It’s a frigid -11C morning in the Estonian capital and the city has frosted over. Fat, fluffy snowflakes are cascading from the sky, blanketing the streets in inches of soft, sugary powder. It’s the perfect weather for curling up by the fire, but instead I’m out and about on an Estonian food trail.
I’m spending the day with Kenneth Karjane and Eva Kõrvas, the affable young duo behind Tallinn’s immensely popular Karjase Sai bakery. We’re trundling along an icy road in a bus headed south for the village of Rahula, in Harju County, where Eva’s family owns a little farm. Despite being locals, they’re enchanted by the snow. “I haven’t seen this kind of weather in a long time,” says Eva, peering out the window.
It might be one of the coldest days of the year but the welcome I’m about to receive is as warm as I could have hoped for. As we open the gate to the farm, two enormous dogs, Hagu and Gusta, come bounding across the snow to greet us, tails wagging frantically. Close behind is Eva’s youthful mother, Egle Kõrvas, a wide smile etched on her face.
We’ve made the 15-mile journey from Tallinn to taste some of Egle’s famous apple juice, which she makes every year from her crop of 20 or so apple trees, many of which bear heirloom varieties. “It’s a hobby for me,” says Egle, who, as it turns out, has many pastimes: besides working as a physical education teacher, she also dabbles in furniture restoration and enjoys dancing.
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In fact, she’s participating in a traditional dance performance in a nearby village this very afternoon, which explains her distinctive outfit: a striped skirt that’s part of the rahvariided, a colorful folk costume, hand-stitched using a blend of linen and wool.
This explains that she usually harvests her apples around August/September, extracting the juice using an old-school fruit press and bottling it in glass jars. “It’s 100% apples, no sugar or water,” she declares proudly. This season, Este has managed to make around 400 liters of juice — a “medium year”, she reckons.
“This apple juice is something that we enjoy throughout the year,” says Eva. “We always drink it whenever we have lunch together as a family. We also sell it in our bakery. It’s really loved by our customers, who say it’s the best they’ve ever had.”
This, I’m about to discover, is not an exaggeration. After laughing at the excitable dogs, who have mischievously chased Egle’s goats and sheep into hiding, we retreat into the house — a cozy, wooden structure decked out with delightfully mismatched chairs and a host of four-legged residents. In addition to Hagu and Gusta, there’s Marta, a geriatric dachshund; Jussi, a plump, sleepy-eyed cat; Totu, a feisty, blue-eyed feline; and Misha, another cat that apparently has an identity crisis. “Misha thinks he’s a dog. He always greets us at the door, and prefers dogs instead of cats for company,” Egle says affectionately.
She wastes no time preparing some refreshments: bowls of gingerbread biscuits, some scented with orange peel; steaming mugs of sage tea, brewed with leaves Egle picked from her vegetable garden just minutes earlier; and, of course, a large jug of apple juice. This batch, she tells us, is made purely from perfectly ripened summer apples, which are “sweeter and more intensive.” Catching a whiff of the spread, Gusta pads over and quickly makes his presence felt, pawing at me insistently for table scraps.
I take a gulp of the cloudy golden liquid and immediately understand why it’s so special. It’s a medley of wonderfully complex flavours: mellow yet full-bodied, sweet yet refreshing — a tantalizing hint of summer on a cold winter’s day. Eva’s customers are right, I think.
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