Behold the glory that is lihapiirakka, Finnish meat pies made with a yeasted bread dough and fried. You can fill them with anything from beef to grouse, and they are an amazing appetizer, lunch or trail snack.

I love cooking Scandinavian food, and I love making various meat pies, from Cornish pasties to Mexican empanadas to sturdier pies filled with venison. So this was a great bit of synergy.

I’d heard of lihapiirakka, which are pronounced something like “LEE-hah-PEE-rah-kuh,” on various food TV shows, and I’d eaten the hybrid pasty-lihapiirakka in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But a recipe eluded me.

Until I found one in The Finnish Cookbook by Beatrice Ojakangas. She offers a variety of fillings and doughs, but the one that interested me most was her yeasted dough. This sets lihapiirakka apart from, say, pasties or fried empanadas, which are made with a pie dough, and since they are fried, not baked, the end result will be different from bierocks, which are bready and baked.

As for the filling, ground beef is traditional, but I am not traditional. But I did want to go with something culturally relevant, so I used willow ptarmigan I’d hunted in Alaska. Ptarmigan are a species of grouse that live in the high latitudes of the world — both here in the US and in Scandinavia.

Generally speaking, lihapiirakka are filled with ground or shredded or diced meat and onions cooked in butter, chopped hard-boiled egg, and cooked rice.

Rice in Lihapiirakka

The funny thing about the rice is that it’s always short- or medium-grained rice, not long. I am not sure why, but a wild guess is that the Finns get their rice from Italy or Spain, where shorter grain rices rule.

This matters with lihapiirakka because if you want to eat them cold, or room temperature, short or medium-grain rice is vital. Long-grain rice gets brittle and chalky when eaten cold. Short rice, which has a different starch structure, stays tender and nice.

So my advice is to get some arborio or Japanese rice from the supermarket and cook it according to the directions. You need the rice to be cooked and cool before assembling the meat pies.

The Dough

The dough in these lihapiirakka is bread-like, a yeasted, rich, brioche-like dough that’s very soft. Because it uses yeast to rise, you need to make the dough for the meat pies a couple hours in advance.

Most recipes ask you to roll out the whole dough and cut disks out, but that’s silly. Better to separate the dough into about a dozen balls, then roll those balls out.

Even better? Skip the rolling pin and use a tortilla press. Yep, this bit of cross-cultural wizardry makes rolling out the lihapiirakka way, way easier.

Once made, your meat pies will keep in the fridge a week or so, and they freeze well. Freeze after frying. And they are good cold, but even better reheated in a toaster oven at 390°F for about 5 minutes.

Other Meat Pies to Try

I have a wide selection of other fantastic meat pies you might want to try. Some are bready, others use pie crust, some use other doughs. Keep in mind the filling meat can really be whatever you have lying around.

• Venison pasties. Cornish meat pies filled with ground or diced beef or venison, carrots and rutabagas in a bready crust.
• Venison mincemeat pies. This winter treat is well worth the effort – a little package of sweet, tart, savory, fatty, and crunchy.
• British game pie. A game pie is a classic hand pie made with a hot water crust and whatever wild game you have handy.
• Fried empanadas. This one’s a pie dough made for frying. You can fill them with anything.
• Mexican masa empanadas. This is a corn masa dough, a little more fragile than a wheat dough, but lighter and crispier.
• German bierocks. Imagine a nice bread roll stuffed with meat, onions and sauerkraut.
• Plantain empanadas. This gluten-free dough mixes masa flour with mashed plantains. Delicious, and it browns nicely.

If you liked this recipe, please leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating and a comment below; I’d love to hear how everything went. If you’re on Instagram, share a picture and tag me at huntgathercook.