is a
fast food
Fast food is a type of mass-produced food designed for commercial resale, with a strong priority placed on speed of service. It is a commercial term, limited to food sold in a restaurant or store with frozen, preheated or precooked ingredien ...
dish created in the 1960s in the
Finnish city of
Nokia
Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...
.
The term is
Finnish for "
Hot dog", but the ingredients differ so much that is a completely different dish. The dish is not well known outside the
Pirkanmaa region, but Nokia holds an annual International day in March to celebrate the cuisine. Thousands of s are eaten at the local grills on that date.
Invention and rise to fame
The dish was conceived in the 1960s by Teodor Leppänen (1902–1978), a fast food grill owner from Nokia. The most well-known story about the invention says that he had been selling apple jelly doughnuts with coffee and steamed sausages. Combining the surplus ingredients to save some money, he created . In the following decades, other grill owners in the area copied the dish, and it became a staple in the local fast food scene. In the late 2000s, the
MTV3
MTV3 ( fi, MTV Kolme, sv, MTV Tre) is a Finnish commercial television station. It had the biggest audience share of all Finnish TV channels until Yle TV1 (from Yle) took the lead. The letters MTV stand for Mainos-TV (literally "Advertisement ...
entertainment show had Mikko Salonen from Nokia eating four and a half s in five minutes on a live broadcast, setting a new official record. Around the same time, the International day was held for the first time. These events together propelled the cuisine to the knowledge of all Finns, further aided by the Finnish fast food program on the
Nelonen TV channel in 2016.
See also
*
Hot dog
References
Fast food
Street food in Finland
Finnish words and phrases
1960s in Finland
Food and drink introduced in the 1960s
Nokia, Finland
{{Finland-cuisine-stub