I have just returned from two weeks in Iceland, where I almost completely failed to sample the local cuisine because everything’s so bloody expensive there. I ate a lot of hot dogs, fish & chips, and the occasional Chinese and Indian. I did not try any of the usual tourist-horrifying delicacies which most Icelanders don’t eat, aside from harðfiskur: hákarl (rotted shark meat, said to taste something like strong blue cheese), harðfiskur (dried haddock), pickled sheep’s head, or Brennevín (caraway-flavored schnaps made from potatoes, colloquially called “Black Death” and taken as shots between bites of hákarl). I did buy a tiny sample bottle of Brennevín to try later, though.
Icelandic cuisine is pretty heavy on the fish and lamb, for obvious reasons, and relatively light on herbs and spices, aside from curry powder, which caught on around WWII or so. This has resulted in some pretty horrifying “curries” (I shudder to recall an “oriental soup” I unwisely had which consisted of perfectly good shrimp and some unidentifiable vegetables floating in a broth murky with curry powder). You can also eat minke whale, dolphin, and horse in Reykjavík’s finer restaurants (ironically, whale meat has almost no market, now that the whaling ban has been partially lifted: it’s difficult to cook in a way that makes it taste tolerable, and people have gotten out of the habit of eating it. This makes it the cheapest meat in Iceland, at only 400 kronúr per kilogram). Reykjavík is a very cosmopolitan city, with a variety of international restaurants, although the best tend to be Euro-Asian or European-flavored Icelandic/Icelandic-flavored European.
I did try smoked lamb with butter on rye pancakes (flatkökur), which was pretty nice. I prefer lox (lax) on the rye pancakes, which are slightly sweetish and very good. Icelandic butter is excellent, but Icelandic lox is pretty much the same as imported Norwegian lox in the U.S. I dispair of ever having smoked salmon as good as Russian syomga again.
I also ate large amounts of skyr, a cultured milk product similar to yogurt. Although it is essentially low-fat, it is very creamy in texture, almost as creamy-feeling as whole milk yogurt. It has a sharper tartness, which is usually masked by loads of sugar and flavoring in Iceland. Although I enjoyed it, I have been thoroughly spoiled by Brown Cow’s delicious whole milk yogurt with chunks of recognizeable fruit and honey or maple syrup sweetening. I would love to taste what Brown Cow could do with skyr. I believe some Whole Foods locations sell skyr, but otherwise you’ll have trouble finding it anywhere outside of Iceland. I’ve read that it’s somewhat similar to Greek yogurt.
And finally, I picked up a couple bottles of an Icelandic wild herb mix from Blóðbergsgarðurinn (no, I can’t get the site to load, either, which seems to be the case with a lot of Icelandic websites), so I’ll have to pick up some more lamb before the farmer’s markets close this fall and try it. The mix contains Arctic thyme, birch leaves, bog bilberry, bilberry, and juniper. You may be able to purchase a similar mix from Potmagic, but they don’t list ingredients on their website.
Anyway, in my absence, we began the process of moving (which is going to happen again next month, hurrah), so things are in disarray, but once they’re settled out I should be back to cooking and posting recipes.
