New hotel alert! We woke on the sixth day in our fourth hotel and I went to get my usual breakfast for the day. This place also had the silly conveyor belt toaster and they had blueberry jam! Unfortunately, there were not many blueberries in the blueberry jam, but it was still quite tasty.
After breakfast, we headed back to Reykjavík. On the way, we made some similar stops as we had before, at a crater and a waterfall and whatnot, but that’s not what we’re going to discuss today. Today we’re gonna talk about food.
Over the course of our stay here, we’ve gotten to try many different kinds of traditional Icelandic foods. Some of these foods are prepared the way they are out of necessity. For example, the sharks are toxic if you eat them as is, but if you go through the process of fermenting them, then the toxins are removed by a naturally occurring bacteria in the sharks and they’re edible.
In general, I’m not very picky with foods. I just don’t like creamy things because I can’t handle the texture. Even with this, I still tried everything, I just tried the Skyr by taking a very small amount and only eating an even smaller amount at a time to avoid the texture issue.
We tried lots of things from Skyr as I said earlier (technically more of a cheese, but has a yogurt texture), rúgbrauð and flatkökur which are both types of bread, hangikjöt – smoked lamb meat, harðfiskur – dries fish, smjör – butter, hákarl – fermented shark, hraun – chocolate candy, sviðasulta – sheep’s head, tiger shrimp, horse tartare, arctic char, puffin, and another type of lamb.
I didn’t really have any preconceived notions about any of these foods. I was excited for the shark until I smelled it and then u got worried and then I tasted it and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. One of my favorite things we tried was the horse tartare. I had never had beef tartare before, so I have nothing to compare it to but it was quite good. I also enjoyed the flatkökur a lot.
All in all, the food we tried was quite tasty.
Swanson School of Engineering 