How dried fish is made in Iceland

In Iceland they also eat the heads, it's a local delicacy, I would caution against it.

The roots of their demand are somewhat tragic:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42137476

I’m first-generation and my family is Nigerian, and while I personally don’t eat the heads, we do entire dried fish quite a bit. Locally, we refer to it as “oporoko,” and it’s primarily imported from Norway, rather than Iceland, as another commenter has mentioned. It’s also very widely available in African and Nigerian food stores in the United States.

Similar to the what’s said in the link another commenter posted, I would say it is one of my favorite foods.

I actually worked one summer doing exactly that, back when I was 15. Without any doubt, the absolute worst job I've had. I'd previously worked summers in my uncle's _fresh_ fish processing and that was totally fine. The stuff we were racking and drying at that other place though was anything but fresh. Ugh, the textures, the smells, it's all coming back to me... Kinda hard to reconcile that as a delicacy.

It sure was formative though. All uphill from there, haha.

Stockfish has been the main ingredient of a very traditional plate in north east Italy for more than four hundred years [1]. These days it is not used as much as in the past, but you can still find stockfish in a number of supermarkets. Preparing the fish for cooking takes 2-3 days, and the first step is of course beating it with a mallet :-)

[1] It was in fact considered food for poor people which is quite strange since it was imported from far places.

wonder if this was for softening up or killing macro parasites and eggs

> I thought the step where they beat the fish with a mallet was so wild.

Is it really so wild? Beating on it remains a common way of tenderising meat.

Wait until you try it with a bit of butter then! I think the protein-to-price ratio makes sense when you compare it to similar products like beef jerky or pepperoni sticks. I'd bet hardfiskur is a lot healthier than jerky and deli meat though, since at the least it has much less salt.

At the Dill restaurant they served it with a little home made mayo and what seemed like powdered, brown butter (made powdery with maltodextrin). It was incredible.

I second the suggestion to visit if you can. I moved to Norway about 6 years back and I'm still amazed at the beauty of things, especially when I get out of the city.

This summer, I'm heading generally North myself :)

Pretty much any fermeted food is going to be an acquired taste and take a while to get used to (if ever).

I happen to love French cheeses but I know some of my foodie friends won't find them enjoyable.

I suspect this to be a natural distrust of the body regarding fermented things, slowly easing the taste into things that the body can recognize as safe. But I don't have any evidence to back that up.

So I went to the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö(would recommend going!) And they had a little tasting section at the end. Pretty much everything else was absolutely fine, even surstromming was ok, I can totally see myself enjoying it with some vodka and a gherkin. But Hakarl? Jesus I honestly wanted to vomit afterwards. All of the foods there had some redeeming quality - if the smell was bad, the taste was good, or at least the texture was. Hakarl was bad on all 3 counts - smell that could wake the dead, texture that was somewhere between a snot and egg yolk and the tests was just of something that died long ago and was left to rot.

The next upgrade is Skata which in my experience actually gets eaten a lot more. There is Þorláksmessa on the 23rd of December where bucketloads of the stuff get eaten all over the place. It’s perfect if you really want to stink of ammonia in a deep seated way.

This is a really exceptional food. There's a lot of "aged fish dishes" that are perfectly appropriate for everybody.

I was a bit underwhelmed by how moderately off-putting it was...I was led to believe it's the worst thing ever. It certainly smelled pretty awful, but there wasn't a wretch-inducing taste. The icy Brennivín definitely helped.

Not that I'm eager to ever try it again...

Hakarl is a very peculiar one though. It's treated and fermented fish, not a dried one, and is well known for being… an acquired taste (https://youtu.be/vTOfhQ_SZEg?t=121)

Funny, in Sweden where surströmming is from I have heard the exact same words used to describe the production of Hákarl. But Hákarl is easy to smell and eat compared to surströmming, which is gut-wrenching when you smell it.

Maybe its cold enough out for minimal bugs? The pics seem to have snow in the background.

The article mentions they dip the fish in brine before hanging up as well. Google indicates other methods of drying fish include sprinkling salt on to keep bugs away.

Probably by doing it when it's too cold out for the bugs. They also dip it in brine to neutralize the pathogens on the surface of the fish.

What I'm curious about is what they do if they put a batch out and then a warm front blows through unexpectedly. Do they take the fish down and stuff them in a freezer until the weather cools off again? I can't imagine they let the whole batch get ruined.

I don't think there are many bugs in Iceland so long as you don't fish-shack-up near a lake, ponies, or puffins.

Bug season in Iceland is relatively short but very intense.

Similar to the Nordics and Canada.

The black fly is the worst of them imo.

We use netting

I'm gonna guess netting in the warm months, but honestly, they are far enough north to not worry as much as one would in a warmer climate.

I was shocked by the lack of screens in windows in Norway, and I'm guessing Iceland is the same. The only time it has actually bothered me was on a farm when the cows were in the nearest pasture - there were so many flies!

The drying season is the first winter months of the year, e.g. February, March, April. Before the flies are back.

Killjoys at the FDA would probably make it difficult to import.

I haven't seen this exact thing.

I have seen a variety of dried fishes available in Slavic and Asian markets though, so I'm sure you could find something similar.

You can buy it online from some stores - this is the first one that popped up on Google: https://nammi.is/food-drinks1/dried-fish.html

smoked salmon if you are in the pacific northwest, avoid the thin-sliced stuff though

Well, it's not like "harðfiskur" is cheap. 100 grams go for about $8. Icelanders don't eat a lot of fish any more. Almost all of it is exported.

Is the fishing sustainable? I don't know. Probably not.

There are about 340,000 Icelanders, and Iceland has a 200 mile exclusive fishing zone around its coast.

Such a zone around a single point already is over 120,000 square miles.

So, at less than 3 Icelanders per square mile of ocean, I doubt they could eat all the fish in ‘their’ ocean.

Drying fish is highly sustainable, as it is done on low-tech solar power.

The only concern could be the method of catching fish. I doubt that makes much impact, though, and if it does, there’s bigger fish to fry elsewhere (pun intended)

My fave spot for interesting dried fish in SF is "New World Market" on Geary in the Richmond district. Its pretty good but slightly confusing if you don't speak russian.

I imagine it's similar to dry aging beef. With the right temperature and humidity, you support only bacteria that are safe to eat and you end up with a dry protective exterior before long which allows the fish to begin safely fermenting. You can do this with a surprising number of things. The trick is to have the correct initial conditions which prevents the proliferation of counterproductive bacteria. They also dip the fish in a brine to promote the right bacteria and prevent others from taking hold.

As for insects, it's likely that it's too cold outside (I think the article mentioned that it's kept outside in cool weather). Once it's done doing the cool weather thing it goes inside.

I have a treat for you, Norske lutefisk. Its one of the, for me, most disgusting things i have eaten. All the side dishes made it bearable.

Cambodian fermented pork is amaaazingly tasty. It was way less fragrant than I thought it would be too.