Week 6 (2023) - Icelandic

I wrote all of this last February. I have no idea why I never posted it!

Iceland has been on our "want to travel" list for years, between the hot springs and geothermal spas, beautiful landscape, possibility of seeing the Northern Lights, and the culture which led to their amazing crowd presence at the Euro back in 2016, but the closest we've gotten was our visit to Icelandic Fish and Chips back in 2017 (they have since closed, but will post about it someday). The Week 6 challenge was Icelandic, which I was excited for but also a little concerned about, since there weren't many recipes that seemed easy or in some cases, even doable. Fermented shark may be one of the national dishes there, but that certainly wasn't happening here.

I picked up a couple of cookbooks - one, North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland by Gunnar Karl Gislason, looked delicious but was a bit too fancy and complicated for me, and the other, The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson, covered all the Nordic countries and was over 750 pages. There were only a handful of Icelandic recipes in The Nordic Cookbook, especially compared with recipes for Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, but I was able to find more than enough there to pick out something for the challenge. That book is so heavy that you could also use it for strength training while cooking.

I decided to make plokkfiskur, a fish and potato mash, which the book said is commonly eaten with rye bread and with a lump of butter on top. The book also had a recipe for rye bread, rugbraud, but it was meant to be steamed in a geothermal area, which I obviously did not have access to in NYC. The alternative was to put it in the oven for 12 hours or overnight, neither of which I wanted or was comfortable doing. So I found a recipe for Icelandic rye bread on King Arthur Baking which took less than 3 hours in the oven, and that seemed like a far better fit. The King Arthur Baking recipe also noted that rye bread is usually served with smoked, cured, or pickled foods, and is also good with butter, so I thought a repeat of smoked salmon and the mustard-dill compound butter from Week 5's mustard challenge was in order.

Rugbraud (Rye Bread)

This rye bread was a no-knead dough (yay!) consisting of rye flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk, honey, and molasses. I thought putting it together would be really easy since it was really just mix the dry, mix the wet, and pour the wet into the dry with no kneading, but it took far longer than I planned. Part of that was because the wet here was sticky honey, sticky molasses, and then buttermilk. It turned out fine, but it was messier and took longer to mix than I anticipated. The dough was super sticky when I added it to the loaf pan, plus our loaf pan was smaller than the recipe which I hadn't realized, so I had to add the rest of it to a second pan in an attempt to make some misshapen rolls. The original recipe also used a pain de mie/pullman pan with a removable lid, which we didn't have either, so our bread wasn't flat on all sides.

The bread bakes at a low temperature for about 2 hours, and then sits in the hot oven for a little longer. I left it in there for perhaps a few extra minutes because it was a little crustier than I thought it should be. It was okay for the most part, the inside was dense but soft, but some of the outside was very hard. I was worried when I first started cutting into it because of all the "brick bread" I've been making recently, but at least this one turned out edible, and with toppings, good. I don't know if I would make it again, since it's on the sweeter side and because it made the kitchen smell like molasses (and not bread) for a few hours straight (not my favorite aroma), but I'm glad we made it for the challenge.

Plokkfiskur

Searching "plokkfiskur" on Google turns up a lot of recipes for "Icelandic fish stew," but this cookbook's representation of it as a fish and potato mash seems more accurate for what we made. There are also Norwegian (plukkfisk) and Danish (plukfisk) versions that differ slightly, so maybe we'll revisit that whenever those countries turn up in the AtWCC (that's a big whenever, since we're still in the letter A).

To make the mash, you melt some butter, add some chopped onion, and then once cooked (but not browned), add a little bit of flour followed by milk (used oat milk). The mixture comes to a boil and then simmers for a few minutes, which I did until it started getting thicker. Then you add in some cooked, flaked fish (boiled some tilapia straight from frozen, only took 15 minutes), and next, boiled potato (will admit that I used instant mashed potatoes here and am not ashamed of it because it is such a time-saver for a similar enough result), salt, and pepper. The end result was basically mashed potatoes with fish in it, and it was delicious, especially with the butter on top. We ate this on top of the rye bread, and while the rye bread tasted very sweet on its own, it was so much better as a vehicle for eating this and the smoked salmon-butter combo. Very glad this was our choice for the Icelandic challenge!