What to Order from Iceland Once You're Home

Most people come back from Iceland with a half-empty suitcase and a specific regret. The salt they meant to buy at the airport. The liquorice someone handed them in a car. The bread from the breakfast buffet they assumed they'd find at home.

You won't find it at home. Icelandic food is made in small volumes for a population of around 390,000, and almost none of it reaches supermarket shelves elsewhere. That's the whole reason this shop exists.

Here's what's worth ordering, roughly in the order most people want it.

Start with what you already recognise

Skyr. The thing in every hotel breakfast, every petrol station chiller. Thick, sour, almost no fat. It is technically a fresh cheese rather than a yoghurt, and Icelanders have been making it the same way since roughly the settlement period. If you liked it there, the shelf-stable versions travel well.

Nammi — the liquorice. Salted liquorice under chocolate is the single most requested thing we ship. Nói Síríus, Góa and Sambó have all been at it for decades. Þristur, Eitt Sett bites and the Appolo assortment box are the usual entry points, from $9.99.

Norður sea salt — $8.99. Flaked salt from Reykjanes, evaporated using geothermal steam rather than fuel. It's the salt you probably had on a restaurant table without noticing. It is also the single best-value thing on this list — one box lasts months and changes how your food tastes.

Then the things you had once and couldn't name

Harðfiskur — $34.99. Air-dried fish, torn into strips, eaten with a thick layer of butter. It's roughly 80% protein and tastes like the sea in a way that dried fish elsewhere does not. Icelanders eat it as a snack, not a novelty.

Rúgbrauð. Dark rye, dense, faintly sweet, sliced thin. Some of it is still baked by burying the tin in geothermal ground for around 24 hours. Eat it with butter and smoked lamb, or with harðfiskur.

Flatkökur — $4.99. Thin unleavened rye rounds, cooked directly on heat until they blister. The correct use is butter and hangikjöt, in that order.

Hangikjöt. Smoked lamb. The traditional smoke comes from dried sheep dung, which is not a detail Icelanders hide, and it's why nothing else tastes like it. It's the centre of the Christmas table and it's excellent cold in a sandwich in March.

The ones that need a small amount of nerve

Lýsi. Cod liver oil, taken by the spoon. Icelandic schoolchildren were given one every morning, and plenty of adults still do it through the dark months. Not pleasant. Genuinely useful at 64°N.

Hákarl — from $44.99. Fermented Greenland shark, cured for months because it can't be eaten fresh. This is the one people order to dare a friend, and we're fine with that. Buy a small tub, not a large one.

The one that starts an argument

Malt & Appelsín. Two soft drinks from Ölgerðin, mixed together in the glass. Iceland has never agreed on the ratio and never will. Mostly a Christmas drink, though anyone who tells you it's only a Christmas drink is picking a fight.

Pylsur. Icelandic hot dogs, mostly lamb, made by SS. There is a fixed topping order and most visitors get it wrong. We wrote a whole piece about that.

If you're buying for someone else

The Freyja Box and the other bundles exist because the most common order we see isn't one thing — it's five things a person is trying to explain to someone who has never been. Everything ships in packaging you can hand over without apologising for it, with a note if you want one.

Where to start

If you order one thing, order the salt. If you order three, add rúgbrauð and a bar of chocolate-covered liquorice. If you're trying to recreate one specific afternoon in Reykjavík, order the harðfiskur and the butter is on you.

Everything here is sourced from Icelandic producers and shipped worldwide from Iceland. We don't make any of it. We just know who does.