The Sheep Come Down in September
In June, Icelandic sheep are released into the highlands and left there. No fencing, no supervision, no daily check. They spend the summer somewhere in the interior eating moss, grass, herbs, and whatever else grows on volcanic ground.
In September, the country goes and gets them.
Réttir
The round-up is called réttir, which is also the word for the sorting pens the sheep end up in. Farmers ride out on horseback for several days, sometimes a week, sweeping the highlands and driving the flocks down. Neighbours go. Family members who moved to the city go. People take annual leave for it.
The sheep arrive at a circular pen divided into wedges, and then everyone sorts them by ear mark into the right wedge for the right farm. It is loud, muddy, and social, and there is usually a dance afterwards.
It is also, in the most direct sense, where Icelandic lamb comes from. Not from a feedlot. From four months of unsupervised eating at altitude.
Why this shows up in the meat
Free-ranging lamb tastes different, and Icelandic lamb tastes noticeably different. Thyme, moss, angelica, salt carried inland on the wind. The animals are small and the meat is lean and dark.
You can't taste "highlands" in any literal sense and we're not going to claim you can. What you can taste is a leaner, more mineral meat than pasture-raised lamb, and a fat that doesn't coat your mouth the way heavier lamb does.
And then it gets smoked
Hangikjöt means hung meat. Lamb, salted or brined, then cold-smoked and hung to mature.
Iceland had almost no trees, and that shaped the method. Smoking here was never weeks over hardwood, because there was never the timber for it. What developed instead was a short, cold smoke applied to meat that salt had already done most of the work on — preservation first, flavour second.
The result doesn't taste like other smoked meat. It's dense, faintly sweet, and closer to a cured ham than to a roast. Sliced thin it holds together and the flavour opens up; sliced thick it does neither, which is why nobody slices it thick.
How to eat it
Cold, sliced thin, on buttered flatkökur — $4.99 for four. That's it. That's the standard.
At Christmas it's served hot with béchamel, potatoes, green peas and laufabrauð, but the everyday version is a slice of smoked lamb on a rye flatbread with too much butter, eaten standing at a kitchen counter.
If you buy one thing from this post, buy the hangikjöt and the flatkökur together. Separately they're both good. Together they're the thing you actually remember.
Why September matters commercially
Réttir is happening now, which means this is the point in the year when Icelandic lamb enters the system. It's also the start of the run-up to the Christmas table, where hangikjöt is the centre.
If you want it for Christmas, order it in October or early November. December orders arrive, but they arrive under pressure, and we would rather tell you that now than in a shipping-deadline post in three months.
Order hangikjöt and Icelandic lamb — sliced, vacuum-packed, shipped from Iceland. Pair with: flatkökur $4.99, salted butter, rúgbrauð. Also from the round-up: Blóðmör, SS $14.99.