What’s your favorite dish?
Chances are that it’s a common crowd-pleaser that even the pickiest eaters will like. Fried chicken, spaghetti, and other fast food staples come to mind. But in many parts of the globe, favorite dishes take on a more exotic flavor profile.
Fried chicken? How about a crunchy fried tarantula from Cambodia instead for warm summer nights spent drinking in the streets of Siem Reap. Maybe you’d rather try the infamous balut, an egg delicacy whose main attraction is a partly developed duck embryo.
Asian cuisines get a bad rap for being strange (if you’re the curious type) or disgusting (if you really want to rag on an entire continent). But it isn’t just Asian cuisines that boast stomach-churning dishes that can turn off even the most adventurous eaters.
In Northern Europe, Scandinavian countries have a few surprising fish delicacies up their sleeve. You have the Icelandic hákarl (a fermented, dried shark) and the equally infamous surströmming.
What Is Surströmming?
Surströmming is a preserved fish delicacy from Sweden made from Baltic sea herring that is submerged in a lightly salted brine before being left to ferment for six months.
Opening up a can of surströmming is a bit like setting off a biological weapon in your house. People’s reactions to the smell of surströmming can range from a disgusted face to gagging to straight up calling surströmming “sewage in a can.”
Yeah, doesn’t sound so good. But before you end up thinking surströmming is guaranteed death in a can, why not give it a chance? A lot of dishes and flavors have relied on fermented fish flavors since the days of ancient Rome. Maybe, just maybe, surströmming isn’t that bad. Most of the bad reaction videos about surströmming feature reactions from people who aren’t Swedish. Perhaps they’re just not used to the smell?
Nope. Turns out it’s not just foreigners repulsed by the dish. Swedish born YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, who you might recognize as PewDiePie, recoils from the dish in a surströmming Mukbang video with Good Mythical More.
You’d think an actual Swede might have a better opinion of surströmming seeing as it’s a dish he’s admitted to having eaten a few times before. That is, until you see PewDiePie gagging on the show along with the other non-Swede hosts. The smell is so awful that PewDiePie jokes about renouncing his Swede-hood because of surströmming. Yikes.
But if it’s still being made then there has to be some redeeming quality about surströmming, right?
How Is Surströmming Made?
Herrings are typically caught in the Baltic sea by Swedish fishermen some time before the herrings’ spawning season. This seasonal schedule means that the delicacy’s fermentation process starts around May.
Each fish is placed in a brine solution for about twenty hours or so to get the blood drawn out of the fish, a process that helps extend its shelf life further. It’s then beheaded and gutted before being moved to a container with a weaker salt solution.
Look, I’m no stranger to weird food and fermented fish. I’m too Asian to be (completely) turned off by a stinky fish dish. So you’ll understand my confusion while I watched everyone else gag each time a can of surströmming was opened. Fermented fish in salty brine sounds like it has a lot of culinary potential and is, possibly, something to die for.
If you love surströmming, congratulations: you’re either a daredevil, a culinary adventurer, or a glutton for punishment. This is a safe space where no one will judge you for your cultural cuisines. But the off-putting smell started to make sense when I put two and two together and realized surströmming is placed in just enough salt to stop it from spoiling completely.
Not enough to stop it from spoiling at all, mind you, just enough to keep it from completely going bad. Just think about barrels of herring sitting in barely preserving salt water as it ferments to a point that is just shy of rotten.
It still sounds bizarre. Why not just add enough salt to make surströmming taste less offensive? The history of this delicacy reveals that it’s something of a time capsule.
Surströmming was made during a period of Swedish history when salt was scarce and expensive. This restricted old-timey Swedish fishermen to using as little salt as possible when preserving their herring.
The more primitive, and less sanitary, preservation methods before the 19th century meant that surströmming would have been stored in wooden barrels that were more vulnerable to bacteria and spoilage.
It was only after the invention of the modern canning process that surströmming became a commercial product. But by that time, surströmming’s flavor was already cemented in the taste buds of descendants of the first Swedish fishermen, who had no choice but to eat nearly spoiled Baltic herring.
Spoiled doesn’t mean rotten, though. The sterile environments and clean conditions under which surströmming is made today keep the fish from posing any real danger to your stomach and intestines.
It’s safe to eat for as long as the tin is intact. Speaking of the tin that surströmming comes in, you’ll notice a small bulge at the top of each tin. While it looks like a dent to the untrained eye, the bulge is actually formed by gas released by chemical reactions in the fermentation process. The bigger the bulge, the more fermentation, the stinkier the fish.
But whatever. Soy sauce, kimchi, and a number of delicious cheeses are all fermented. I’m down. You’re down. We aren’t scared of a little fermented fish.
According to Swedes, it really isn’t all that bad. Yes, it’s an acquired taste given its ahem, pungent flavor, but once you get past the smell, surströmming isn’t as intimidating as it seems.
How To Eat Surströmming
The taste of surströmming itself is mostly just salt since the fish is basically left to sit in its own gamer girl bath water for six months. Depending on how fermented the fish is and how trained your taste buds are to recognize flavors in food, its flavor profile can vary from plain salty to slightly reminiscent of blue cheese.
Again, the smell can really trigger your gag reflex and put you off from eating the dish. Because of this, eating the Swedish delicacy comes down to keeping yourself from having as minimal contact as possible with the scent that comes with it.
The secret to eating surströmming without bombing your nasal pathways and lungs and the rest of the neighborhood with its smell is, surprisingly enough opening it in water.
Åke Dahllöf guides us through how to open a can of surströmming without annihilating your bloodline. He places the can under a pail of water to keep the smell from spreading as he opens it. Once the initial wave of putrid sock fumes are gone, he takes it out of the water to fully open the can.
Bam, yummy Baltic herring.
We’re not done yet, though. We still have to open up the fish to remove its entrails and backbone. If you haven’t had the misfortune of accidentally eating fish entrails, know that it tastes bitter in the worst possible way. Not even bitter gourd can match the taste. Removing the backbone is just so you can eat with ease.
Once you have a deboned fish, you take a boiled potato and place it on a toasted flatbread. Apparently, it’s a local Swedish flat bread but any other flat bread or white bread will do. Add yogurt, cheese, or sour cream, along with onion and pickles before layering on the surströmming. Once you have all your fillings in place, roll it up and you have the the most cursed burrito on the planet. Enjoy, you mad lad.
Jokes aside, I hope I’m not offending any Swedes or surströmming fans. Taste is completely subjective and whatever tastes good to you tastes good to you. Every culture’s food is valid. But given that even Swedes didn’t seem to be mega fans of surströmming, one just has to wonder whether anybody in Sweden actually likes surströmming or is it, at least, a cult classic type of dish?
But Does Anyone Actually Like Surströmming?
While it looks like most Swedes would rather have salmon on their bread, there’s no doubting that surströmming has its unique appeal.
Claes-Bertil Lewau answered the great surströmming dilemna by explaining that many Swedes actually don’t eat surströmming. It’s a small portion of the population that eats most of the surströmming consumed in Sweden. If you want to read up on the actual stats for the consumption of this delicacy and you speak Swedish, you can check out this article.
For those of us who don’t speak a lick of Swedish, we’ll have to rely on Lewaus’ translation. According to him, only about 20% of the Swedish population eat surströmming regularly and this 20% is concentrated around the northern part of the Swedish coast.
Apparently, it’s more of a niche delicacy eaten around Bottenhavet, the area of the Baltic sea between Sweden and Finland. For a big picture perspective, consider that only 10% of the Swedish population lives in the northern coast of Sweden.
Go down to the southern parts of Stockholm and virtually no one eats the fermented herring. Its abysmal popularity ratings are part of why only 0.2% of surströmming produced in Sweden gets exported to other countries, making it extremely difficult to find outside of Northern Europe, let alone the rest of the world.
Compare this to similar fermented fish sauces, pastes, and dishes that are more commonly found in Asian groceries and it’s clear there’s very little demand for the dish outside of its locale. Then again, that could be just down to Sweden’s lower population and smaller diaspora.
When it’s fully prepared on flat bread, it honestly doesn’t look that bad. If you have balls of steel, a death wish, and a really adventurous palette, surströmming is definitely a bucket list food item that you need to try within your lifetime.