Skyr: not a yoghurt, and how to eat it the way it is eaten here

Overview

Skyr is not yoghurt. It is a fresh cheese, and the distinction is technical rather than pedantic: skimmed milk is warmed, soured with a culture, and then set with rennet — the enzyme that makes cheese — before the whey is strained off. Yoghurt uses no rennet and is not strained to anything like this degree. What comes out is thick enough to stand a spoon in, sour, clean, almost entirely fat-free, and dense with protein because roughly four litres of milk go into a single litre of skyr.

That ratio explains everything else about it. Straining away three-quarters of the volume concentrates the sourness, which is why skyr has always been eaten with something to soften it: in the traditional form, a splash of milk or cream stirred in and sugar on top. Eaten plain it is sharp enough to make people wince, and the pot you buy at a shop today is usually sweetened and flavoured for exactly that reason.

It is genuinely old and genuinely native. Skyr came with the Norse settlers, was made on farms across the region in the medieval period, and survived as a living everyday food only here — everywhere else in the Nordic world it faded out. That is the strongest honest claim available: not that it was invented in this country, but that this is the only place it never stopped being made.

For most of its history it was farm food and famine insurance — a way of turning surplus milk into something that kept, at the end of a short summer. The domestic uses are still around: hræringur is skyr stirred through leftover oat porridge, which sounds bleak and is in fact the ancestor of every protein bowl now sold in this city.

Reykjavík’s relationship with it is simply saturation. Skyr is in every shop, in every hotel breakfast, and in more forms than any visitor expects — pots, drinks, cakes, cheesecakes, ice cream. It is not a delicacy here. It is the dairy aisle.

What to order

There is no ordering ritual, because skyr is mostly bought rather than served. The decisions are made in a shop, and the useful vocabulary is on the pot:

• Hreint or ósætt — plain, unsweetened. The real thing, and the one to buy at least once. Sour, chalky-thick, and transformed entirely by a spoon of cream.
• Flavoured pots — blueberry, vanilla, pear, liquorice among many. Sweetened, softer in texture, and where most of the market is.
• Skyrdrykkur — drinking skyr, thinned to a pourable consistency. Breakfast on foot.
• Skyr with cream already added — richer, sold as a dessert style rather than a breakfast one.

The traditional way to eat it is worth doing properly: plain skyr in a bowl, a good splash of cold milk or single cream poured on and stirred through until it loosens, sugar or a spoon of berry jam over the top. The berries to use are the small wild bilberries that grow across the country and turn up frozen in every supermarket.

In cafés it appears as a breakfast bowl with granola and fruit, and as skyrkaka — a cheesecake made with skyr instead of cream cheese, lighter and much sharper than the usual article, and the single best argument for the ingredient in a dessert.

At a hotel breakfast, take the plain one and dress it yourself. The jug of cream is always on the same table.

What to avoid

The main thing to know is that the export version is not the domestic one. Skyr sold abroad under the name is often thickened with milk protein concentrate and made without rennet, which is legally fine and produces something closer to strained yoghurt. Here, the pots on the shelf are the real process. So the mistake is not buying a bad pot in this city; it is assuming the thing you had at home was the same food.

Beyond that:

The very sweet flavoured pots. Some run to a sugar content that puts them alongside a dessert, which defeats the point of a nearly fat-free high-protein food. The plain pots and the lightly sweetened ones are where the interest is.

The airport and hotel-shop markup. Identical pots, several times the price, bought by people who did not walk into a supermarket. A shop two streets from any hotel sells the same thing at the same price the whole country pays.

Skyr as a souvenir. It is a fresh dairy product with a short life and it does not travel; the tubs in the departures hall exist because people buy them, not because it is a good idea.

And one genuine caution about the modern café bowl: skyr, granola, dried fruit, honey and a banana is a large amount of sugar and calories built on top of a food whose whole virtue is that it has neither. Order it, but do not order it because it is the healthy option.

Practicalities

A pot from a supermarket costs a few hundred krónur — small money by the standards of this country, and one of the very few things here that is not expensive. A café breakfast bowl runs roughly 1,800 to 2,800 krónur, and a slice of skyr cake similar. The gap between the two is the largest proportional markup on any food in the city, and it is worth knowing before you order breakfast rather than buy it.

Timing barely matters — this is a shop product, available whenever the shop is open, and the supermarkets in the centre keep long hours. What does matter is that dairy here is dated tightly and shops discount pots close to their date, marked with a coloured sticker; the skyr is perfectly good and half the price.

There is no season for it in the shops, but there is one for eating it as it should be eaten: bilberry picking runs from roughly August to September, when the hills around the city are full of people with buckets, and skyr with fresh-picked berries in late summer is the version every household here would name.

Cards and phone payment work for everything, down to a single pot, and cash is essentially unnecessary. If you take one thing away: buy the plain pot, buy a small carton of cream, and eat it in your room the way it was eaten here for a thousand years before anyone put a fruit picture on the lid.