Stockholm Food Tour

Food, glorious Stockholm Food Tour.

I don’t remember for certain which was the first food tour I went on in my travels, but it wasn’t all that long ago. I think it was on my Asian trip late last year. I know I went on a food tour in Bangkok on that trip, and I think that might have been my first.

I so thoroughly enjoyed my first food tour that now, wherever I travel, if I find a food tour, I’ll usually go on it. The tours give me tastes of the local cuisines, without facing the intimidation of trying to select them on a menu.

The food tours I’ve been on haven’t all been from the same company, but there’s one that provides tours in several cities around the world. I’ve been on their tours in a few different cities now. I seem to remember mentioning the company name in one of my journal entries, but I worry that, if I do, people will think they compensate me to mention them. They don’t. They probably barely know I exist, and likely have no clue this journal exists.

(That being said, if they do want to compensate me, I’ll happily accept it as long as they don’t expect me to change what I write about them.)

That preamble out of the way, I’ll mention the company because, so far, I’ve never been disappointed with any of its tours. It’s Secret Food Tours. No, it’s not a secret. That’s its name. They call the company that because there’s always one food that they keep a secret until you go on the tour.

As you might have guessed, Secret Food Tours has a Stockholm Food Tour. I went on it today.

Their food tours are walking tours that go from taste to taste. My left foot, as regular readers will know, has been bothering me for a few days. Fortunately, it was not as bad as it had been. I was still limping. And as the group walked along, I was always at the tail end of it, struggling to keep up. So I guess I’m still not walking as fast as I normally do. Until today, I’ve usually been right up at the head of this sort of group in the past, even fairly recently in my already decrepit age..

On the Stockholm Food Tour

As I mentioned in my morning post today, the Stockholm Food Tour started at the far end of Gamla Stan. The far end, that is, if you enter it from the side of Gamla Stan that my hotel is on. The first few stops were all in Gamla Stan, but we ended in Central Stockholm, which is not very far away.

There were eight customers on the tour, including me. The other seven were all in a group. Based on their faces, I think the group was composed of parents and their four grown daughters, plus a spouse of one of the daughters. But that’s only a guess on my part. They didn’t say.

The younger couple (younger than me) lives in Missouri. The others live in parts of Pennsylvania. These days, I get nervous when I meet Americans on my travels. But that has been unfounded. On my last trip, in Argentina, when I met any Americans on a tour I went on, once they heard I was Canadian, they almost invariably immediately apologized for the president wholeheartedly.

Today, when I mentioned I was Canadian, one of them said she wished they were. At one point on the tour, we passed a sculpture of a gun with its barrel tied in a knot. The guide made a comment about gun control in the United States at that point, and the Americans said something to the effect of they wish they had some.

Later on in the tour, I forget how it came up, but one of the women of the younger generation turned to me and said, “You don’t have to worry about us. We didn’t vote for him. We hate him.” She never mentioned his name. It’s the name that shall not be spoken.

But enough about that. You probably want to hear about the food. The meeting point of the Stockholm Food Tour was in a square in Gamla Stan. The first food we tried was from a food truck in that square. The truck has been doing business in Stockholm for 50 years. It used to station itself at another location, but that area is being redeveloped. So he now parks his truck in this location when he’s open for business.

The food was herring. I don’t know how the herring was prepared. But I know it was not fermented. The guide mentioned that that is one way it’s eaten here. He suggested it wasn’t at all pleasant. And we wouldn’t be having any on the Stockholm Food Tour.

The herring was served on a slice of full-bodied*, tasty brown bread, topped with red onions and what I think might be sour cream. It was delicious. The herring tasted a little bit like the sardines you get from a tin, but milder and somewhat more flavourful.

(*I know “full-bodied” isn’t usually a descriptor for bread, but I couldn’t think of another way to describe its rich taste.)

We then moved on to a sit-down restaurant where we had two dishes. The first was something called skagen. I’ve had it on this trip before. It’s small, chopped-up shrimp mixed in something sort of like mayonnaise and served on a piece of toast.

When I’ve had it elsewhere here, the skagen has come assembled with the shrimp already on the toast. Here, they put a mound of the shrimp mixture on a plate. There were also four small pieces of toast, some red onions, dill, lettuce, and a lemon slice on the plate. This was a tasting tour, not an eat-till-you-burst tour, so they brought two of the plates of skagen. We split the shrimp four ways per plate, and we each took a piece of the small toast and put our shrimp on our toast ourselves.

The second dish at that restaurant was the secret food. But I have no idea why they called it a secret. It’s probably Sweden’s most famous food. I don’t imagine you could run a Stockholm Food Tour without it.

Guesses, anyone?

It was Swedish meatballs. For this, we were each served our own plate, with three meatballs, mashed potatoes, a small container of lingonberries formed into a sauce, roughly the consistency of cranberry sauce, and a small container of cucumber slices, not quite pickled but trending that way. There was also gravy, which the guide told us was called “brown gravy.” A couple of times on the tour, the guide made a comment about the Swedes’ lack of creativity in naming things.

The serving was more than a taste. It was closer to a full meal portion.

The restaurant we were at didn’t make the usual Swedish meatballs. The guide said the Swedish meatballs are typically made with calf or pork. Here, they make their meatballs with a combination of three types of venison. I forgot the types, but one of them is reindeer.

I’ve had Swedish meatballs before on this trip. I’ve never been very excited about them. I thought they were a little on the bland side. Not bad. They had some taste, and I mean that not in a bad way. But it wouldn’t be worth coming to Sweden just to eat them.

Here, however, the meatballs had a wonderful taste to them. They burst with flavour. They tasted a little bit gamy, but in a very good way.

By the time I finished them, I was full. But the Stockholm Food Tour wasn’t over.

It then moved on to a long-standing candy shop where they make a traditional candy, polkagris, by hand. It’s a stick candy that was originally made with peppermint. In their original flavour, they look much like candy canes, but not in a cane shape. Now, they make a variety of flavours in addition to the traditional peppermint, so there are different colours.

When we went into the store, they were handing out samples of fudge, which they’ve also started making. The samples weren’t just for the Stockholm Food Tour. Everyone in the store was offered a sample. It was very good.

I think this was coincidental, not planned, but a little while after we got there, they started making a batch of licorice-flavoured polkagris. I said they make it by hand, but that’s only mostly true. There is a machine that folds and re-folds the still very pliable candy. But all of the rest of the processes were machine-free.

We watched that process for a while. Before it was shaped and cut into individual candies, they cut off a piece of the not-yet-hardened candy and cut it into samples.

Eaten at that stage, you can’t immediately chew into it because it will stick to your teeth and it’s very difficult to pull off of them, or so I was told. But after a little while in your mouth, it hardens and it’s safe to gnaw on it.

As we left the store, the guide handed us each a polkagris lollipop. I can’t tell you how it tastes because I haven’t tried mine yet.

We then moved on to a food market, where we ate a small sample of the oldest cheese in Sweden. (I think he meant that it was the first type of cheese made in Sweden that’s still made today, not that it’s been mouldering for eons.

I didn’t catch the name of the cheese. I took a picture of the handwritten label, but I can’t quite figure out what it says. I posted that picture. Maybe you can make it out. The top line on the label is the region it comes from. The second line is the type of cheese.

It tasted vaguely like an aged cheddar, with a bit of sharpness, but not a heavy bite to it.

The last stop was for Swedish fika. As I understand it, fika is not a food. It’s more of a lifestyle.

According to the guide, when you invite someone to meet for fika, you are asking them to get together for coffee or tea and cake. And my understanding is that fika is not about the food. It’s about the company and your time together.

I liked that. Anyone want to get together for fika?

However, we didn’t just have fika explained to us as a concept. We each got a huge slice of cake. It was a layer cake. On top, there was a thin layer of green marzipan. Underneath, there were a couple of layers of a sponge-cake-like cake with some sort of creamy filling. The bottom layer was raspberries. The whole package was delicious.

As we were eating it, one of the younger generation of women said, “I don’t usually like marzipan, but this is very good.” That kind of freaked me out because, just seconds before, I said the same thing to myself (silently) in almost exactly those words.

And so ended the Stockholm Food Tour. It was another great food tour experience for me.