Yesterday we spent the best part of the day on a guided food tour learning about various traditional Finnish foods, a bit of the history of Helsinki and tasting various things – barley porridge wasn’t a huge hit, but some other things including salmon, wurst-style sausages, beer, gin, and sea buckthorn licorice were interesting and tasty.  Heather our guide is a Helsinki-resident Australian married to a Finn so she was very knowledgeable about Finnish food and food traditions but understood that we would find some of them a little strange.

We started the tour in the food hall of Helsinki’s premier department store Stockman – for those of you who know Wellington it was a bit like Moore Wilson’s on steroids- with lots more in-house ready prepared foods.  We tasted salmon and some amazing licorice including one coated with sea buckthorn and chocolate – better than it sounds.

Finland has a really short growing season and unsurprisingly a lot of it’s traditional food is based on root vegetables  – particularly potatoes and grains  – both of which keep over the long winter.  So we tried barley porridge (not my thing)  and rye flour pastries filled with rice porridge (a bit bland).  From there it got a bit more interesting with pork sausage (like a german wurst) and sauerkraut with a beer tasting for lunch, a cheese tasting,  jams using local berries (sea buckthorn again – like a really tart fruit bomb) and coffee and pastries to finish.  And back at the hotel we had our own local gin tasting 😀!

More pictures will follow….