Icelandic Dairy

First a disclaimer, I didn't get paid anything for writing this post--I just really enjoyed skyr and wanted to write about it.

I've been reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse for a while now.  With kids I don't get to read as much as I used to and thus books take me longer to get through.  It is a very interesting read.

I read Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel a number of years ago and really enjoyed it.  Instead of dealing with the rise and spread of societies, Collapse concerns itself with the collapse of societies.  One of the groups covered in the book are the Viking societies of the Northern Atlantic.

It is fascinating to read how the Viking societies from Scandinavia adapted to the different islands they voyaged to and settled, including the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Vineland.  As I was reading I came across a mention of a unique product called skyr.

I grabbed my phone and opened up Wikipedia to discover exactly what skyr was.  Apparently it died out in Scandanavia, but has been made in Iceland for hundreds of years and may have been made in Greenland as well during the 450 years the Vikings colonized the island.

I've always enjoyed yogurt and a number of other dairy products so I figured it was worth checking out.  Once there I discovered that skyr was still being made today and was available commercially.  Apparently the American brand siggi's, made by Icelander Siggi Hilmarsson who immigrated to the United States.  According to siggi's website:

Skyr is the traditional yogurt of Iceland that has been made for over 1,000 years. It is a strained non-fat yogurt. It is made by incubating skim milk with live active cultures. Then the whey, the water naturally found in milk, is strained away to make for a much thicker, creamier and concentrated yogurt. It takes four times the milk to make one cup of siggi’s compared to regular yogurt.

The next time I went to our local Kroger store I decided to see if I could find any siggi's skyr.

 It wasn't hard to find at all and even had a prominent sign.

I picked up a single container just to see if I would like it.  I've always enjoyed fruit and dairy so I decided on raspberry.

Skyr is definitely thicker than typical American yogurt.  I could pick up a spoonful, turn the spoon upside down, and not have any fall off the spoon even when I held it like that for over half a minute.

There are a minimum of ingredients and sugar is rather low on the list if you're concerned about that.  The taste is definitely different than other yogurts, but I rather enjoyed it.

The labeling was also quite interesting.  In order to make it more easily recyclable each cup has a removable paper liner--but this also provides more space for text, so you can see a short history of the company on the inside of each liner.

As I said above I didn't get paid anything for this post, I just happened to really enjoy this product and wanted to write about it.

As I was researching this post I also happened to find a TED talk by Jared Diamond that covers the topic of his book Collapse, so if you're interested but don't want to read the book you can check out this video.

~Matt

PS And if you want to try your own siggi's I found a coupon on their website.