Finland

Lohikeitto is definitely one of my favorite foods in Finland. Lohikeitto is salmon soup and any type of fish food is actually a pretty good. I like muikku, paisatut muikut, that is fried vendin seas, a type of a small fish that you fry in rye flour. You eat it like that or you can have kermaviili, which is a type of milk-based sauce that you can put on top of the fish. I also like fresh vegetables, natural produce, the berries here are really good, mustikka, mansikka, vadelma, so like basically blueberries, strawberries, raspberries that you can pick in the nature. They're really good, delicious, anything from the nature. Mushroom picking is fine, mushrooms are good.

They've got this great Finnish dessert called Mammi. It's a rye pudding and I love it. But you just got to really enjoy the candy and the chocolate there. They have a brand named Fatser which I'm sure you'll be well acquainted with by our first couple weeks there. Besides that I mean they have a lot of really good salmon dishes and salmon soups. Oh and pea soup and yeah they do a lot of really good soups there that I really enjoy. One of my favorite two things though is the rye bread which is not like American rye bread at all. It's actually really good and then they have this Christmas drink called Glöggi which is very Scandinavian but it's like a berry cider. It's really good.

Finland's dessert culture absolutely blows Americans out of the water. It's actually kind of sad for America. Finland's chocolate is amazing. If you ever come across a Fazer bar, eat it. Buy it and eat it. It's just so good. And the ice cream is amazing. They make it so well. You can get it for really cheap, but it can still be really good quality. One of my favorite things would be to go to the store, to either the S market or the K market, and buy this Ingman brand of raspberry smoothie ice cream that they had. It would come in a box with a liter of ice cream in it. It was probably maybe two or three euros. It was so cheap, and it was really, really good, and I gained so much weight off of it. It's definitely something I really miss about Finland.

There's a ton of amazing food in Finland and amazing people who are more than happy to make it for you. One of my favorite meals was at Osta's Bari up in Rovaniemi. It was a pile of mashed potatoes and it had little pickled salads around the edge and a couple of sausages and fried eggs on top and it was amazing. And also a black blueberry sour cream concoction, kind of a trifle-y was amazing. I remember we made, of course, fatzer chocolate and all the other wonderful candies and chocolates there. But just so many good desserts, pannukakku, crepes after sauna are amazing and the mehu and the kiseli is just fantastic. Best food ever. Bob's mehu, kiseli is just fantastic.

Okay, so favorite foods from Finland. We once got fed some fresh reindeer straight from Lapland, the north of Finland, and it was so good and delicious and juicy and yummy. You eat it with jam and it was just delicious. And then there's another classic dish is buula, which is delicious and my favorite is the, it's like buttered and sugar topped and it is amazing.

Oh, do I love Finnish pulla. It's like baked pastries. My favorite is what's called dalles pulla. And it's like this, this pulla that, that, that it has like this vanilla custard in the middle of it. But that's just desserts, I guess, a more, a more hearty food. I really love makaroni laatikko. It's macaroni casserole. What they do is they make a casserole of macaroni. They put meat in it, they put vegetables in it, cheese on the top. And oh, it's so good. So good. I love it.

The pastries in Finland are incredible. One of my favorites was like a cream cheese filled pastry, but my all-time favorite bakery item is Risi piirakka, which is a small rice pie. The Finns use them a lot of times for open-faced sandwiches, like they'll eat that for lunch. They'll put meat and cheese just on top of this little Risi piirakka and have a couple of those for lunch. You can also have them for breakfast. I would put butter on them or cream cheese. You just pop them in the toaster for a little while and they just like melt on there and it's creamy and and it's really fantastic. It's one of the things that I miss and that shows up in my dreams sometimes, but I can't find it here. You have to make it homemade here. One of the other things that's pretty common is to actually make egg butter and put it on the Risi piirakka. Egg butter is just what it sounds like. It's butter with hard-boiled eggs in it and Finnish butter called voi is incredible.

You will learn this very early on, but Finnish chocolate is the best chocolate ever. I mean, I lived in France for a while and I thought their chocolate was good. Seriously, Finnish chocolate is the best. Their Christmas chocolate has like gingerbread chunks in it and some have little, I think they're raisins and nuts in them. They are incredible. Stock up during Christmas time, take some home, you will not regret it. I also really love gummy candy and they have this stuff called tutti frutti, which is just amazing. I just, Finnish candy, it's so good. You've probably heard about pula from some of the other videos. There's a special type called korvapusti, which is kind of like the equivalent of a cinnamon roll. I still make it for special occasions. It is absolutely my favorite. And root vegetables, they're actually really good. I never knew that I liked rutabaga before I had some in Finland, but it's quite tasty.