You can cook a whole meal over an Icelandic geyser

REYKHOLT, ICELAND— Standing in the mud of the Myvatn geyser field in northern Iceland, Kolla Ivarsdottir lifted the lid of her makeshift bread oven. It had been fashioned from the drum of an old washing machine and buried in the geothermally heated earth. All around us, mudpots burbled and columns of steam shot skyward, powered by the heat of nascent volcanoes.

Ivarsdottir, a mother of three who sells her bread in a local crafts market, reached into the oven and retrieved a milk carton full of just-baked lava bread, a sweet, dense rye bread that has been made in the hot earth here for centuries. She cut the still-hot loaf into thick slices. It is best eaten, she said, “completely covered by a slab of cold butter as thick as your hand, and a slice of smoked salmon, just as thick.”

“Do many people cook other things this way?” I asked, eyeing the natural heat sources all around me.

“Not much,” she replied. “Sometimes a goose that a hunter shot, but most often, just the lava bread.”

I found this surprising in an energyrich and conservation-minded country that is also a pioneer in modern Nordic cuisine. In this era of slow cookers and Sous-vide, wouldn’t it be possible, I wondered, to make a whole meal using Iceland’s natural geothermal ovens?

I did more than wonder: I decided to test my proposition, a quest that led me last summer on a wide-ranging tour of this island’s culinary riches.

A call to restaurant critic and fish exporter Kjartan Olafsson, my go-to source for all things Icelandic, caught him in the midst of haying for the horses that carry him and his wife on off-road forays into the wilderness. “I have just the guy for you,” he said. At his suggestion, I immediately set out on an eight-hour drive to Reykholt, a village in the southwest.

The next day, I met Jon Sigfusson in Reykholt, where he is the chef at Fridheimar, a restaurant under the same roof as a futuristic indoor farm of the same name. About a fifth of Iceland’s tomatoes are grown there on soaring vines — as tall as a two-storey house — under golden lamps in geothermally heated greenhouses. The restaurant’s whole menu is based on tomatoes.

Sigfusson and his wife, Asborg, returned to Reykholt, his native village, after raising their children in Reykjavik. They were looking for a slower pace of life. He did not foresee the runaway suc- cess that the tomato restaurant would have, but he still maintains a small-town existence, more in tune with nature.

In that low-tech spirit, our group hatched a plan to cook at the local geyser oven, a feature of many rural Icelandic towns. A short drive from the restaurant, it sits on a rise with a160-kilometre vista to the south and east, a panorama of big rivers and lava fields. In the distance, Hekla, an active volcano, hulks over the plain.

We were standing on the hill above Reykholt, where the town’s geyser has been capped with a roughly finished housing of concrete, topped by a ramshackle smokestack. From that source, the village channels steam and hot water that supply part of the heat and power needs of the community. Some of the hot vapour is also diverted to the village’s communal oven, where Sigfusson proposed to cook our meal. It’s a much safer way to cook in geothermal heat than tiptoeing around boiling geysers.

He opened the geyser oven, propping it up with a fence post so that I could peer in safely. The escaping steam was as hot as a sauna and, at the bottom of the oven, a good deal hotter (about 93 C).

We agreed to meet the following morning to cook a menu of local fare, including trout from the nearby Tungufljot River and grass-fed Icelandic lamb, a hardy local breed that has the same salty succulence of the famous French agneau de pré-salé, lamb raised in saltmarsh meadows.

For dessert, Sigfusson suggested abrystir, made from the first milk (nutrientdense colostrum) produced by a nursing cow.

The next day broke bluebird-bright, with cotton-candy clouds and a light breeze. As we worked, the geyser would blow its top every seven minutes, and we had to pause, retreating beyond the reach of its warm, misty spray.

We left the oven to work its magic and, a few hours later, returned to unburden it of our meal. The bread easily could have sufficed for the whole meal had we not exercised some restraint. The trout was flaky and herbaceous. The milk pudding was super-creamy.

But the star of the show was the lamb braise. The meat was salty and smoky.

I’ll admit to a tingle of schadenfreude as I looked over at Hekla to see to see if the soul of anyone on my hit list was plunging into hellfire, but I didn’t dwell on it. The day was too lovely, the natural world too congenial and the food too satisfying to yield to uncharitable fantasies.