Foodie
  • 2 days ago
Danish herring smokehouses once dotted the tiny island of Bornholm. The few that remain showcase both this historic food preservation technique and the delicious meals, such as this open-faced herring and egg sandwich, that are traditionally enjoyed throughout Denmark.
Transcript
00:00Sol over Gudhjem, what does that mean?
00:13It just means the sun over the city of Gudhjem, and Gudhjem in free translation is the city
00:24of God.
00:27If you go to Bornholm, you will always get the whole herring with the bones in it.
00:36You will get the egg yolk, you will have the radish, you will have the chives and rye bread
00:42and salt.
00:43That's it.
00:45The egg yolk symbolizes the sun.
00:50I'm from up here, this is on the tip of the island, the northern part, small city.
00:59Bornholm is located in the Baltic Sea and it's very close to Sweden, but still a part
01:03of Denmark.
01:04Of course, in the old days, you had lots of fish in the ocean around Bornholm, and they
01:10were catching so many fish, eating more fish all the time.
01:14You were salting lots of fish because they could last for a longer time, and then you
01:22started thinking about different ways of preserving, and smoke was one of them, and then we started
01:31smoking herring.
01:32We have smokehouses all over the island, and there has been many, many, many more smokehouses.
01:41Everybody was smoking.
01:43Now we only have like these, I don't know how many we have left, six, eight, ten places.
01:53There is different ways to smoke the herring, but I think the most common ways on the smokehouses
02:00on the island is, it's in two steps actually.
02:06So what you do is that you dry the herring for one hour first, and after that you smoke
02:11it in the oven, and you smoke it under the chimney.
02:17And they are smoking for around three hours for 55 degrees, and then they are smoking
02:27it with something called red elm.
02:30The smoke is cleaner, and it gives a better taste to the fish.
02:41You don't have smokehouses in Copenhagen, you have so many on Bornholm.
02:56It's got something to do with the history on the island, and it's just something which
03:01will always be there, I think, because it tastes so very beautiful.