Rúgbrauðsís

Rúgbrauðsís is an ice cream made with Iceland’s dark rye bread. The flavor of the sweet bread carries into the cold dairy dessert, and in versions that leave bits of bread in, you can also enjoy their texture.

Turning the Flavor of Bread into Ice Cream

In a dish created by students at Iceland’s hotel and food school, rye bread is warmed with milk, cream, sugar and glucose, and brought to a boil while being stirred. The mixture is then churned and frozen in an ice cream machine and served on top of a warm bread pudding. It also comes with a sauce of lemon and raisins that are cooked and mashed, a combination with tartness amid the sweetness.

Café Loki, across from Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, also serves rye bread ice cream. An article introducing the café’s offerings says you can feel bits of bread in the creamy ice cream. Depending on the form of the bread used and how it is mixed in, the texture of the grain remains in the cold ice cream.

Bread Baked with Geothermal Heat, and a Home-Style Soup

The bread used as the ingredient, rúgbrauð, is a dark, moist rye bread with a touch of sweetness. In Laugarvatn, Iceland, a method has been handed down in which a pot of dough is buried in sand warmed by the heat of hot springs and cooked for about a day. The warm bread, once dug up, can also be eaten with butter. It can also be baked for a long time in an oven without geothermal heat, so not all rye bread is made underground.

Ice cream is not the only sweet dish that uses this bread. In Anna Laura Pálsdóttir’s home, leftover rye bread was frozen, and once enough had built up, it was cooked down in water, and lemon, raisins and a malt beverage were added. For her, this bread soup served with whipped cream is a childhood taste she would want to eat even on her birthday.

Students at the hotel and food school took the ingredients of that soup and reworked them into a bread pudding, rye bread ice cream, and a lemon and raisin sauce. It is an example that combines a warm dessert and a cold dessert on one plate, born from a familiar way of eating bread.

Glossary