Does Iceland use volcanos for baking bread?
Imagine a horizon covered with ice-capped mountains and suddenly you see a volcano erupting and spewing red hot lava! Well, this is no scene out of a Hollywood movie, but an everyday reality for people living on Iceland.
Iceland is a volcanic island in the North Atlantic Ocean known for its untamed scenery and terrain. While most people visit to glimpse the Northern Lights, Blue Lagoon, volcanoes, glaciers, and waterfalls, Iceland has a lot more to offer. If you are in Iceland you don't need a stove or oven to bake a nice loaf of bread. A cooking pot, a shovel, and a hole in the ground are the only tools required to transform raw dough into baked glory called Hverabrauð. But how do they use volcanoes to bake a bread? Let’s find out.
Rugbrauð: The Icelandic thunder bread
Rugbrauo is tasty, sweet, and always a side dish. Your guess is correct; we are talking about the thunder bread. Thunder bread is the nickname for rye bread, rugbrauð, hot-spring bread, or Hverabrauð. Rugbrauð was Iceland's most widely consumed bread as the rye grains were affordable. People used sourdough to make rugbrauð. It’s steam-baked beneath the ground in a geothermal spring. When no ovens existed, bread used to be baked in pots on the leftover embers of hot lava from volcanoes. The sweetness came from low heat and a lengthy baking period.
This treat's ingredients include rye flour, all-purpose flour, baking soda, salt, kefir, and corn syrup. To make the dough, all these components are combined. Once the dough is ready it is poured in a tin container that is greased with butter. Then the dough is covered with baking paper. The bakers carry this tin pot to hot springs of the lake Laugarvatn Fontana. With the help of shovel, a new hole is dug in the sand and the pot is buried in it. The next day, the heated pots are removed and cooled in the lake and the delicious thunder bread is ready to serve. Rúgbrauð's sweetness balances up sour, smokey, or bland food. Icelanders serve it with pickled herring, smoked lamb, smoked trout, salmon, or butter. There are three variations of rugbrauð. The one with added sugar is the most loved.
Living with the volcanos
Living near an Icelandic volcano is like living anywhere else for country people, but it does affect the lifestyle of the locals in many ways. Residents can view volcanos from a hill which is undoubtedly a little ominous. If lava has already flowed over the area, it might do so again someday! In fact, many large residential areas have been built on old lava fields thousands of years old in many towns of Iceland. Now, the reason why Iceland has so many volcanoes is its peculiar location. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a 40,000 km long rift in the ocean floor, produced as a result of the separation of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, is where Iceland is located. Thus, it is one of Earth's most volcanically active regions. Iceland typically has a volcanic eruption every four years!
Locals have learnt to be alert because the island has roughly 30 active volcano systems. In fact, they have also learned how to use the volcanoes to their advantage.
Eyjafjallajokull: The traffic disruptor
Currently, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull is the most well-known volcano on the planet since 2010. It is made of numerous layers of tephra, pumice, hardened lava, and volcanic ash. Eyjafjallajokull's eruptions are explosive and contain a lot of ash. The ice cap contains multiple outlet glaciers and is around 100 square kilometres in Suðurland The crater of this volcano is two and half miles in diameter.
After lying dormant for 180 years, Eyjafjallajokull erupted on March 20, 2010, spilling molten lava in a remote area of South Iceland. The volcano erupted again on April 14, 2010, resulting in significant floods and the evacuation of 800 people. Volcanic ash eruption disrupted North-West Europe's air traffic for six days! It happened again in May, closing off airspace over large portions of Europe. Thankfully, since August 2010, Eyjafjallajökull is dormant and inactive.