Icelandic Food: Fish, Lamb, Rye Bread and Geothermal Greenhouses

Iceland has never been an easy place to grow food. Its farmers work a short summer against volcanic soil, salt spray and near-constant wind, and for a thousand years its people have depended instead on what the sea, the sheep and the earth’s own heat could reliably provide. The result is a cuisine that reads less like a restaurant menu and more like a record of survival: dried fish that keeps for months, lamb that has grazed free on highland grass since Viking settlement, and tomatoes grown in glass houses heated by the same geothermal water that fills the country’s hot springs. On our Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour, food isn’t a side note to the landscape — at Bjarnarhöfn farm and the Fríðheimar greenhouse, it becomes one of the clearest ways to understand how Icelanders have made this island livable.

A Cuisine Written by Geography

Iceland sits close to the Arctic Circle, on a rift where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart. That geology is inconvenient for farming but extraordinarily useful for cooking: geothermal heat runs underneath much of the country, and Icelanders have used it for centuries to bake, brew and, more recently, to grow vegetables through winter darkness that would otherwise make agriculture impossible. Fishing has always been the larger industry, and sheep farming the older one, brought by the Norse settlers who arrived from the ninth century onward and found an island with almost no native land mammals worth eating. What developed from those three pressures — sea, sheep and subterranean heat — is a food culture built on preservation and patience rather than spice cabinets or long growing seasons. Our guide to planning an Iceland ring road itinerary for mature travellers traces the route that carries this tour past the fishing villages and farms where that food culture is still visibly at work.

Fish and the Sea: Iceland’s Oldest Industry

For most of Iceland’s history, fish was not a delicacy but the difference between a hard winter and a fatal one. Cod, haddock and herring sustained coastal communities long before tourism existed, and the drying racks still visible along the coast — wooden frames hung with split fish, left to cure in the wind rather than the sun — are a working method, not a display for visitors. Dried fish, harðfiskur, is still eaten today much as it always was: torn into strips and eaten plain or with butter, closer to jerky than to anything served on a plate with cutlery. The tour’s route hugs this fishing coastline for much of its length, through small harbour towns whose economies were built entirely on the catch coming in. Our article on Ísafjörður’s fishing heritage and how the Westfjords shaped Icelandic life goes further into one of the towns on this route where that history is easiest to read in the harbour itself.

Lamb, Grazed Free and Preserved for Winter

Icelandic lamb has a reputation among chefs for a distinct, slightly wild flavour, and the reason is straightforward: the sheep spend their summer roaming unfenced highland pasture, grazing on wild herbs, moss and grass rather than feed. Every autumn, this free-ranging system requires réttir — a communal sheep round-up in which farming families and neighbours gather the flocks down from the highlands together, a tradition that has barely changed in a thousand years. Because refrigeration is a modern convenience and Iceland’s winters are long, lamb has traditionally been smoked over dried sheep dung or birch to make hangikjöt, a preserved meat still served at Christmas and other gatherings today. It’s a preservation method born of necessity that has simply outlasted the need for it, in the way that traditions often do once people decide they taste better than the alternative.

Do I have to try the fermented shark at Bjarnarhöfn?

No — tasting is entirely optional. At the Bjarnarhöfn farm on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, farmer Hildibrandur offers travellers a small taste of hákarl, Greenland shark that has been fermented and then air-dried for months to break down the toxins present in the fresh meat. It’s one of Iceland’s most infamous foods, with a strong ammonia smell that surprises most first-timers, and nobody on the tour is expected to finish a piece they don’t enjoy. The stop is as much about the farm itself and its tiny wooden church as it is about the shark — a chance to meet someone still practising a food tradition that goes back centuries, in the place it has always been made.

How much walking is involved at the farm stops?

Both farm visits are gentle by the standards of the wider tour. Bjarnarhöfn is a working farm with flat yard areas and a short walk to the church and drying sheds, and the Fríðheimar greenhouse visit is entirely indoors on a level floor. Neither requires the sustained walking or uneven ground that some of the tour’s coastal and highland days do — this tour overall is rated Level 2 – Moderate, meaning participants should be able to manage 3–5 hours of physical activity across a typical day, equivalent to walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven terrain, but the food-focused stops themselves sit at the easier end of that range.

Geothermal Greenhouses: Growing Food Where Nothing Should Grow

Iceland’s growing season is short and its winter daylight scarce, which should make fresh vegetables a luxury import rather than a local product. Geothermal power has quietly solved that problem. Hot water piped from underground is used to heat glasshouses year-round, and supplementary lighting extends the growing day through the darkest months, allowing farms to produce tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers that would otherwise be impossible at this latitude. Fríðheimar, a working horse and tomato farm on the Golden Circle route, is one of the clearest places to see this in practice: rows of tomato vines growing under glass, heated entirely by geothermal water, with a short show by the farm’s Icelandic horses as part of the visit. It’s a genuinely local answer to a problem most cold-climate countries solve by importing. Our explainer on how Iceland uses geothermal energy, from hot springs to greenhouses, covers the wider system this farm is part of, including the geology that makes it possible.

What’s included at the Fríðheimar farm visit?

The greenhouse visit, horse show and a tasting of the farm’s own tomato-based dishes are included as part of the day’s itinerary, with no separate booking required. It’s one of several stops on the tour where a meal or tasting is built directly into the day rather than left to travellers to arrange themselves — a difference that matters most on the days when there’s little else nearby.

Rye Bread from the Ground Itself

One of the more striking examples of geothermal cooking is rúgbrauð, a dense, faintly sweet rye bread traditionally baked not in an oven but underground, buried near a hot spring where the earth’s own heat does the work slowly over many hours. The result is a soft, almost pudding-like loaf, often served with smoked fish or butter. It’s a method that only makes sense in a country where geothermal heat is this close to the surface, and it sits alongside skyr — a thick, cultured dairy product related to yoghurt but strained until it’s closer to a soft cheese — as one of the foods most visitors are surprised to learn is genuinely everyday fare rather than a novelty made for tourists.

How many meals are included on the tour?

The tour includes 16 breakfasts and 12 dinners across its 17 days and 16 nights of accommodation, with lunches generally left open so travellers can choose a café or bakery in whichever town the day’s itinerary passes through. Between the included dinners and the farm tastings at Bjarnarhöfn and Fríðheimar, most travellers find they get a genuine cross-section of Icelandic food — fish, lamb, skyr and geothermally grown produce — without having to seek any of it out themselves.

Can dietary requirements be accommodated?

Yes — Odyssey asks travellers to advise the company of any dietary requirements, allergies or medical conditions at the time of booking, so hotels and included meals can be arranged accordingly. Because much of Iceland’s traditional food centres on fish and lamb, travellers with different needs are generally best served by flagging this early rather than adjusting on the road, and a Tour Specialist can talk through what to expect on a day-by-day basis before you commit.

Food as a Way of Reading the Country

None of this — the drying racks, the smoked lamb, the buried loaves of rye bread, the tomatoes grown under geothermal glass — exists because it makes a good story for visitors. It exists because Iceland’s early settlers, and the generations who followed them, worked out how to eat well in a place that offered very little help. Travelling the coastal towns and inland farms where these methods are still practised gives a more grounded sense of the country than its waterfalls and glaciers alone can provide, and it’s one of the reasons food earns a genuine place in the itinerary rather than being left to whatever happens to be on a hotel menu. If you’re still deciding whether this route is the right way to see Iceland, our overview of Iceland small group tours for mature travellers is a useful place to start before you look at the day-by-day detail.