(upbeat music)
That there is an erupting volcano.
So there's a lot of geologic activity
under the surface of this country.
And the people of Iceland have found a way
to harness that energy.
So this lava field has come through
and I think maybe jump-started the growth of these berries.
- It's a bit surrealistic to come in here
during the winter time when you're having
maybe a couple of meters of snow.
These guys here, I'm not sure if they'll continue to ripe,
but maybe we can just give these to you.
- Oh, thank you so much.
Seeing this collection of tropical plants
felt like I was watching a magic trick.
I was impressed,
but now I wanted to see what the secret was behind it.
(ambient music)
Due to its location on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
there is a lot of activity underneath Iceland.
Throughout the country, there is a network of groundwater
that gets heated up to boiling temperatures.
This happens so much,
that you will often see fumaroles throughout the landscape.
This is steam escaping from the earth.
You may also happen across one of these.
(geyser erupting)
Jump scare.
We're just sitting here looking at this thing,
peacefully bubbling,
and then all of a sudden it shoots up.
That just came out of nowhere.
I was told that this used to be more active,
but because the volcano has erupted,
that has taken some of the pressure
out of that vein of magma.
It's so weird to think that they're connected.
Because we're very, very far from that volcano,
it was like an hour drive away.
Doesn't matter.
That Volcano has got such an immense kind of activity to it.
(piano music)
The word geyser comes from Iceland's Great Geysir,
the first geyser that has ever been documented in writing.
Remember how I said that
Iceland has found a way to harness this geothermal energy?
In fact, if you live in Iceland,
and you find out that you have
geothermal activity on your property,
it's like finding out that you have crude oil.
That energy is a valuable resource that can be used
in a number of different ways.
And one of the earliest uses for geothermal energy
was cooking.
Since there is a shortage of trees in Iceland,
historically using wood in order to make fire
was not reliable.
Long ago,
Icelanders instead looked towards the endless supply of heat
that was coursing underneath their feet.
The earth became their oven.
That'd be a great title for a book.
I've been told that if you're walking through an area
that has a lot of geologic activity underground,
then if you look for an area without plants,
that's probably a spot that's like really hot,
like a warm spot.
And over here you can see this is a very active area
and you can see some of the plants are not surviving
in these little zones.
And when I touch the ground here, it is warm.
It's a very cold day, you can see I'm wearing a jacket.
And although the sun is shining,
the ground is actually warm.
And I think that you're feeling the inside of the earth.
There's only so many feet between me and magma.
Over here, it's in the shade,
let me see if this is warm too.
Yeah, it's a little warmer in the sun.
The ground is not cold, that's pretty cool.
Cooking with the earth is a practice that isn't needed
now that there are electric stoves.
However, there are a few areas
that utilize the heat of the earth
in order to cook traditional foods.
In the area that I am right now,
there's a lot of activity underground. And because of that,
people can use that to cook.
Restaurants and hotels, they will bake bread underground.
There are a few places that used to do it
and they're all closed.
This place looks like they had banana bread,
and carrot cake, and stuff like that
that was cooked using geothermal energy.
Luckily, I did find one place that was open
and it did have some food that was cooked by the earth.
(piano music)
This is amazing, there's so much activity here.
It must be like right above like a big vein of magma
because, I mean, look at that.
If I would put my hand in that, that would cook my hand.
And one cool thing with this place
is they will cook bread and potatoes.
And this looks like it might be somewhere
where people are cooking some potatoes
it smells like an egg.
I know I keep saying it,
but every time you see this sort of activity,
like the inside of the earth has a smell guys
and I am smelling it right now, and it smells like sulfur.
And if the potato cooker wasn't hot enough for you,
get a load of this bread cooker.
(cooker hissing)
This here is a piece of hot spring bread,
also known as volcano bread.
In Iceland it's often just referred to as rye bread.
What people do is they will take a pot,
or even like a coffee can,
they will fill it with a dough made out of rye flour,
golden syrup, salt, a few other ingredients,
and they put that in the pot, they bury it underground,
and then the earth will cook the bread.
The man who sold those to me,
he said this took 16 hours for it to bake fully.
Depending on how hot the ground is,
it might take longer than that.
There is a hotel in Iceland that will do it as well,
and for them it takes 24 hours.
You're dealing with the earth,
so it depends on what you got.
The bread is very, very dense.
And I think that's not so much a matter
of it being cooked by the earth,
that's the type of bread this is,
this is like a nice, dense rye bread.
This also has the nickname thunder bread.
And that is not for any sort of geologic reason,
that is because this thing has so much rye in it
that it can have a laxative effect.
So you can't eat too much of it.
I decided to wait until I got to a hotel
because I had a five and a half hour drive
from where I got this bread.
And I didn't want to be in the car
with any kind of thunder inside me.
And I'm going to be eating this with some Icelandic butter.
The guy who sold it to me said that
you should put butter on it. It's not good without butter.
So let's give that a try.
That is actually really nice.
It's not like eating regular bread,
it's like somewhere between a very dense rye bread
and a piece of molasses date cake.
It has a nice texture to it.
It's like really dense and very chewy.
And yeah, that butter in there is really nice too.
I'm gonna to try a little piece just on its own.
I would eat this on its own too,
but it is nice with the butter.
I could definitely see the issue of eating too much of this
and then having to deal with the thunder
that comes from thunder bread.
Because I have another slice over there,
I am tempted to eat it, but I know I shouldn't.
So I'm just going to stick with this one piece here,
but it is really, really good.
And if I had a whole loaf of this,
I would have to really work hard
to control myself from eating it.
Flavor aside, coolest thing is that
this is cooked by the earth.
(cooker hissing)
I'd be terrified to cook with this thing.
(ambient music)
While we're on the subject of cooking,
let's take a minute to talk about food.
And no, I don't mean lamb.
Although bananas aren't grown commercially in Iceland,
a lot of fruits and vegetables are.
There may only be 1.2% of arable land
throughout the country.
But thanks to greenhouses,
ones that are powered by geothermal energy,
that doesn't matter.
If you go to a supermarket here in Iceland,
what sort of products do you find that are grown locally?
- Well, usually you have like the tomatoes,
the sweet peppers and the cucumbers,
even the cucumbers are being exported to Denmark
and being sold in Danish markets.
Well, those are the greenhouse vegetables we're seeing,
but then we're having the outside farmers
with agriculture they are growing beets, potatoes, carrots,
cauliflowers, for example, broccoli.
The pre-growing of the vegetables which are grown outside
is done usually in cold greenhouses.
And after some time they will have been pre-grown,
they're ready to go outside,
then they need to be sure
that we have a season which is going to be frost-free.
You don't want to put your plants out
until you have a couple hours of frost.
You could damage everything in the beginning.
Then the outside vegetables are produced in fields.
- One of the things that I was most curious about
was how farmers cope during the dark season.
I visited during the light season,
and the whole time I was there, the sun never set.
Late at night, it would get kind of dim out,
but never completely dark.
That seems like it could be pretty good for plants,
but then there's the cold, dark season,
when there could be some days with no light at all.
What do they do?
- Fascinating.
(upbeat music)
All right, so that's it for the second installment
in this six-part series
about the Icelandic banana among other things.
If there is a another episode out already,
there should be a link on the screen.
If you don't see a link on the screen,
that means I forgot to put it there, or it's not out yet.
If you're not subscribed,
and you want to be notified when that episode is out,
subscribe, click the bell, do all that stuff,
you know what to do.
And the next one is going to be focusing on hot springs,
but some really weird hot springs that are in Iceland
and also commercially grown crops,
like crops that are grown in Iceland
and sold at supermarkets.
Before I go,
I want to give a thank you to my Patreon supporters.
If you're not in Patreon,
now's a good time to take a look at it,
because Patreon is going to be full of
all sorts of exclusive content about this series.
So I've got a commentary for this episode
and some behind the scenes stuff, a lot of outtakes,
and it's going to be all sorts of cool stuff.
So check that out.
There's more information in the description below,
and also a big thank you to The Agricultural University,
which was a huge help in making this episode.
There'll be a link to more information about them below,
as well as other sources that I used to make this episode.
Thanks so much everybody. I'll see you in the next one.