This is part of Breaking Bread, a collection of stories that highlights how bread is made, eaten, and shared around the world. Read more here.
“If someone tells you to go and see a bread, you’re gonna be like… yeah, no. I'm gonna see a waterfall.”
Rye bread may not be high on your Iceland trip wishlist, but Sigurður (Siggi) Hilmarsson is here to tell you it absolutely should be. Not only is he well-known as the managing director at Laugarvatn Fontana—a popular hot spring located on a lake a 75-minute drive from Reykjavik—but Siggi has also lived in Laugarvatn his entire life. And there’s something special about this hamlet that about 200 people call home: they bake bread underground, a tradition that has lasted more than a century.
Chef Gísli Matthías Auðunsson, chef and co-owner of Reykjavik restaurants Slippurinn and næs, seasons freshly baked ‘hot spring bread’ in the Westman Islands.
Locals call it rugbraud, but it’s also referred to as ‘thunder bread’ or ‘hot spring bread’. It is made of a simple recipe of rye flour, white flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and sometimes milk and golden syrup, but it is the geothermal energy that makes this cooking method possible. Celebrated more for its more visible manifestations like the occasional volcanic eruption and the constant stream of hot springs that dot traveler itineraries, it is what molds rugbraud’s complex flavor. The dense rye bread that emerges is an embodiment of a culture-wide sweet tooth—a delicious meeting point between cake and bread that’s best balanced with a thick swipe of butter, smoked lamb, or pickled fish.
“I find it so interesting that this bread actually has flavor. There are no spices in the recipe—the flavor just comes from the rye and the sugar,” says Siggi, whose mother and grandmother baked this way, and who in turn has taught people like Zac Efron and Gordon Ramsey to make the bread. He continues: "If you go around the country, you will find as many recipes as the places you visit. Some people use four cups of rye, others use five cups of rye, you know?"
The Westman Islands make up an archipelago off of Iceland’s south coast.
Gisli makes his way up the volcano to bake bread.
The recipe is only one part of it, because to make rugbraud, you have to be able to access bubbling, boiling water within a few feet of the ground’s surface. As a result, this tradition is compartmentalized to regions of the country where the earth is hot enough to cook. One such place is Vestmannaeyjar, an archipelago off of Iceland’s south coast. This is where Gísli Auðunsson, chef and co-owner of Reykjavik restaurants Slippurinn and næs, bakes his bread, harnessing the heat of a volcano that last erupted in 1973. “Nobody taught me really, I just heard that there was still heat at a few spots in the volcano—even 50 years later,” he says. “I asked my grandmother, Bobba, for a recipe and started trying to make it.”
The recent volcanic activity on Reykjanes Peninsula in southwest Iceland has made it another place of interest for one tour operator. Iceland Adventure Tours, which offers experiences snorkeling in Silfra Fissure and much more, has hopes of adding a baking site to the region and introducing non-Icelanders to the method. “This bread is a big part of our history and I can almost guarantee every Icelander grew up eating it with fish,” says Sigrún Jóhannesdóttir, a company representative. They currently offer a tour that brings guests to Fontana and its community bakery and baking site.
