It’s cod season Again during the considerably north of Norway, and Røst—a remote scatter of rocky islets off the outermost idea of Norway’s Lofoten Islands—is over again the honeypot for fishermen in search of jackpot paychecks from the lucrative dried cod trade, Norway’s oldest export field, courting again into the Viking days.
The sorter, acknowledged in Norwegian as being the “Vraker” kinds the fish into a number of high-quality grades. The fish could be sorted in as much as 20 different excellent types, and it's only the very best fish that will get the standing “Stockfish from Lofoten”.
In the drying approach about 70% to eighty five% of your drinking water within the fish is taken out and all which have been good and nutritious are retained in its most pure variety. The result is actually a fish concentrate, healthy, refreshing and chemically freed from any artificial additives. The nutritional price of a person kilogram of Stockfish is the same as close to five kilograms of new fish.
, a Viking yarn set during the ninth century. In it, a youthful Norse raider named Thorolf Kvendulfsson sets off for England within a brilliantly painted, dragon-prowed vessel, its blue- and purple-striped sail filling With all the summertime breeze, its thwarts piled large With all the fortune in furs and dried cod he and his Guys had amassed over the past Wintertime.
It’s eleven o’clock with a dim, chilly, blustery early morning in February, which has a feeble arctic sun hardly peeping more than the horizon, plus the harbor at Røstlandet is often a hive of exercise. Three boats are tied up to the wharf, delivering their bounties of clean caught cod, even though the skipper of A different boat nestles his craft into a slot freshly vacated by a fourth.
Several returned household with nicely-stuffed pockets, though the bigger variety sailed to the tip of life in poverty. Yet they went up time and again, 12 months immediately after yr, technology just after technology. It was their fairy land of fortune. That they had to go.”
Every cod is assigned among 20 different grades based on subtleties in shade, texture, and scent. Courtesy Olaf Johan Pedersen Stockfish—the name derives from “adhere fish,” because of the wooden frames on which it’s dried—is cured in the open air about quite a few weeks, normally from February, if the period opens, to April.
The clean cod is cleaned and headed after Each individual day-to-day catch. The fish are then tied together in pairs within the tail and hung on drying racks.
When the temperate waters in the Gulf Stream enter the grounds throughout the Lofoten archipelago, the temperature is strictly proper to the Norwegian Arctic cod to spawn. Huge cod swim down from the Barents Sea in the midst of the darkest Wintertime, and turn into often called
The German Hanseatic retailers have been waiting, and marketed the fish on to the citizens from the flourishing towns of northern Europe. Superior Catholics try to eat fish on Fridays, and cod are full of hearty proteins.
Any way you need to measure it, it’s a great distance from The nice and cozy Mediterranean sunshine to the moody skies above Røst, whose 365 islets and skerries are household to some hundred hardy Norwegians shrimp for sale live and about a million seabirds. Yet the one-way links concerning these two really various destinations return nearly 600 years, towards the shipwreck in 1432 of a Venetian service provider trader named Pietro Quirini.
Our success as being a marketplace chief in Stockfish distribution established a demand from customers by our founded buyers For additional assortment of good quality European seafood items, and led for the expansion of our merchandise line Using the addition on the Queen from the Coast brand.
The cargo fetches a fancy price in England, and Thorolf returns to Norway a wealthy guy, only to fall afoul from the king, who feels that Thorolf is obtaining a minor much too wealthy, just a little way too cocky, and not paying out his taxes.
In 2012, an opera depending on Quirini’s shipwreck premiered on Røst—a primary for the small island—and was so well-liked with locals and visitors that it was introduced back again for any repeat general performance two decades later on.