Icelandic Lava Bread: The beautiful tradition of baking bread in the ground

While most bakers rise early, don an apron, and disappear into the kitchen in pursuit of the day’s bread, at Laugarvatn Fontana — a hotspring retreat around an hour east of Reykjavik — the resident breadmakers reach for a spade and venture into the wild. When they spot the desired area of scorching black sand, they begin to dig, and within a few minutes they’re unearthing tins of freshly-baked loaves from the ground.

“When we bring people to the hot spring area, it’s covered in sand and nothing appears to be happening,” says general manager and head baker Sigurður Rafn Hilmarsson. “But then, you take a shovel, dig one foot deep, and it’s boiling like crazy.” This heat makes the area beside Lake Laugarvatn an ideal location for making a very Icelandic culinary offering: ‘lava bread’. Guests are welcome to join Hilmarsson on this ritual and taste the dark rye of his labour, served warm with a generous smear of golden Icelandic butter and a glistening slice of local smoked trout. “The sugar in the recipe tastes great with salt,” he says, of the bread, which here takes 24 hours to bake.

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Since at least the 12th century, Icelanders have been cleverly harnessing the geothermal power of their land to cook food, according to the country’s foremost popular cookbook author and culinary historian Nanna Rögn-valdardóttir. “Baking hverabrauð [hot spring bread] is an old tradition, although how old is unclear,” she says. “[For a long time], there were no ovens in Iceland and the first bakery wasn’t established until 1834, so breads were mostly flatbreads or baked on a slow fire under an upside down cast-iron cooking pot. Fuel was often scarce. It was very convenient to have a natural source [of heat] where you could simply bake your bread in a closed container.”

These days, the term ‘hot spring bread’ has been replaced with the snappier, more Internet-friendly ‘lava bread’. “In older writings, it is usually called ‘hot spring bread’, which is the correct translation,” Rögnvaldardóttir clarifies. She believes hverabrauð was only rebranded as ‘lava bread’ in the last decade. “I’ve seen the term ‘volcano bread’ also sometimes used, which can lead to the misunderstanding that red hot lava is somehow involved. Geothermal heat and hot springs do not necessarily mean there is a live volcano lurking nearby.”

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Finding the ideal spot for baking bread is far from predictable. “The ground is alive,” says Hilmarsson, who grew up in the area making this bread with his family. “You could be baking in a certain hole for three-to-five months, then all of a sudden it slows down and you need to look for another active spot. It’s good to have your eyes open.” While Iceland is notorious for its abundant geothermal energy sources, there are many areas without any hotspots, meaning preparing hverabrauð au naturel has not always been an option. This hasn’t dulled its popularity.

As bakeries began to spring up in the mid-19th century, similar methods of steam baking, producing hverabrauð and other dark rye breads became staples across the country. Today, it’s a method that can easily be tried at home, according to Rögnvaldardóttir. “There is no magic involved: you don’t need your own private hot spring, you can get more or less the same result from your own oven,” she says, suggesting one use a closed container, even a milk carton, baked at 90°C overnight for at least eight-to-nine hours. “Just take care not to fill the container too much as the bread needs room to expand,” she advises, adding that the bread is best eaten fresh.

Rögnvaldardóttir prefers her bread served with either smoked salmon, lamb paté, or alongside some plokkfiskur, a simple mashed fish. She’s also known to whip up rye bread soup, a sweet dessert made from raisin loaf, served with whipped cream. “It’s either loved or hated,” she says matter-of-factly. Similarly, demand for the bread has waxed and waned over the last century, but the Icelandic food scene’s penchant for experimentation and reinvention of classic Nordic fare has seen hverabrauð bubble up in popularity once more.

Enter Gísli Matt, one of Iceland’s top chefs known for his inventive approach to indigenous ingredients. After stints at acclaimed restaurants in New York, he returned to his homeland to dedicate himself to the preservation and advancement of Icelandic cuisine. “When you grow up here, you don’t really see the beauty around you, but when you leave and look back, that’s when you really appreciate it,” he says.

Matt’s recently released cookbook, Slippurinn: Recipes and Stories from Iceland, includes a recipe for lava bread concocted by his 84-year-old grandma, Sjöfn Benónysdóttir. She still bakes it today, in the same tin box. Growing up, Matt was served it often, always with a side of the island’s plentiful fish. Vestmannaeyjar became a hverabrauð hotspot after a major eruption in 1973 that caused the entire population to temporarily evacuate; when they returned, the still-flowing lava streams were used for cooking. “It changed everything, creating a lot more heat, so my grandma was always making cakes and this bread,” says Matt, who recommends balancing the sweetness of his hverabrauð with something rather smoky and bracing, such as herring and his signature pickled seaweed. “These harsher flavours go really well together,” he says.

For Matt, grandma’s the real food star of the family. “She is truly a wonder woman. She had seven kids and her husband was always out at sea,” he says, noting that her influence extended far beyond the kitchen. “The men were often viewed as the heroes, as the captains of the ship, meanwhile the women were taking care of the kids, the nets of the boat, the finances, the food, everything else.” He continues to honour her version of hverabrauð by serving it at his restaurant, Slippurinn, and to his four children.

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To get a better sense of how it’s made, Matt invited Vogue Scandinavia and Icelandic artist Saga Sig to travel to his home in Vestmannaeyjar and document his journey up the tempestuous Eldfell volcano. Braving swirling winds and frigid winter temperatures, he digs a hole in a particularly steamy spot and buries his loaf. Unlike a conventional oven, there are no knobs to turn, no digital temperature indicators, no built-in alarm clocks to let you know when it’s done. “I’ve over-baked it more than once, which makes it chewy,” says Matt. “The heat cannot be too high. To me, it’s part of the fun. It forces you to accept the fact that you are beholden to nature and cannot control it, you can only work with it.” It’s a concept that resonates beyond Iceland, to the rest of Scandinavia – this notion that we must work with what we are given and respect nature.

Back home in his busy kitchen, having unearthed the loaf four hours later, Matt quickly turns from mountaineering chef to everyday dad, feeding moist slices of authentic fresh lava bread to his two-year-old son Auðunn, just as his parents did for him, and their parents for them. As a chef, he looks to continue to innovate, but Matt is adamant that such legacy foods should be given a future. “Traditions in Icelandic food weren’t celebrated until recently,” he says. “Food is culture. It’s so important that we don’t forget about our own.”