It was Thanksgiving Weekend here in the states, and one thing that I'm thankful for is that I'm no longer in Sweden. You see, I've been traveling quite a bit these past several months and Sweden was unfortunately on my itinerary. It's not that I have a problem with Sweden, the Swedes, or even Swedish Meatballs, it's that Sweden is right next to the dreaded homeland of Salmiak: Finland.
Fortunately, I was as far away from Finland as possible (Malmö), but I could not escape the long arm of Finnish delicacies. On my way back to Denmark, I stopped at the grocery store at the train station to find an absurd amount/variety of yogurt, a strange obsession with condiments in metal tubes, and – as you probably guessed – plenty of salmiak.
One thing that caught my eye was in the freezer section. Amongst a bunch of seemingly good-tasting ice cream treats, I spotted this:
My Swedish is a little rough, but "Lakulätkä Lakrits Puck" roughly translates to "ground-up hockey puck", and is apparently how they describe the flavor of salty licorice. After confirming that the ingredienser did indeed list salmiak, I opened up the package to find this appropriately hockey-puck shaped ice-cream bar.
I figured that nothing could ruin ice cream, so I took a big bite of the Lakulätkä. I figured wrong. The ice cream portion of the bite melted pretty quickly, leaving a half-melted candy coating to chew on. It was a lot like those chocolate-covered icecream bars, except that it was covered in awful.
The candy coating had an impressively strong taste that came roaring in after a few seconds. I was a bit hungry, so I took another bite figuring that the taste couldn't get any worse. And once again, I figured wrong. The taste of cheap salmiak candy coating quickly overwhelmed me, and I threw the remainder of the puck in the nearest rubbish bin.
The taste stayed with me halfway to Copenhagen, and took nearly half a pack of gum to finally rid myself of. Considering that the Lakulätkä Lakrits Puck was mostly ice cream, I'll rate it as almost edible.
