What to eat in Finland? The ultimate guide to Finnish food

Ask Finns what food they miss when living abroad and a suspiciously large proportion will answer ruisleipä: rye bread.

Forget the polite, mildly brown rye bread you may have encountered elsewhere. Proper Finnish rye bread is dark, dense, sour and substantial enough to be used as a blunt instrument. It’s also incredibly healthy.

It has been one of the foundations of the Finnish diet for generations, and remains an everyday food rather than something wheeled out for tourists in national costume.

One of the most distinctive versions is reikäleipä, literally ‘hole bread’: a flat, ring-shaped rye loaf. The hole was once genuinely useful, allowing loaves to be threaded onto poles hanging beneath the farmhouse ceiling and stored there for the winter.

Then there’s saaristolaisleipä, or archipelago bread, which comes from the Swedish-speaking coastal tradition. It’s dark too, but sweeter, softer and maltier, and particularly good with smoked or cured fish.

Time Out tip: Don’t overlook näkkileipä, crispbread. It may not photograph as well as a cinnamon bun, but spread with butter and topped with cheese, it has fuelled generations of Finnish schoolchildren.

Many of my Asian friends have asked the same question when they first encounter a karjalanpiirakka: why on earth would anyone put rice inside bread?

Well, we do. And we love it.

The Karelian pasty is one of Finland’s great everyday foods: a thin rye crust wrapped around a filling of creamy rice porridge. Originally from Karelia in eastern Finland, it has long since spread across the whole country and become one of the easiest snacks to grab on the go. You’ll find them in supermarkets, bakeries, cafés and hotel breakfasts almost everywhere.

You can eat one perfectly happily on its own, but things get more interesting once you start piling things on top. The classic is munavoi, chopped boiled egg mixed generously with butter. Cheese and cold cuts work too, turning the humble pasty into a miniature open sandwich.

In fact, considering how ubiquitous, portable and endlessly customisable karjalanpiirakka is, we’re mostly just waiting for some enterprising Finn to realise the obvious and build an entire café chain around it.

Time Out tip: Hotel Runo in Porvoo is a good example of how seriously Finns can take the humble Karelian pasty. Before opening, the hotel reportedly tested pies from dozens of bakeries around Finland until it found the one it considered the best – and that is the version now served at breakfast.

Finland takes cinnamon buns seriously. A proper korvapuusti is soft, buttery and generously flavoured with both cinnamon and cardamom, then topped with crunchy pearl sugar.

That cardamom is crucial. It gives Finnish buns their distinctive aromatic flavour and separates them from many of their sweeter, more heavily iced cousins elsewhere. And while korvapuusti literally translates rather alarmingly as ‘a slap on the ear’, the experience of eating one is considerably more pleasant.

It is also inseparable from Finnish coffee culture. A cup of filter coffee and a freshly baked korvapuusti is less a snack than a national institution – whether you’re sitting in a stylish Helsinki café or at somebody’s kitchen table.

Time Out tip: For what may well be Finland’s – and is, in our view, certainly Helsinki’s – best korvapuusti, head to Rams Roasters. Each one of their buns comes out a little different, with so much filling that some of it spills out in the oven and caramelises around the edges into something almost biscuit-like. 

Salmon appears on Finnish menus in almost every form imaginable: grilled, baked, boiled, hot-smoked, cold-smoked and salt-cured as graavilohi. Perhaps the most atmospheric version is loimulohi: a side of salmon fixed to a wooden board beside an open fire and slowly cooked in the heat of the flames.

Finland’s relationship with salmon goes back centuries. Wild salmon was once so plentiful in the great rivers of western Finland that labourers demanded contracts guaranteeing they wouldn’t have to eat it every day. Many of those rivers were later dammed for hydroelectric power during Finland’s industrialisation, and today much of the salmon eaten in Finland is farmed and imported from Norway. It is not always the most sustainable choice: WWF Finland notes that farmed Norwegian salmon has a substantially higher environmental impact than many locally caught species.

That is one reason why better Finnish restaurants often look beyond salmon. Keep an eye out for nieriä, Arctic char: pink-fleshed, delicate and closely related to both salmon and trout. Think of it as salmon’s slightly more sophisticated northern cousin.

Time Out tip: Ask almost any foreign visitor to name a Finnish dish and chances are they’ll say lohikeitto. The generous splash of cream sets it apart from most other fish soups and makes it unmistakably Finnish – and it’s also one of the more affordable ways to enjoy salmon. For the best possible version, head to Restaurant Ariel in Helsinki, where the humble classic is taken to another level.

Finland has around 168,000 lakes and a coastline that appears to have been designed by someone who refused to draw a straight line. Inevitably, there are plenty more fish to eat.

Kuha, zander or pike-perch, is one of the finest. Its white flesh is delicate but firm and works beautifully fried in butter. 

Siika, whitefish, has become something of a restaurant favourite – and with good reason. Delicate and elegant, it may be Finland’s finest fish when simply pan-fried until the skin is crisp and served with a classic beurre blanc. 

And then there’s hauki, pike: one of Finland’s most characterful fish and a creature important enough to appear in the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, where a giant pike meets a decidedly unfortunate end. 

Pike suffers from two problems on the plate: an unfair reputation for tasting muddy and a very fair reputation for containing an infuriating number of bones. For that reason, chefs often mince the flesh and turn it into patties or a Wallenberg-style preparation. Fresh, properly handled pike is excellent.

Time Out tip: Look out for kuha Mannerheimin tapaan – zander ‘Mannerheim-style’, named after Finland’s famous marshal. The classic version is breaded and fried in plenty of butter, then served with horseradish butter, a creamy mushroom sauce and boiled potatoes. It’s old-school Finnish restaurant food at its richest.

If someone points a camera at a group of Finns, don’t be surprised if they say muikku instead of ‘cheese’. It does the same job: everyone smiles.

The word itself means vendace, a small freshwater fish particularly associated with the great lakes of eastern Finland – and one of the most distinctive things you can eat here.

Larger muikku are lightly coated in rye flour and fried in butter until crisp, then usually served with mashed potatoes. 

If you see neulamuikku, order those as well. These ‘needle vendace’ are tiny young fish only a few centimetres long. They’re so small and soft they don’t need gutting: they’re rolled in rye flour, fried in butter and eaten whole, heads, tails and all. Perfect finger food – preferably eaten outdoors from a paper tray.

Time Out tip: Kuopio is the spiritual capital of muikku, and the city’s Sampo restaurant is famous for it, although you’ll find excellent fried vendace at market stalls around Finland too.

Few fish have done more to feed northern Europe than herring. Cheap, plentiful and easy to preserve with salt, it was the kind of food that could survive long winters, travel inland from the coast and keep people fed long before refrigeration entered the picture.

In Finland, its smaller Baltic relative, silakka, became particularly important. For centuries, coastal communities depended heavily on small fish, and archaeological research from northern Finland suggests that fish may once have provided the majority of people’s dietary protein. Even today, silakka remains the backbone of Finland’s commercial sea fishing.

Silakka – Baltic herring – is smaller, leaner and slower-growing than Atlantic herring, having adapted to the Baltic Sea’s brackish water. In Finnish cooking, it is commonly fried whole or turned into silakkapihvit: butter-fried fillets pressed together like little fish patties.

Its bigger relative, silli – Atlantic herring – is more often eaten preserved. You’ll find it salted, pickled, marinated and flavoured in countless ways, from mustard and onion to dill and creamy sauces. That ability to preserve herring is a big part of why it became such an important northern food in the first place. Today it remains a fixture of festive tables, summer lunches and, above all, plates of new potatoes with butter and dill.

Time Out tip: For one of Helsinki’s most famous plates of silakka, head to Sea Horse, which has been serving traditional Finnish food since 1933. The restaurant’s fried Baltic herring became legendary after jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie reportedly enjoyed it so much that he finished not only his own portion but his companions’ too – then went to the kitchen to fetch more.

Yes. But not that often that the restaurants’ menus would suggest. 

Reindeer roam semi-freely across the fells and forests of northern Finland under a managed herding system, and reindeer husbandry remains an important part of life in Lapland. Visiting a reindeer farm is one of the best ways to understand the tradition beyond simply meeting the animal on a dinner plate.

In Lapland, reindeer is normal local food. In southern Finland, it is more of a delicacy – not least because it costs considerably more than conventionally farmed meat.

The easiest introduction is poronkäristys, thin slices of sautéed reindeer traditionally served with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. It’s hearty, widely available and relatively affordable because it doesn’t require the most expensive cuts. Smoked reindeer soup is another accessible option.

But reindeer really comes into its own as steak. The meat is lean, dark, gamey and surprisingly refined.

Time Out tip: Once you’ve eaten the reindeer, try what the reindeer eats. At Restaurant Aanaar in Inari, which specialises in northern ingredients, you may find lichen worked into dishes alongside other flavours from Lapland. It’s a neat way to taste the landscape from both sides of the food chain.

Finland also has large populations of moose and deer, but finding them in restaurants can be surprisingly difficult.

There’s a simple reason: they are wild animals, hunted rather than farmed, and hunters tend to have the irritating habit of keeping the good stuff for themselves.

When you do find Finnish moose on a restaurant menu, it’s worth ordering. Compared with reindeer, it tends to be deeper and more robust in flavour. 

Time Out tip: One reliable place to find moose and deer on the menu is Helsinki gastropub The Tart.

Finnish has a lovely old saying: oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka – roughly, ‘your own land is a strawberry, foreign lands are blueberries’.

Exactly why the blueberry got such a bad deal is a question for another day.

Strawberries are one of the great Finnish summer treats. Wild strawberries grow in forests and meadows and are tiny but intensely sweet; their cultivated cousins appear in enormous quantities at markets and roadside stalls during summer.

But if Finland were choosing a national berry today, the bilberry – commonly called blueberry in everyday English – might have the stronger claim. In late summer, the forests are full of them, and they also turn up in juices, pies, and desserts.

And then there is lakka, cloudberry, the aristocrat of Finnish berries. Amber-coloured and intensely aromatic, it grows in boggy northern landscapes and is much harder work to gather. That scarcity is reflected in the price. Try it as jam with leipäjuusto, Finnish squeaky cheese, and you’ll understand why people go wading into mosquito-filled marshes looking for it.

Time Out tip: Thanks to Finland’s everyman’s rights, anyone can generally head into the woods and pick wild berries for themselves. Blueberries are best eaten the obvious way: straight from the bush, standing in a Finnish forest with increasingly purple fingers.

Come late summer and autumn, Finland’s forests turn into one enormous free delicatessen.

Chanterelles are among the most prized finds and appear regularly on seasonal restaurant menus, often simply fried in butter or turned into rich sauces. Funnel chanterelles arrive later in autumn, while porcini – herkkutatti in Finnish – are another favourite.

But Finnish mushroom culture goes deeper than the glamorous species. Milk caps have traditionally been salted and preserved for winter, while assorted forest mushrooms end up in soups, sauces, pies and creamy mushroom salads.

The best Finnish mushroom dishes tend not to mess around too much. When something was growing under a spruce tree that morning, butter, cream and salt are often all the technology required.

Time Out tip: If you see kantarellikastike on a summer menu, order it. This creamy chanterelle sauce, usually served with new potatoes, is one of the simplest and best ways to taste the Finnish forest on a plate.

Porridge may not sound like something worth travelling for, but spend a few mornings in Finland and you may change your mind. The everyday version is usually made with oats, although rye, barley and other grains also have their place, and it is served with anything from butter and milk to berries, jam or fruit. And somewhere along the way, Finnish hotels appear to have turned breakfast porridge into a quiet competition. The best places slow-cook it until it becomes exceptionally soft and creamy, sometimes leaving it to simmer for hours. At a good hotel breakfast, the porridge is considerably more interesting than the obligatory scrambled eggs.

Time Out tip: The most beloved Finnish porridge is riisipuuro, creamy rice porridge traditionally eaten at Christmas, usually with cinnamon and sugar. One of the best places to try it is Helsinki’s Tuomaan Markkinat Christmas market, where stalls tend to take the classic in increasingly inventive directions with all sorts of toppings and seasonal twists.

There are more exciting ingredients in Finland. There may not be a more important one.

Potatoes arrive boiled alongside fish, disappear beneath meat in stews, are fried until crisp, mashed with indecent quantities of butter and cream, and turned into the creamy potato salad that appears at parties and, especially, on picnics during vappu, Finland’s gloriously enthusiastic May Day celebrations.

But then June arrives and the humble potato undergoes a transformation.

The first Finnish new potatoes of summer, uudet perunat, are tiny, thin-skinned and intensely flavoured. Finns await their arrival with an enthusiasm normally reserved for major sporting victories. Boil them with plenty of dill, add butter and eat them with pickled herring and you have one of the simplest – and best – meals in the country.

Time Out tip: Try pyttipannu, Finland’s almost-official hangover food: a hearty fry-up of diced potatoes, onions and meat, usually topped with a fried egg. In Tampere, generations of musicians have nursed the morning after over a plate of hash at Tillikka. And, according to local wisdom, exactly one beer should accompany it. No more. No less.