Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.08.2013, Page 36

36The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 12 — 2013
Appropriately enough, we are meet-
ing at the new Óðinsgata location
of the organic, fresh-from-the-farm
specialty store Frú Lauga. Svavar
makes a quick half circle to the trunk
of his car and opens it up to reveal
two crates full of his latest success:
Bulsur vegan sausages. Not only
does he shop here, but they are one
of the four local shops that sell the
meat-free links, and today they’re
getting a delivery.
Meatless pursuit
Of course, up until recently, most
people knew Svavar for producing
entirely different creations. Namely
music, as a member of the band
Skakkamanage and as front man
for weirdo-pop darlings Prins Póló,
various graphic design ventures plus
having been co-proprietor of the
dearly departed Havarí book and de-
sign shop. Then suddenly, he turned
his attention to sausages. “I went
vegetarian last year and I quickly
got a craving for sausages,” Svavar
tells me, while helping to unload one
of his crates of shrink-wrapped non-
meat. “The problem is I hate soy, so I
couldn’t really have any of the meat-
less sausages available. So I decided
to make my own.”
Thus he launched into almost a
year of trial and failure in recipe mak-
ing, he tells me, ambling around the
shop eyeing the day’s crop and ex-
changing pleasantries with another
person delivering their wares. “I
tried many different things to get the
consistency and flavour right, and it
really took a lot of time,” he says, but
doesn’t recall a test batch so terrible
he had to spit and rinse.
The result? A Coeliac sufferer’s
dream sausage: a mix of barley,
beans, almonds, chia and flax seeds,
with no traces of potato, soya, glu-
ten or egg. He walks over to a shelf
and grabs a bag of barley from Móðir
Jörð, an organic farm in Vallanes.
“This is what I use to make Bulsur,”
Svavar states with determination. “I
love this stuff. This farm is so great.”
Svavar seems particularly at
home in this extremely small shop,
perhaps due to the fact that it was
one of three locations that sold his
first batch of sausages. “I thought I
had delivered enough to last a week
or two,” he says, “but they sold out
in two hours. Between ten in the
morning and noon, all three stores
were sold out.” His eyes are wide in
joyful bewilderment. It’s as though
the reality of it has still not sunk in,
even though his batches have pro-
gressively increased from 40kg to
600kg in one month in order to meet
the demand.
You can’t digitise food
He and his wife, Berglind Häsler also
of Skakkamanage and Prins Póló,
now spend four or five days a week
making Bulsur at the Esja food pro-
cessing facility, renting the time,
equipment, technical and culinary
support. I point out that the techni-
cal process of making the sausages
is not so different from recording a
studio album. “That’s kind of true!”
Svavar laughs. “There’s a similarity
to it, but what’s really different is
how people consume the product.
With a CD, maybe a few people buy it
but they have it for a long time. With
sausages, more people buy it but
they... recycle it a lot quicker.”
Svavar walks past the barley and
picks up a box of Saltverk Reykjanes’s
flaky sea salt, which is handcrafted
in the Westfjords using a 200-year
old artisanal method. Again, this is
another product he swears by for
making Bulsur. “This salt is really
the best, it has such a good flavour,”
he says passionately. Indeed, these
pudgy, auburn-coloured fry-em-ups
have really consumed all of his cre-
ativity.
“I spent the past two years work-
ing in a studio, sitting down, and I
really felt the urge to do work that
involved standing and using my
hands,” Svavar explains how he redi-
rected himself towards honing a new
craft. “One thing that sparked this
was sitting in my studio looking at a
stack of unsold Skakkamanage CDs
and thinking, come on!”
Creation is its own reward
He says that this new venture has so
completely taken him over that he
has put graphic design entirely on ice
(except for designing Bulsur labels),
and doesn’t even really have the de-
sire to make music (sorry, fans!). He
seems slightly bashful to admit that
he had to force himself to take a cou-
ple of weeks off at the end of sum-
mer to finish up the next Prins Póló
record, scheduled for a fall release.
But altogether, he doesn’t see this
change as a drawback. “It doesn’t
make a difference if I’m making an al-
bum or a poster or sausages, it’s just
about creating,” he says. “I’m the
same person, and the urge to create
comes from the same place. It’s just
a different outcome.” He is also re-
ceiving so much feedback about his
product—“It’s nice to hear the good,
but it’s important to hear the bad”—
that he’s even getting the urge to im-
plement a culinary experimentation
kitchen in his own home.
And all this because he went veg-
etarian? Well, yes. “Changes in life
are good for you because they help
you come up with new ideas. Move
houses, quit your job, quit smoking,
quit drinking, quit eating meat,” Sva-
var says. “When you quit something,
you start something new. If you’ve
been doing something for a long
time, get rid of it and you will find
new things in life.”
Nodding happily, he looks over to
his left and points to a bag of spelt
buns. “I just discovered these recent-
ly. They go really well with Bulsur.”
Date
The Vegan Sausage King Of Iceland
by Rebecca Louder
Svavar Pétur Eysteinsson
A large glob of water keeps dripping out
of someone’s rain-gutter onto my head
as I huddle in a doorway, waiting for my
mid-morning date, Svavar Pétur Eysteins-
son. Moments later, a large burgundy jeep
swoops into the parking spot ahead of me
and out pops the man of the hour, smiling
and chipper as a farmer about to pick the
morning crop.
Frú Lauga is located at Óðinsgata 1 and Laugalækur 6. For information
and opening hours go to www.frulauga.is.
“With a CD,
maybe a few
people buy it but
they have it for a
long time. With
sausages, more
people buy it but
they... recycle it
a lot quicker.”
Magnús Andersen