Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.08.2013, Page 36

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

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