Kjötsúpa is Iceland's Sunday lamb soup, chunks of mutton simmered with root vegetables into a clear, warming broth against the long winter. Few ingredients, slow time — it is the taste of the Icelandic cold-weather table.
Spoon up kjötsúpa — clear amber broth with chunks of fall-apart lamb, potato and rutabaga softened, pearl barley adding chew. Bite: lamb's herb-fed Icelandic flavor (sheep have grazed wild thyme for 1100 years), broth's clean savory depth, root vegetables sweet from slow cooking, barley providing earthy grain body. Pure, restorative, deeply Icelandic. With rye bread to soak the broth, this is the Reykjavik winter dinner.
Browning lamb builds Maillard depth. Long simmering tenderizes meat and extracts collagen. Adding vegetables late preserves their texture.
Variations
With added cabbage. With more barley. With dumplings. Without barley. With added swede. Vegetarian (with mushroom).
On the Palate
Where Kjötsúpa sits in the Icelandic flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 6
How it's made
7 steps · 25 min active + 1 hour 35 min waiting
- 110 min
Cut 1 kg lamb shoulder into 4-cm chunks; brown in 2 tbsp oil 8 min.
Watch outBrown the lamb in an uncrowded pan until deeply colored on several sides — that crust is where the soup's savory depth comes from.
- 26 min
Add 2 chopped onions; cook 5 min.
- 34 min
Add 2.5 L water, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp pepper, 1 sprig thyme, 100 g pearl barley.
- 477 min
Simmer 75 min until lamb is tender.
Watch outSimmer low and long until the lamb is fork-tender and the barley has plumped; skim any grey scum off the top for a clean broth.
- 527 min
Add 400 g cubed potato, 300 g cubed rutabaga, 200 g sliced carrot, 1 sliced leek; simmer 25 min until vegetables are tender.
Watch outAdd the vegetables only in the last 25 minutes so they cook through but keep their shape instead of dissolving into the broth.
- 61 min
Stir in 2 tbsp chopped parsley.
- 71 min
Serve hot in deep bowls with dark rye bread and butter.
