BARK BREAD & TAR CANDY - Reviewing Interesting Foods in Finland 

What would you put on your bark bread?

"Most people would prefer this to not have wood in it." Yeah.

Finland has wisdom of old: "If sauna, alcohol or tar don't help, it is deadly."

I feel like that bark bread just needs the right dip to be perfect.

I would really have enjoyed it if you had read the ingredients of each of these products. It helps the listener better evaluate quality and understand some ethnic ingredients for foods.

Why would you dislike this masterpiece

What else will Finland surprise us with? Chew-able rocks?

Yeah, we northern countries have to take what we can get at times 🤣 - tree bark and tar, yum!!!

Tar is wood sap extracted from roots saturated with sap, the way you extract it is by heating the roots up and then naturally the sap will come out- or it's mechanically squeezed while the roots are hot. The "smoky" and "burnt" taste comes from that process, I don't like the taste either but it's one of those "hard times" traditional foods- same with the bark bread.

love all the history you explain behind the foods you review : )

Knäckebröd (crispbread) is still very popular i Nordic countries. I don't know if it's also popular in other countries. Most are without any bark added though. Not very nice on it's own, but goes very well with creamy toppings. Like cheese & ham, hummus, räksallad (don't know the English word, shrimp mixed with crème fraiche and herbs), eggs etc. Nice crunch and something creamy so it doesn't become to dry. Honestly never tried tar candy. But think I will stay away from it xD

I actually really like the flavor of tar. My dad knew a guy who produced tar by himself, I got to taste it pure. Super intense. My favorite tar flavored thing is tar mustard, it is really good. I can't eat fish but my friend says that vendace in tar marinade is the best thing ever. Also tar is used in sauna scents. You put a few drops of it in the water you throw on sauna stove.

Finnish curiosity shop having a slow day. Jared enters said shop. The shop: " ladies and gentlemen we got him."

Not really wood dust or bark. The cambium layer of many trees is edible. It has been used as food likely before wheat ever existed.

Europe: Introduces the basis for the original government oversight food inspection system to make sure bakers don't bulk up bread with filler like saw dust *16th century Finnish* : "You guys don't put saw dust in your bread?"

My grandmother eat bark bread as a child here in Sweden during the war, I think. You usually put butter on it though with cheese or ham if you had it.

I come from a long line of roofers and was pretty excited to see tar on the menu. Tar used to be the common chew substitute on the job / or bubble gum for kids. VERY popular in the 20's-30's. It's pretty much always been considered safe when the tar was pure. Tar nowadays (industrial use since the 70s - 80's) is not actually *tar* though - it's just black mystery cancer goo for the same usage.

Bark bread reminds me of that one william osman video where he puts increasing amounts of sawdust in rice krispies treats to see what amount people notice it at

I can pretty much garantee that everyone watching this in the US has eaten something with sawdust as a filler. It's particularly common among low calorie breads and granola bars, but it finds its way into a bunch of places. The magical words that mean "sawdust" without saying it on the package are "cellulose powder." It could technically mean other things, but it doesn't. It's just bleached sawdust. Removes the wood flavor.

I love tar flavored candies, those Leijonas are really good!

Butter! You need butter for the bark bread! 🙂

translations for products and brands in this video Skogs Knäcke: (Swedish) Forests crispbread (my swedish isn't perfect) Leijona: Lion Terva Lakritsi: Tar Liqourice

back in the days early 90's when I was in junior high school in Kokkola Finland... there was one Swedish teacher who hated the smell of Terva Leijona... that was the reason why students in her classes ate only Terva Leijona candy or similar tar candy 😅 Terva Leijona tastes amazing, it's one of my favorite candies 👌😋

You shoud try the berry called mesimarja/arctic raspberry.

It would be cool to see you do a tree foraging video and eat the cambium, drink the needle tea, and even sap of some trees! Maybe juniper berries & pine nuts? Could be interesting!

"How much sawdust can you put in bread before people notice?"

Also that bread was vital well into the 1800s in Sweden and Finland. When there were bouts of shortages and periods of starvation people would make this and other not so tasty foods to survive. And there would be a high amount of bark in the bread.

The Tervaleijona you ate does not contain ammonium chloride, the cough-drop taste comes probably from the tar flavour mixed with liquorice extract. There is a 'salmiakki' aka ammonium chloride version of the Tervaleijona, but you ate the liquorice ('lakritsi') variation. If you ever come across 'Salmiakkipulveri' or 'Salmiakkijauhe' in finnish shops, I would recommend giving it a try. While both salmiakki and cough drops do contain ammonium chloride, salmiakki is not supposed to taste like cough drops but rather an intense mix of sweet and salty and the salmiakki powders are imo the best way to taste that difference.

Watching this made me crave restaurant Harald's bark- and tar ice cream, and want to hunt down spruce ice cream made by Suomen jäätelö. All of them are so delicious.

I've always wanted to try bark bread. My grandmother told me they had to make it during the war and she told me it tasted like shit, they probably had to use a lot of bark. Her parents even had to trick her to eat her own dog, poor woman :(

That bread is from Sweden. 'Skogs Knäcke med bark och enbär från härjedalen' literally 'Forest crispbread with bark and juniper berries from härjedalen' Härjedalen is a province in Sweden. And I love Leijona!

Are you aware of the history of this foods? I am not sure about the candy (even if it would make sense) but about the barkbread. In germany streching the flour with wood/bark dust is a common thing and refered to as hunger-bread throughout the ages. Depending on how tough the times are up to 30% of wood can be used, if you use more the yeast would stop working. There are daily life proverbs about stretching flour with wood, so it is common knowledge even in our great times today wothout starvation. Is was widely consumed during both world wars, in 1816-17, the year without summer, and locally through all the middleages and most probably before in hard winters to stretch the flour reserves until spring to survive. In this context "yeah, most people would prefere the bread without wood inside" is a little rude to say... People didn't choose to stretch the bread, but to make their children survive the winter and as you say it is an aquired taste so this way it might got into finnish culture i guess-finnish people please correct me, it is just the way hunger-bread is used in germany. Anyway, still love your videos! Thanks for the good content and please forgive the critique it is meant constructive not destructive. For strange foods also the history/context behind should be talked about, it makes things more interesting, isn't it?

Just FYI he bark bread uses the cambium/phloem layers of tree bark (they transport nutrients basically) and is essentially the only part of the tree that isn't just straight up indigestible cellulose. Even then it was thought of as just a filler. PS: tar syrup in coffee is surprisingly good

To be fair, all knäckebröd tastes a little like wood. The more, the better, I say! Oh, btw: that was swedish bark bread.

Bark bread is called "pettuleipä" where my parents grew up in Finland. My grandmom claimed she had to eat is as a child, but I'm not sure times really were that bad... For my own part, I'd rather eat proper crispbread. 😁

New child behaviour management strategy unlocked: 'Be good or you'll be eating barkbread with tar jam for dinner!'.

I love those tar candies. 😊 But I can understand that it's an acquired taste. The candies have salmiakki in them in addition to the tar, which is why you tasted the ammonium chloride. Of course I - like many Finns - love salmiakki as well. I think a part of what makes the taste of those tar candies good to many Finns is that the smell of tar is often associated with sauna - there's even shampoo with tar-fragrance. My grandmother used to have that tar shampoo in the washing room of her sauna (she actually had two saunas - one a very old wood fire warmed sauna, and one smaller electric sauna). So the smell is very familiar and associated with good memories, with me, and I bet many other Finns. And, as you know, smell is a big part of taste.

I'd like to try the tar, I love that french hard non-sweet liquorish layers, and I like toast.

Both of these are common in Sweden, and I presume, in the rest of the Nordics. I am from the far-north of Sweden and I have, however, not seen them since moving south.

I like the smoky taste of toast charred on the grill, so I might like the tar candy... maybe...? Hmm...

Pettu was not actually made from "saw dust" but from the layer between the bark and the wood called "nila" in Finnish, which is the part of wood that circulates nutrients from the leaves to the roots.

They used to make flour from a thin layer of starchy bark beneath the outer layer of bark. I think this is what it is based on.

Hi Jared. The bread is like a special kind of the swedish Knäckebrot/crispbread, that we have here in Germany. Btw, do you know the peruvian Curuba fruit, related to the passion fruit? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_passionfruit

I feel like every country has their own "Ole Timey" candy that makes you feel sad for your great-grandparents/ granadparents. (some of it's actually good I would say; but some of it tempts you question the truth of it's edibility)

It's tar flavouring. For the tar part, it's doubtful it's made from brute petroleum tar. I could be wrong, though.

Finnish food seems so... Intense. Rough & harsh. Black licorice, Salmiakki, bark bread, tar candy, like damn.

When my children finish darning their rags and transcribing the Bible for the evening I reward them with a piece of bark bread and tar candy.

Their bread is worse than their bark. Do they have chicken that tastes like wood?

Damn you always find a lot of interesting stuff and it's really interesting to see it

I can definitely see the Leijona candy be something you need to have a certain background to enjoy. Personally, being from northern Sweden, being outside in the woods, sitting around a campfire is something that's been a huge part of growing up for me. The candy really brings some of that feeling of the wilderness straight into your mouth, along with liking licorice(which it does contain) like many people up here, it's something I really enjoy personally, even though it is a very special kind of taste.

I imagine the tar candy tasting almost like a hockey puck

I would love to taste that bread. I love the smell of boiling tar.

A Finnish friend of mine send me those tar candies and I like them! To me, the flavour is very reminiscent of fragrant log fires, and transports me to medieval open-air museums and the woodsy (and slightly musty) smell of traditional buildings and fires in open hearths. It is definitely a unique flavour, not really a sweet in the traditional sense.

As a Finn I love those tar candies. I can't explain why, the taste is just really good to me.

YEAH IM 3/4 FINNISH IM DOWN FOR ALL THAT STUFF

“It has a taste......” I thought you were just gonna stop there with the tar candies 😂

Oh man. RU-vid is pretty stupid for recommending your channel...so fricking late. I'm a sub since a week or so and I love your work so much. Best channel ever! I get a lot of inspiration, knowledge and enjoyment from your videos! And I'm trying to watch as much of them as I can and there are tons of quality stuff. Wish I discovered you earlier. Oh well, better late than never. Wish you all the best and thank you for your awesomeness. 🤩❤🧡💛

Bark bread seems like a good way to recycle pencil shavings

While I do not like tar candy, I do LOVE tar ice cream. It is like butterscotch ice cream but it has a smoky and earthy after taste to it. Kinda like maple syrup but stronger and less sweet. If you're still in finland or will visit again, I would suggest visiting Viking Restaurant Harald. They have a few locations across Finland. Very good food made out of somewhat unusual ingredients, such as berries, small and big game, mushrooms, and fish.

It is amazing how well you have found the most Finnish things there are. I've never had or tasted Pettuleipä (bark bread) but that is totally part of the Finnish national legend that is tought ti us in schools. But leijonapastillit are definitely something I crave at times :) There are not that many Finns commenting on your videos, but I've followed your journey couple of years now and was super confused/happy that you ended up in Finland on your travels :D

I love terva leijona!

We have/had some years ago wood jam, bonbons and alfajores (big sandwich cookies) in Argentina. I could never find them :-(. They were made with the wood of a certain tree species (that was originally consumed by indigenous peoples) boiled for three days.

Next up: ROCKS!

The ladder in the background is so interesting and I wanna know where it leads!

Thing is we (finn's) don't have tar in many form's as salmiakki (salted liqurice).

........When I was a little kid of about 7 or so, 75 years ago, I remember some older kids chewing tar......Not tar candy or any commercial product....just real tar...........I thought it was odd and I didn't try it.

3:44 He keeps licking his lips, and still missing that little speck in the corner! 3:58 FINALLY! I kept licking my lips like Heath Ledger's Joker in sympathy throughout this whole ordeal!

That tar candy looks ... awful. Blech. :(

“It has a flavor of ammonia chloride” ... 😳 ... WTF Oh boy, that’s a flavor. 🤣🤣🤣

Try tar icecream if you ever get to visit Finland again. It is so good with cloudberry jam.

Tervalakritsi means tar liqourice, Leijona also has pure tar candies. And you can buy tar menthol candies from apotecharies and tar lollipops from different places like Arktos at Rovaniemi. Btw, those candies you rasted where one me favourite as wee kid!

Sounds a lot like the Knäckebrot, which is common here in Germany, except the wood part. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispbread

Terva = tar. Lakritsi = liquorice. Terva leijona = tar lion. Barkbread is just a "fun thing" nowadays. That bread is made in Sweden btw.

It is not wood dust, it is the inner bark. Inner bark of some trees are considered a survival food.

Huh... I am curious about the tar-candy. Isn't tar basically petroleum?

Never had those tar candies, But I have tasted pure tar freshly made. I would ABSOLUTELY NOT recommend that haha! But it was similar to what you're describing, only I'm guessing about 100 times more intense. Like soap + charcoal.

Any cracker bread can be rehydrated with a damp towel wrapped around it, or steam. They can also be crumbled into soups.

That bark bread you bought is apparently from the Härjedalen province in Sweden. I looked it up, and "Skogsknäcke" is produced in a small place called Lillhärdal.

Bark bread was an emergency food during the great famine of 1600's with 50% or even 100% bark instead of rye. Everyone hated it. There's even an ancient Finnish saying: "Moni kakku päältä kaunis, vaan on silkkoa sisältä", A bread might look beautiful but might be made of sourmilk and bark", basically "don't judge a book by the cover". At least it's not "olkileipä", straw bread. It's considered much worse than bark bread, sorrel bread or moss bread. Straw bread couldn't be ground to a fine flour, so the tiny needle-like fragments would pierce through your intestines and eventually cause dysentery and even death. I'm no Gordon Ramsay, but I prefer food that doesn't slowly kill me.

4% bark is not really much bark content. I would guess that a cinnamon roll has almost that high a bark content (cinnamon is, of course, powdered bark).

They made bark bread here in Norway 🇳🇴 during WW2, since they didn’t have enough flour. So they used bark to stretch the flour. But when they no longer had to eat it, they stopped making it! ☺️

how he described the tar candy makes it sound very disgusting lol... wouldn't try

pls pls pls try another fruit review about a rare coconut mutation called "macapuno" its so ultra rare almost as rare as coco de mer... ❗️❗️❗️❗️for the catch dont buy the groceries canned version, but hunt down the naturally accuring coconut mutant... this occurs in the wild at 0.15% .... thanks weird fruit hunter.... im hopeful💪👍🏻🙏

Of course, there's also tar-flavoured soda. A certain British RU-vidr with a penchant to sample massively out-of-date foodstuff has tried it on their "extra" channel. On the topic of regional peculiarities, I have no idea if you're into eating/baking cinnamon rolls or similar buns, but the dough here (Nordic countries) is (usually?) flavoured with cardamom. If you visited a cafe on your trip, you may have noticed it.

Safe to say that the problem was mostly the ammonium chloride... It reallyis an acquired taste.

Chinese americans put pieces of paper inside cookies. They call them 'Fortunes'. More than 4% cellulose.

I've always liked the tar flavored candies. One thing I've also liked was this sauce/dressing with tar and mustard flavor I've seen in some supermarkets. I've not seen it in years, though. :(

It's called crispbread in English. Very common in Scandinavia. But not normally with wood in it. But it's saw dust you are eating, but the inner bark, and it is actually eatable

Sometime around 1976 a bread came out in the U.S. that was marketed as a diet bread. I don't recall it's name, unfortunately. I used to buy it, and it was delicious. But the FDA didn't like the fact that one of it's ingredients was cellulose. The news of the day kept saying it had "sawdust" in it. Since cellulose comes from many plant sources, it is unclear whether it came from trees or plants. The FDA ordered it off the market as not being fit for human consumption. I was very disappointed.

There is no tar in Leijona. Tar is slightly carcinogenic, so EU won't allow any significant amounts in food. But it do contains liquorice, which is more carcinogenic than tar. Instead of tar, it contains liquid smoke, the same stuff used in most bacon, and other "smoked" foodstuff, because it's to expensive and time consuming to smoke food in a smoker. Liquid smoke also make it easier not accidentally get more carcinogenic, or other hazardous stuff, than regulations allow, into the food product, than with traditional smoking. Tar kills some pathogens, so it is used in traditional Scandinavian medicine. Leijona was originally a medically very effective coughing drop. There is also tar in some traditional skin cream and shampoo (used when you get skin problems, not everyday). But now you have to go to a veterinarian to buy that stuff. Contextually , the EU ban on tar make little sense. Since smoke from when you grill meat, or many other foods (and it drips into the heat source), is much more carcinogenic than being exposed to cigarette smoke or small amounts of tar. For those regulations to make sense, open grills, without proper smoke collection and filtration, should be banned, as should most restaurant fryers for chips/french fries, and also most candles. But perhaps that would be to unpopular, better to prohibit hazards that almost nobody is exposed to regularly and in insignificant amounts.

This just proves that anyone would eat anything that’s been packaged

turns out wood tar is used in the candy... but wood tar is pitch, and creosote... HIGHLY toxic...

YT recommendations caused me to fall backwards into your videos, and I am now a man obsessed. Thank you for your service, Weird Fruit Video Guy.

Those Leijona(lion) candies are good. 😁 But really ppl buy it if ur throat is ill or try to cover cicarette smoke. 😂 Same as salmiakki, terva candies are old part of finnish medicine history.

It says 'lakritsi' on each bag of liquorice on that isle and you couldn't figure out terva lakritsi might mean tar liquorice?

The bark bread says it's from Sweden! I'm sure similar bread is made in Finland, though.

Have you had any Salmiakki? You wouldn't think black liquorice and salt would go together as well as they do.

I like those tar candies - terva leijonat. Did you know there's also tar shampoo, but it's not really tar, only smells like it.

I want to clarify in saying that the under-bark of a tree is not actually wood, but cambium, which people have survived off of for centuries, particularly certain Native American tribes. I’ve heard a few ways to make it more palatable such as frying it in animal fat, but at the end of the day yeah it’s still only especially useful if you’re starving in the woods. I would’ve never thought to use it in bread. Great video!

Terva Leijonas are amazing! Gotta go buy some right now... :D