Culinary World Tour: Greenland (Suaasat)

It's been quite awhile since our last culinary world tour stop, but now it's time to get traveling again as we hit Greenland! If you missed our last world tour meals, we've previously made posole from Mexico and poutine from Canada.

Our Greenland meal is a traditional soup called suaasat, which is generally made with seal or wild game like reindeer. While we couldn't readily get our hands on seal (and Megan hates seafood anyway - which is going to be something to overcome when we hit a few other countries...), we were able to acquire some deer thanks to our hunting family members. Suaasat is actually a fairly simple meal with only a few basic ingredients, pictured below. We used barley, deer chops, baby carrots, onion, rosemary, sage, and the standard seasonings like garlic powder and pepper.

The deer is cut into smaller chunks for a size about what you'd want for a stew or thick soup. We've never really cooked with wild game before, so we weren't expecting the differences in smell and texture. The deer was a beautiful red color, but also much softer and less firm than beef or pork.

First the deer is cooked in a large pot with a small amount of oil. While we were prepared for the game taste, we didn't expect the game smell - which was quite pungent and overpowering.

Here the dish is starting to come together and look more like a soup or stew as we add in the veggies and lots of crushed garlic.

After a few minutes of cooking and throwing in all the seasonings, the less-than-pleasing aroma became much more what we were used to and far more pleasant.

After the meat is browned and the veggies are softened we poured in several cups of water to get the soup going in earnest.

Although there was a large amount of seasonings used, we noticed it was still a bit bland as the cooking progressed, so we threw in some beef bouillon as well.

Here the barley is going into the soup, which will plump up as the cooking progresses and offer a nice firm texture.

The end result was a very attractive looking soup that's almost thick enough to be called a stew instead. Unfortunately we weren't super in love with the flavor of the deer or the combination of flavors here, which was disappointing, as this has been the first meal from another culture we've tried that we didn't love. This is likely just a matter of personal preference though, and we'd recommend others try it, as Megan's brothers loved it and had several bowls each.  Some recipes we've seen called for putting in cherries, which might add an interesting new flavor to a simplistic dish.

Since this one wasn't as pleasing to the palette as we expected we were left with a huge pot of leftovers, which weren't going to get wasted no matter how much we didn't care for the dish. To make sure we didn't end up throwing away all that food we decided to bake the remaining soup into a casserole.

First the soup goes into the bottom of a casserole dish, then we whipped up some mashed potatoes.

The finished mashed potatoes are layered on top of the soup as a soft "crust" of sorts, and then everything is baked for about 40 minutes. If you want something more firm, putting biscuit batter or day old biscuits on the top or bottom would be a great addition.

Here's the leftover casserole with a side salad, topped our own homemade smoky jalapeno ranch dressing. We'll be covering how to make that amazing dressing in a new blog coming soon!

While the Greenland stop of our "world tour" wasn't what we'd hoped, we're still glad we tried something new and went outside our comfort zones. One little speed bump won't be slowing the tour down, however, as next up we're headed to Iceland: gateway to Europe and home to soul shatteringly awesome metal band Solstafir!  See you again soon!