Österlenkryddor and Olof Viktors

On our final day in Skane, we left Malmo and took a train to the town of Ystad, famous for being home to the fictional detective Kurt Wallander. You’ll all be glad to hear that Ystad looks like quite a pretty peaceful town whose police-people are more likely to be posing with tourists than dealing with terrible murders!

At Ystad station, we met Karin again and she drove us out to Österlenkryddor, a herb farm about a 10 minute drive outside Ystad. It’s a family business run by Eva and Olle Olsson and they run the largest herb farm in Sweden.

Eva had set out fika for us that morning, with each homemade component featuring their herbs. The rye crispbreads had been baked with stinging nettle. Soft cheese had been mixed with lovage, a savoury herb high in glutamates (Eva suggested boiling potatoes with lovage). Their delicious smoked sausage had a mixture of rosemary and savory in its filling.

It wasn’t all savoury though – Eva had baked oat biscuits with sage and chocolate biscuits with mint too. And with it all was a fantastic infusion of lemon balm, mint and sage – I made sure to buy a bag of this from their shop before I left and am enjoying it now as I type this post!

Lots of herbs you know and probably some you don’t are grown here. Eva told us of their trouble growing rosemary (usually a perennial here but it’s had to be an annual there in Sweden) and their recent midnight harvest party for wordwood.

While we didn’t have time to tour their herb fields, we could get a glimpse of them from their herb garden (first photo), where we got a short explanation of some of their more exciting herbs (yes, they had a poisonous plants section…).

Their shop sells all their dried herbs, herb mixtures and herb products and on weekends, you can fika here at their cafe too. It’s a very calming and relaxing place and their products are delicious. Tours of their herb fields can also be arranged and do take a look at their website for this and other events. Apart from their shop and online, you can also find their goods at the Malmo farmers market.

Our lunch destination that day was Olof Viktors and I was very much looking forward to this visit as every Swedish person to whom I had mentioned the name became very excited themselves. It was a short drive from Österlenkryddor and when we arrived, we were led to a table set for us. See that table in the back of the room? With the sofa? We sat there and we learned, thrilled, that the sofa we sat on had featured in one of the Wallander series in a scene with a grisly murder.

They had arranged for all of us to try their most famous sandwich – an open faced crayfish sandwich. This was piled very high on a very non-Swedish bread, focaccia! It was delicious and very generously portioned!

Dessert was a selection of their famous ice creams. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and yoghurt, mango and yoghurt, passionfruit sorbet and raspberry sorbet were scooped for us. They were all truly excellent but special mention must go to the ice creams made with yoghurt – it gave a bit of tang to the mango which helped prevent it from being too sweet.

We had a short tour of the bakery itself…

…and the rest of the cafe (there were more buildings than I expected!) too. The cafe really was as beautiful as everyone had told me it would be! Mårten Göthberg the managing director then kindly sent us off with some of their famous knäckebröd.

We ended with a whistle-stop car tour of Ystad (I’d love to spend more time there in the future) and then a drive back to Malmo Airport to catch our flights back to London. Thank you so much to everyone we met on this trip and thank you very much to Malmö Turism, Skåne Tourism and Visit Sweden for a lovely food-packed weekend in Skane.

As always, all my photos from this trip are in a Flickr photoset.

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