Hi, I'm Zar Larson. And today I'm gonna
be showing you some of my favorite things from Sweden
. And what makes me proud to be a Swede
. I'm gonna show you some snacks, some foods
, talk to you about places you can visit and
show you how to celebrate Midsummer. Like a true
sweet. Let's go. So, first off,
we have a classic which is basically the time where
you don't eat like the real meals, no breakfast
, lunch or dinner. It's all that you snack
on between those meals and usually it's some sort of
pastry or, you know, and the Swedish cinnamon
buns, which this is, are quite different than
the American ones because we have this p which is
these big like sugar things instead of that frosting.
I've never had an American cinnamon bun. I think
they look so scary. Ok. Ok. Mhm
. What I like is a cardamom bun. They're
very yummy. And then this is the Semla which
is very seasonal. You would only have this in
the month of February. I'm not a huge fan
of it because inside of it you see this is
all, this is all like cream and that's all
very nice in that. And a bun. So
this is kind of like um marzipan. But it's
weird because I really like Marzipan, but I don't
like this, but they're like cousins, but this
is the cousin that I don't like very much.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. You
can put this in a bowl with warm milk.
If you will eat it as a soup, you
put it in the bowl with the warm milk.
Then we, we're over to this little very exciting
thing. When I grew up, I was only
allowed to have it on Saturdays because Saturdays is the
candy day. Every Saturday. I got to pick
like 10 pieces of candy and it's like a pick
and mix and it's in every single store in Sweden
and I am a such a big liquorice fan.
So I'm so happy to see one of my absolute
favorites ever. Which is the Salt Patron. Oh
, sorry, I'm going to pick it up.
This one is just, oh, it's so good
. This one is so good. Also, this
one is amazing in this one is my favorite.
It's like raspberry and licorice. Also, this one
is really good. He ro salty. These ones
are absolutely the worst can you could ever have.
This is some old people candy but you know what
? That's the beauty of it. You can pick
and mix whatever you like this one. I haven't
seen this in so long. This is a gum
and I'm going to say that I'm actually gonna bring
this home. Thank you, come to the house
. Thank you so much. This one you could
also have, you would, you would have this
on some bread with a lot of butter, maybe
some, some of this which is the hard bread
. It's like a cream smoked fish roe. And
I would understand that you might not love this if
you didn't grow up on it. But to me
, this is just like the most amazing flavor is
, it's giving like umami to me, I am
way more of a salty savory type of person than
I am with the, the sweet stuff. Like
even the sweets, I will like enjoy a licorice
, nice, nice. A lot of people know
Swedish food from the food court at IKEA and that
is pretty accurate as you know, we have the
Swedish meatballs here, but we also have some other
things to try and let's start with that. So
on this little plate, this actually would look like
a typical Midsummer. I don't know what it is
about the Swedish holidays, maybe the same for you
guys. But we do the exact same menu on
every single holiday midsummer, Christmas Easter. Like it
does not matter what kind of holiday we have the
same menu period on this one right here. I
see we got the pickled Herring. I would have
it with some sour cream chives perhaps. Hm.
It's like being at home. This is my favorite
. I would have. It just like this to
SAL is also very easy to make at home.
Just shrimp. Some mayo dill onion. Mhm.
It's like the Swedes. We love a good pickled
something pickled fish. It doesn't sound very nice.
We don't have a lot of seasoning. So you
do let the ingredients or the fish or, you
know, whatever kind of be the star of the
show staple staple in Swedish culture. Swedish cuisine,
Swedish survival. Honestly, the star the queen,
the Swedish dish, if you will. She's simple
. She's elegant. She's classy four things. Meatball
, mashed potato, pickled cucumber, ling and berry
and with the yummy, yummy brown sauce for the
meatballs. This combination, I don't know who came
up with it. I would say a genius.
It's just like it just hits, it just hit
. Oh my God. This is like being out
for a long time. You're in the mountains,
it's windy, it's freezing and then you see it
, you see a cottage and in that cottage,
this is what's waiting for. You also part of
Swedish tradition. We just get shit faced on every
holiday and this glass is very big. But what's
nice about it is that you don't need to drink
the whole thing. It is not like a shot
. Sometimes with the people you're around, you say
, OK, let's just have half and then you
would sing a song about drinking half of it because
that is part of the fun. I'm gonna sing
a song for you guys. I'm gonna do my
dad's favorite. So, you know what? That
was really nice. That was really nice. I
don't know if it's because I'm grown now. I'm
like 26. I can handle the liquor, but
this was actually really nice. So whoever wants to
have a taste of Swedish Ala? Shout out to
an DeJean. It's midsummer time. Can't you?
See, I'm sitting here with a beautiful flower crown
, which is something that you would wear on midsummer
. My favorite holiday in Sweden, it is celebrated
in the middle of summer, usually on the very
lightest day and night of the year and we dance
around this pole which looks like this and then it's
almost like a cross and then it hangs two round
things on the pole that lays horizontally. And what
, what does that look like? That is a
penis? My ladies and gents that it's, it's
, it's what we do. We dance around the
green penis and we thank the penis for impregnating the
earth and making it green and lush and we dance
like frogs around it sometimes like Musli la Ola,
which is a little guy who cries out for his
mom. Like every other holiday, there's a lot
of alcohol involved. Midsummer is probably the holiday where
people would go the most like they will go in
for it. It's just so be like people just
look beautiful. People are off work and can just
like celebrate the fact that at least we have hopefully
two more months of warmth and sunlight. So as
you can see here, this is Sweden. This
is Norway, this is Finland, this is Denmark
. This is Scandinavia. Finland is actually not a
part of Scandinavia, but a part of the Nordic
. So I would start my journey here from Stockholm
if it's summer down south, winter up north.
So I would take my car and I would go
over all the way down to here. It's absolutely
stunning, white beaches, beautiful cliffs. When you
are down south here, you could also go to
Mal, which is the third biggest city in Sweden
. And from Mal, you can take a train
that takes about 20 minutes and you can go over
to Copenhagen and just like spend the day there have
a little beer, just chill in Denmark and then
you go right back and just enjoy your evening here
. But south of Sweden is just absolutely gorgeous.
In the summertime, wintertime, I would do the
opposite. I would go up north to go skiing
here with Norway. They have the fjords and they
have a lot of mountains and up here you're most
likely are gonna see the northern lights and there's a
lot of reindeers up here. Maybe Rudolph is from
here somewhere. The last show that I did actually
was here in and it's really, really fun to
come here. It's an amazing crowd. You could
um go on a sled with some dogs. It's
fucking cold though. But it's so stunning. And
up here they have a really funny accent, I
think just like they do down, down south here
also. Summer time. I like to go here
to Gland, which is a super old island.
A lot of rich history over here. I would
say it takes about four hours with a ferry.
Limestone city, baby, a lot of limestone over
here. And that does for beautiful places to swim
. Sweden in general. We have so many islands
. We have about 220,000 islands. If you hear
about Greece having a lot of islands, you should
come here to the Stockholm Archipelago, which is just
so so stunning. My favorite things in Stockholm would
be I like Yon a lot. It's in Stockholm
City. So Stockholm is small, right? You
can walk basically anywhere and you're always close to water
. But Yon is just so beautiful because it's in
the city, but it's like super green and not
a lot of people live there. I think like
the king's friends live there and like people like that
, but it's just very nice. And we also
have this thing is called a man, which means
that you could basically camp wherever you want. There's
no such thing as like a private owned area,
even though it is, you are still allowed to
be there, you're still allowed to exist and do
your thing. Unless it's on someone's like, backyard
. The old town. I really love, I
really, really love the Swedish archipelago and like I
said, there's hundreds and thousands of islands. So
wherever island you go to, I bet it's lovely
. Thank you so much for watching and I hope
to see you soon in Sweden. Bye.