Goodbye Sour Cream: Give Baked Potatoes An Icelandic Twist With This Topping

Baked potatoes are undoubtedly tasty with sour cream, but if you're looking to shake things up, consider skyr. It's a thick, tangy cultured dairy product that's been a staple of the Icelandic diet for over a thousand years; Norse settlers apparently brought the technique over from Norway in the ninth century.

To the eyes and taste buds, skyr seems like a type of yogurt, although it's technically closer to a soft, fresh cheese: Live bacterial cultures are added to warm skim milk, along with rennet (a key part of the cheesemaking process), which helps thicken it. As a result, it may be classified as a low-fat cheese.

On a potato, it works so well because the tartness cuts through the buttery, starchy tuber in a similar way to sour cream, but you'll get a cleaner and slightly sharper bite along with it. This is because it's very low in fat (around 0.2% for some varieties), so you'll avoid the potentially excessive richness that you might get from putting sour cream with 20% fat on top of an already well-buttered potato. Otherwise, you can approach it like sour cream: Chop some chives, scallions, or dill, mix them in, and top the potato with the mixture, perhaps adding a crack of black pepper. Skyr's flavor is unobtrusive, so of course, you can consider loading up your potato with more than just this (consider going Turkish style with sausage, corn, peppers, olives, and more for a flavor bomb).

Unsurprisingly, it's the use of skim milk that makes skyr very low in fat (and it's also very low in saturated fat). Instead, you have a lot of protein: anywhere from 10% to 15% by weight.

In terms of texture, skyr and sour cream aren't super different. One advantage is that skyr is particularly thick and dense, so when plopped onto a hot potato, it may hold its shape better than sour cream; it's closer to Greek yogurt in terms of thickness, although arguably even a little thicker.

If you're looking to buy skyr, it shouldn't be too hard to find. While it used to be sold by weight in specialty dairy shops in Iceland, where it would be wrapped in parchment paper, times have changed. It moved into tubs like yogurt, then gained popularity in the U.S. thanks in part to an Icelandic entrepreneur who founded the company Siggi's in the 2000s. So, no need to venture to Reykjavík: It should be easy to find at Whole Foods, Wegmans, Meijer, Giant, and Stop & Shop. Some of the main brands beyond Siggi's include Icelandic Provisions and Painterland Sisters; just pay attention to the packaging, as (like yogurt) there are flavored versions available, and you probably don't want to put raspberry- or peach-flavored skyr on your potato.