Akutaq – Alaskan Ice Cream and Other Non-traditional Foods

[racnwdow]

Has anyone eaten Akutaq – Alaskan Ice Cream (reindeer fat, seal oil, snow and berries)?  Want to try it on our cruise.  Just not sure where to find it.  Any recommendations for other strange/non-traditional foods to eat while in Alaska. Already have reindeer on the list.

 

 

[Gardyloo]

It's illegal to sell wild game or game products.  Reindeer, which is commercially raised and subject to the usual food and drug regulations, is probably the best you can hope for.  

 

I've had a variety of Native foods while visiting Native families in the bush, including seal blood soup and Old Fish (title tells all.)  You're not missing anything.  

[AKStafford]

Just an FYI... Your reindeer sausage only has a small portion of domestically raised reindeer meat. It's mostly beef and pork.

Otherwise, game meat cannot be sold commercially.

[zqvol]

On 8/20/2024 at 11:46 AM, racnwdow said:

Has anyone eaten Akutaq – Alaskan Ice Cream (reindeer fat, seal oil, snow and berries)?  Want to try it on our cruise.  Just not sure where to find it.  Any recommendations for other strange/non-traditional foods to eat while in Alaska. Already have reindeer on the list.

 

 

 Very doubtful that you will find any exotic foods on your typical SE Alaska cruise. 

[diesel1973]

Yakburgers are available in some restaurants and yak meat is available in some stores. 

[martincath]

If you're on a one-way or Vancouver RT @racnwdow, you'll have more luck down here than any cruise port - at the very least you can sample pemmican and some game meats at Salmon & Bannock on their regular menu, and if it's the right time of year Oolichan is featured in various forms (fried like whitebait, or pressed for their oil which you dunk bread in like olive oil, or smoked like kippers) and I've had hand-raked smoked herring roe which was very interesting (fresh branches of spruce are used to scrape the eggs free, then the now-briny needles popped in the smoker with them).

 

Pre-covid S&B used to give free samples of various foods that are legal to hunt as a local native, but illegal to sell - I have not seen this happen since Covid personally, but I only visit a couple of times a year and it was never advertised, so it may still happen occasionally. Smoked Sealion was new to me when I was offered that at S&B - better than Seal, not as good as Whale, it seems the bigger the marine mammal the tastier to my palate! Fat is where the flavour is, as they say!

 

Depending what 'strange' means to you OP, you might also find plenty of stuff on the regular and seasonal menus of many local restos - jellyfish, sea urchin, various fish roes, geoduck, octopus, spot prawn are not hard to find locally but might seem terribly exotic to most folks! We're also the only place you can eat fresh King Crab in cruise season - if you have enough friends to split the meal with a multi-course feast begins with displaying your crab plucked forth from a tank...