Salmiakki 101: Finland's Most Divisive Sweet, Explained Kindly
You have probably seen the video. A visitor to Finland is handed a small black diamond, told nothing useful about it, and filmed while their face rearranges itself.
It is a Finnish party trick, and it is a slightly unfair one — because the person filming grew up with this taste, and the person eating it has been given no map at all.
This article is the map.
🧂 So What Is It, Exactly?
Salmiakki is liquorice with a second ingredient: salmiak salt, better known as ammonium chloride. That is the whole secret. Ordinary liquorice is sweet and rooty and faintly herbal. Add salmiak and something else happens — a sharp, saline, drying sensation that spreads across the tongue and lingers.
Descriptions of the effect usually reach for the word astringent, and compare it to tannins, the pucker you get from strong black tea or young red wine. It is not "salty" the way crisps are salty. It is closer to a flavour that grips.
The name is honest about its origins. Salmiakki comes from the Swedish salmiak, which traces back to the Latin sal ammoniacus — "salt of Ammon" — after the ancient Egyptian temple near which the compound was reportedly first gathered. A confectionery aisle in Helsinki, quietly carrying a Roman name for an Egyptian mineral.
⚗️ From the Pharmacy Counter
Here is the part that explains almost everything.
Ammonium chloride was not invented for candy. It was a medicine. It works as an expectorant — it loosens the chest — and nineteenth-century European pharmacies dispensed it for coughs and bronchitis. Liquorice root extract was already a standard pharmacy ingredient, valued for soothing a sore throat and, conveniently, for masking the taste of things that needed masking.
Put the two together and you have a cough remedy that a patient will actually finish. The Finnish author Jukka Annala has suggested exactly this: that salty liquorice began in pharmacies making their own medicines, and simply escaped into the sweet shop. Commercial production was under way by the 1930s — Finland's first industrial batches appeared in 1930 — and not only here: Norway and the Netherlands were making it too.
The clearest surviving fingerprint of that history is a small tin still sold today. In 1951, two chemists — Mr and Mrs Colliander — started making salty liquorice lozenges in the Haaga district of Helsinki. They sold them in bulk to pharmacies, where staff would weigh them into plain white paper bags for customers. The brand is called Apteekin Salmiakki: literally, "the pharmacy's salmiakki." The recipe has not changed since 1951.
A country's favourite sweet, still wearing its old white coat.
🖤 Why Finns Actually Love It
Ask a Finn why, and you will rarely get a flavour analysis. You will get a memory.
Part of it is simply that this is a taste people grow into. Salmiakki is not a childhood sweet that adults abandon; it is a childhood sweet that adults keep, and then start preferring in stronger and stronger forms. Somewhere in that progression, the sharpness stops reading as a challenge and starts reading as comfort — the way an adult palate learns to want black coffee, or salt on liquorice-black rye.
Part of it is how completely it escaped the sweet shop. Salmiakki turned up in ice cream, in chocolate, as powder, and — inevitably — in a bottle. Salmiakki Koskenkorva, Finland's salted-liquorice spirit, was launched on the first day of 1993 and proved so popular — and so cheap for its strength — that Alko pulled it from the shelves within ten weeks. It returned in 1995, weaker and pricier. Of course it returned.
And part of it, honestly, is that it is ours. Finland is a small country that does not often insist on things. Salmiakki is one of the few places where Finnish taste refuses politely but completely to accommodate anyone else. There is a certain quiet pleasure in owning a flavour that the rest of the world has to be talked into.
Not that Finland owns it alone. Salty liquorice is at home across the Nordics, in the Netherlands and Belgium, and in northern Germany — and one of its most famous forms is not Finnish at all. Tyrkisk Peber, the peppery salmiak shell filled with sharp powder, was created by Per Fjelsten in Jutland in 1976 and launched in Denmark in 1977; Fazer bought the brand in 1996 and it has been a fixture in Finland ever since.
🧭 Where to Start
The single kindest thing you can do for a first-timer is not to start them at the top. Salmiakki comes in a genuine range of strengths, and the difference between the mildest and the boldest is not small.
Level 1 — Mild: Halva Chocolate Balls Salmiakki 130g
White chocolate on the outside, salty liquorice at the centre. The sweetness carries the salt rather than the other way round. (A Finnish brand, made in Sweden — fitting, for a flavour the Nordics share.) This is the one to hand someone who says "I don't think I'd like it" — they usually do.
Level 2 — Medium: Halva Salmiakki Licorice 170g
The everyday shape: soft, chewy salmiakki jellies, ammonium chloride right there in the ingredients list (alongside gelatine, for those who check). This is what a bowl on a Finnish coffee table actually looks like. Chewy texture gives the flavour time to unfold, which is the point.
Level 3 — Bold: Fazer Super Salmiakki Liquorice Pastilles 38g
Hard pastilles, no cushioning, no chocolate to hide behind. The small box is not modesty — it is dosage. Take one. Let it dissolve. Do not chew your way through three in a row on your first day.
One practical note, because Finns say it too: liquorice is a food that comes with a caution. When a product crosses a certain liquorice threshold, packaging in the EU carries a standard line — people suffering from hypertension should avoid excessive consumption. The reason is glycyrrhizin, a compound in liquorice root itself, not the salmiak salt. Enjoy it the way it is enjoyed here — a piece or two, often, rather than a bag at once.
💬 For the Brave, and the Merely Curious
Salmiakki has never needed converts. It has simply stayed, stubbornly, on Finnish shelves for the best part of a century, being exactly what it is.
If you try it and the taste never clicks — that is a perfectly respectable outcome, and you will have learned something real about a small northern country in the process. But start at Level 1, give it a fair hearing, and there is a decent chance that somewhere around the third or fourth piece the sharpness stops being a shock and starts being the reason you reach for another.
That is the moment Finns are waiting for when they hand you the little black diamond. Not the face. The second piece.