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My husband brought back a homemade sour cream dill sauce from Finland. It was thick, perhaps with a puréed vegetable, but I couldn't taste cucumber or the like. There is definitely some texture there. Any suggestions?

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  • Was it mustardy?
    – Jolenealaska
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 5:48
  • Hello Rhonda, and welcome to the site! We are here specifically to provide answers on cooking techniques, and swapping recipes is off topic. I would have had to close the question if it was a pure recipe request. But it is clear that you can't search for a recipe somewhere else if you don't know what food you are searching for, so I modified it to be a request for the name. If somebody can identify it as a standard sauce (rather than something created by the cook's whim), you will have enough information to look for it in a recipe database.
    – rumtscho
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 22:57

3 Answers 3

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A very common fish condiment in Sweden is "dillsås", dill sauce.

  • 10 oz gräddfil. A light sour cream. (yoghurt?)
  • A few tablespoons of mayo
  • A generous amount of chopped dill.
  • Season with salt and white pepper to taste.

You can add some mustard and lemon if the mayo is bland.

The taste is smooth and quite neutral with the dill as the lead actor.

A note on the sour cream. It can't be a thick, heavy consistency. It should be quite light and slightly uneven in texture (whisking makes it smooth). It is almost yoghurt like and contains about 10% fat. I have seen suggestions that low fat sour cream can be quite similar. I get the impression IKEA stocks it globally.

It should look something like enter image description here

Image from http://chezsofia.bloggsida.se/2009/08/dillsas-till-saftiga-grillspett/.

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Finn here. Tillikastike (dill sauce) is almost always prepared with kermaviili, a type of viili (vaguely yoghurt-like fermented milk product) which is unfortunately basically unknown outside Scandinavia. Gräddfil, mentioned in Captain Giraffe's answer, is the Swedish version of this.

Sour cream is the closest substitute, but it's much heavier, creamier and more sour than the real thing (40-70% fat, vs only 12% or so in kermaviili), whereas crème fraîche is also too fatty but not sour enough. Fatty unsweetened yoghurt or quark mixed with a bit of water will also do in a pinch.

If you can get your hands on some of the real thing, the recipe is simplicity itself: just mix with chopped dill, chill, and serve. Adding mayo would be unheard of in Finland, but a squirt of lemon or a dash of mustard would be common, particularly if this is to be served with fish.

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Maybe it's dill herb, not cucumber.

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    The word 'dill' is in the question title. I would be surprised if that possibility has been overlooked. Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 17:40

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