A Guide to Orkney's Traditional Baked Goods

By Discovering Orkney's Wartime History on a Quiet Walk
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17 Aug 2026

A Guide to Orkney's Traditional Baked Goods

Why Orkney's Baking Tastes Different

Orkney is a low, green archipelago of fertile farmland, and the sea is never more than a few miles away. That combination of rich soil, a cool, damp climate and a long farming tradition has shaped what comes out of the islands' kitchens. Until quite recently, many households baked on a griddle or in a peat-fired oven, using flour they had milled themselves and whatever fat and dairy the croft could spare.

What you taste in Orkney baking is restraint: handfuls of everyday ingredients, treated with skill rather than fuss. If you are staying in an Orkney guest house, the chances are your breakfast tray already includes some of it. Knowing what you are eating, and where it comes from, makes it taste even better.

Bannocks: The Everyday Bread

A bannock is a flat, round bread, baked quickly and eaten fresh. It is the ancestor of much of Orkney's baking and still appears on tables all over the islands. Two main types are worth knowing.

Yeast bannocks — a soft, risen dough, rolled out and baked on a hot griddle. They are light, slightly chewy and best eaten the day they are made, split and buttered.
Soda bannocks — made with buttermilk or sour milk and bicarbonate of soda, they have a closer crumb and a faint tang. Excellent with soup, cheese or a bowl of broth.

The trick with any bannock is heat control. A griddle should be hot enough to set the dough quickly but not so hot that the outside scorches before the middle cooks. In practice, that means a steady, moderate heat and a good dusting of flour to stop sticking.

If you are invited to a kitchen where they are being made, watch the flour on the surface of the dough: when it looks dry and matt, the bannock is ready to turn. That is the sort of judgement no recipe fully captures.

Bere Bannocks and the Grain Behind Them

Bere is one of the oldest cultivated grains in Britain and is still grown in Orkney, in small quantities, mostly on the outer islands. It is a type of hulled barley and is also known locally as the bere. It ripens fast in short northern summers and tolerates poor, windy conditions, which is exactly why it survived when other crops did not.

Bere has a distinctive, earthy, almost nutty flavour. Milled into a coarse flour, it makes a bannock that is darker than one made with wheat or oatmeal, and denser too. A traditional bere bannock is not a delicate thing. It is substantial, slightly crumbly, and it holds up well spread with salted butter or a spoonful of jam.

A few practical pointers if you want to bake with it:

Bere flour is low in gluten, so it will not behave like wheat flour. Do not expect a light crumb.
Mix it with a little wheat flour or oatmeal if you want a lighter texture.
Add salt and a little buttermilk, keep the handling gentle, and bake on a moderate griddle.
Eat them warm and soon. Bere bannocks dry out faster than wheat ones.

If you cannot find bere flour at home, you can order it from small island millers, and some delicatessens in mainland Scotland stock it. Otherwise, a coarse barley flour makes a reasonable substitute, though the flavour will be milder.

Rich Fruit Cakes and the Orkney Tea Table

The other pillar of Orkney baking is the rich fruit cake: dark, heavy with currants, raisins and mixed peel, and sometimes laced with a little whisky or rum. These cakes reflect a time when dried fruit was a store-cupboard luxury that had to be used thoughtfully, and when a cake needed to keep for weeks without spoiling.

They are not the same as a Christmas cake, though they share a family resemblance. The Orkney versions tend to be plainer in decoration — often just a dusting of icing sugar or nothing at all — because the point is the crumb, not the icing. You will find them sliced thin, served alongside a bannock or two and a large pot of tea.

Two things help them turn out well. First, soak the fruit, whether in tea, fruit juice or a splash of spirits, overnight before mixing. Second, bake low and slow. A fruit cake that browns too quickly will be raw in the centre; a paper-lined tin and a moderate oven for a couple of hours will give you the dense, moist result you are after.

They are, incidentally, wonderful travelling food. A slice wrapped in greaseproof paper survives a ferry crossing better than almost anything else you could pack.

What to Eat Them With, and Where to Buy Them

Orkney baking is at its best with simple companions. Salted island butter, a sharp marmalade or a spoonful of heather honey will all do. And tea — strong, brewed in a pot, taken with milk. The combination is not incidental; it is how these things have been eaten for generations.

If you want to buy rather than bake, look in island shops, farm shops and the smaller bakeries in Kirkwall and Stromness. Local bakeries often make bannocks daily, and bere bannocks appear more often than you might expect. Guest houses frequently bake their own for breakfast, so it is always worth asking your host where theirs come from — you will usually get a story as well as a recommendation.

Take a bannock, a slice of fruit cake and a cup of tea on a bench above a bay on a bright, breezy afternoon, and you will understand why these recipes lasted. They were made for this landscape.

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5 Comments

Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply
- John Abraham says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
  
  I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
  Reply
  - Robert Sonnysays Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
    
    I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
    Reply
Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply

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