This article will lead you through the Danish food mistakes you (probably) only make once.

Adding A38 to your coffee 

Danish yoghurt tends to be sold in 1kg cartons – about the same size as the 1 litre cartons in which you are most likely to get milk. Exactly the same size, in fact.

As a result, the appearance of milk and yoghurt packaging is a lot more similar than it is in other countries, where you might be more likely to find milk in plastic bottles and yoghurt in multipacks of small tubs.

This could mean a couple of double-takes are needed when taking your milk or yoghurt off the refrigerator shelf in the supermarket, to make sure you have taken the product you need.

Further complicating matters is the popularity in Denmark of a product called A38 (named, I believe, after the year the product was launched). This is a type of yoghurt but nothing like the sweet-tasting fruit flavours or natural yoghurts you might be familiar with. It is made using a certain type of bacteria which gives it a probiotic effect – and a distinctly sour taste.

It’s easy from here to see how a simple carton-mix up could result in you creaming your coffee with a dollop of sour-tasting yoghurt. Not recommended.

Finding unexpected liquorice in your pick and mix

For some reason, liquorice is extremely popular in Scandinavia. Visitors from other countries looking to treat themselves to a bag of sweets may be surprised when that unassuming sweet they thought was blackcurrant flavour turns out to be liquorice.

Your chocolate bar isn’t safe either. Many chocolate brands have salted liquorice flavours and you’ll also find liquorice variants of other popular sugary treats including flødeboller (chocolate-covered soft marshmallows) and ice cream.

So if you don’t want a salty, liquorice surprise when you think you’re about to enjoy some delicious candy, watch out. The bitter-tasting plant is a master of disguise.

Buying the wrong type of bread rolls

Rye bread (rugbrød) is king of the Danish lunch break, meaning bread rolls (buns, baps, cobs, whatever you prefer to call them) take a back seat at this time of day.

However, bread rolls are a popular breakfast time staple, including at cafes or bakeries, where you can usually order a bolle med smør (roll with butter) during the morning.

If you prefer rolls to rye at lunch, you’ll need to choose the right type when shopping at the supermarket. Hveder and krydderboller are two types of bread roll that have plenty of sugar and a good dash of cardamom in the dough. (As far as I can tell, they are identical apart from their shape).

They are displayed alongside all the other bread products at supermarkets but taste of, well, sweet cardamom bread. Not ideal if you’re making a bacon roll or cheese sandwich.

Incidentally, eating hveder is a tradition commonly associated with the Great Prayer Day holiday, so maybe this mistake will become harder to make if the government goes through with its plan to scrap the holiday.

Flour or sugar?

Maybe you’ll decide to avoid all this confusion and just bake your own bread. If you do, though, there are other pitfalls to avoid.

The Danish word for flour is mel and sugar is sukker. So what’s flormelis, a word that appears to include approximations of both “flour” and mel?

Flormelis is icing sugar. Because of course it is. It comes in small boxes of about the size you’d need to make icing or frosting for a batch of cakes, and definitely not big enough for baking loaves of bread. Flour, mel, comes in much bigger paper bags.

If you get to the stage where you mix icing sugar with your yeast and water, it’s probably time to admit you should have been paying more attention.

Don’t cut the cheese with a knife

Cheese products popular in Denmark include havarti and the Cheasy range from dairy Arla. Cheasy utilises the pun in its name very well because, like havarti, it is soft and therefore easy to slice.

READ ALSO: Why does Denmark produce so much cheese?

At least, that’s the theory. Cheeses like this should be cut with an ostehøvl (cheese slicer), the quintessential Danish kitchen utensil.

There are two types of ostehøvl: a wire-based type and a version that looks a bit like a trowel, with a raised edge and a gap in the middle for the sliced cheese to pass through.

Inexperienced wielders of either type of ostehøvl could find themselves inadvertently causing a Danish kitchen no-no: the “ski slope” cheese block that comes from injudicious use of the slicer, creating uneven slices and leaving one side of the block thicker than the other.

There’s only one cheese crime that is looked upon even more dimly: cutting the soft cheese with a knife.

Have I missed any good ones? Let me know.