TempoLife › Cultural foods of Estonia and Finland › Kama
Kama
What kama is
Kama is a milled mix of roasted grains — most often barley, rye, oats and dried peas — roasted before grinding until the mix turns a warm brown and tastes nutty and faintly sweet. Food historians trace kama-style roasted grain mixes in Estonia and Finland back centuries: before oats and barley could be stored any other way, roasting kept them edible through the year and made a meal that needed no cooking, only a glass of something cold to stir it into.
How Estonians eat it
The classic serving is two or three spoonfuls whisked into cold kefir or buttermilk, sweetened with a little sugar and topped with berries — a quick summer breakfast, a light dessert, or the last course of a holiday meal. Kama also goes into dairy desserts, ice-cream flavours and the curd snacks sold in every Estonian shop. In Finland the same family of roasted-grain flour is called talkkuna, stirred into yogurt or fermented milk much the same way.
How to log it
Kama is mostly whole-grain carbohydrate — the roasting is about shelf life and taste, not calories. We log it through the closest real rows in our database: kama with kefir (about 138 kcal per 100 g) and kama with milk (about 142 kcal per 100 g) for the mixed drink, or plain barley flour for the powder itself. The exact numbers depend on your mix, so treat them as a starting estimate.
Closest foods in our database
| Food | kcal / 100 g | As it is usually eaten here |
|---|---|---|
| Kama with kefir | 138 | kama whisked into kefir |
| Kama with milk | 142 | kama whisked into milk |
| Barley flour | 345 | roasted barley flour, the main grain |
Calories per 100 g come from the real rows in our food database (no invented values). This page describes food culture — it is not medical advice, and no single food decides anyone's weight.
