The fish soup named after Jasper Pääkkönen supports the protection of fish

At the beginning of May, Jasper Pääkkönen popped up at Restaurant Löyly. Eeva Paljakka

Internationally known and respected actor Jasper Pääkkönen has been an avid nature mover since he was a little boy.

– As a child, I had a good and deep relationship with nature in the nearby forests when studying bugs and collecting mushrooms, Pääkkönen says at the launch of the new oat-based drinks in Juustoport’s Friendly Vikings product family.

The passion for nature conservation has only intensified over the years. Pääkkönen is known as the protector of endangered migratory fish.

When he was in 2019 in Thailand filming an American director Spike Leen with the Da 5 Bloods movie, Pääkkönen’s phone rings.

The then Minister of the Environment Kimmo Tiilikainen special assistant Riku Eskelinen called that now would be an urgent and extremely secret matter, the Minister would like to speak with you immediately.

– The Minister said that it is now really close to buying the Hiitolanjoki hydropower dams from Eastern Finland. Then the dams could be demolished and the Hiitolanjoki River restored, so that lake salmon, which are even more endangered than the Saimaa ringed seal, can migrate to their spawning grounds, Pääkkönen opens a call made three years ago.

That’s when Pääkkö was struck by real passion. The filming of Spike Lee’s film came in second.

– Of course, it was great to be filming with Lee, but I got a completely different kind of energy from the minister’s call, Pääkkönen laughs.

But then the minister asked Pääkkönen a really crazy question: Could he raise the missing critical amount of private funding in a couple of days, half a million euros?

The money was in a hurry, as the elections were coming, the government was changing, and Tiilikainen did not want the project, which had been running for 20 years, to collapse at the last minute because of the new minister.

– I started making calls to anyone who I knew was interested in conserving fish stocks and who was so wealthy that they had the opportunity to donate money.

By Friday, Pääkkönen had talked to people all over and had a stack of 300,000 euros. That was enough.

The first dam was demolished last summer, the second this summer, the third the next. The effects were immediately visible, as lake salmon from Lake Ladoga were observed as early as the first summer.

Pääkkönen’s passion can also be seen in the Löyly sauna in Hernesaari, Helsinki. The second founder of Pääkkönen and Löyly Antero Vartia believed in their ambitious project – and it paid off.

The menu on Löyly’s restaurant includes fish soup named after Pääkkönen. But it’s there on only one condition: 50 cents of every soup sold is donated to protect waters and fish stocks.

– Charity around the corner seemed natural to give the soup my name to use. Half a year ago, I asked how many servings of soup have been sold. The figure was then over 80,000. In other words, more than € 40,000 has been donated to protect fish stocks by selling fish soup alone.

The popularity of Jasper’s salmon soup has exceeded all expectations. The soup has domestic farmed rainbow trout. Needless to say, there is no Norwegian salmon on offer in Löyly.

Back in the 1990s, rainbow trout farming was a big environmental problem and environmental organizations even campaigned against Finnish rainbow trout farming. It was a big polluter and eutrophication of the Baltic Sea. Today, WWF recommends eating domestically farmed rainbow trout.

The salmon soup recipe has remained the same. Pääkkönen reveals that the soup also contains cold-smoked rainbow trout to give depth to the taste.

Löyly is also involved in another charity project: Viinitie and Löyly’s co-operation wine.

– For every bottle of Löyly wine sold, a euro is donated to the Stream Water Management Association to protect endangered fish stocks. In addition, Löyly donates all of Alko’s sales of wine to fish, Pääkkönen says.

Löyly started selling Loimer Löyly Grüner Veltliner together with Viinitie in August 2020.