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Baltic herring

Baltic herring (Clupea harengus membras), Small herring freely; large herring over about 17 cm is limited for young people and in pregnancy.. The national eating advice, why it applies, the rules that matter when you catch it, and what the kitchen changes about the numbers.

Where it lives

The most abundant food fish in the Baltic and the backbone of the region's coastal food culture. Baltic herring is a subspecies of Atlantic herring that has adapted to brackish water; it is smaller, slower-growing and leaner than the North Sea fish sold under the same English name. It spawns on shallow coastal vegetation in spring and is taken by trawl, by coastal trap net and by anglers on multi-hook herring rigs.

Why the advice says what it says

This is the fish that made Baltic dioxins a household subject. Dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs are fat-soluble industrial by-products that were deposited on the sea from the air over decades; the Baltic is shallow, almost enclosed and exchanges water with the North Sea very slowly, so what arrived largely stayed. Fatty fish accumulate these compounds in their fat, and — crucially — the load keeps building for as long as the fish lives. A herring's age is legible from its length, which is why national advice is written in centimetres rather than in years: a Baltic herring much over 17 cm is an old herring with a long deposition history behind it, while the small ones that fill a bucket in an evening are young fish. Concentrations in Baltic fish have fallen substantially since emissions were controlled, but they remain high enough that the EU maximum level for dioxins would otherwise keep these fish off the market. Finland and Sweden hold a long-standing derogation in EU contaminant law that lets Baltic fish above the limit be sold on their national markets, on the explicit condition that consumers are told the dietary advice — the advice quoted on this page is that condition being met.

The advice

The rules

What the rule book says about this fish, described by instrument rather than printed as a number:

• The commercial herring fishery is quota-managed at EU level; the recreational catch is small enough that in most of the region it needs nothing more than the ordinary angling permission.
• Coastal trap nets and any fixed gear are a different matter and need the local gear permit.
• Spawning-area closures exist in some coastal zones in spring — the same shallow bays that hold the fish.
• The EU derogation that keeps this fish legally on the market is conditional on the dietary advice being communicated, which is why you see it on packaging and at fish counters in Finland and Sweden.

In the kitchen

Herring is the regional staple in every possible form: fried in rye flour, pickled, salted, smoked, baked in layers with potato. None of the pickling, salting or smoking touches the dioxin content — they change the salt, not the fat. What does change it is mechanical: skin off, belly flap off, and cook so that rendered fat leaves the fish rather than being served with it. Grilling or oven-roasting on a rack does more for intake than any brining recipe.

This is a reference page, not a fishing licence and not medical advice. Minimum sizes, closed seasons, bag limits and licence prices are set per country and per water body and change most years, so no number for them is printed here — each species page says which instrument sets the rule and where to look up the figure for the water you are standing on. If a clinician has given you a fish frequency or a contaminant instruction, that instruction outranks anything on this page.

Nutrition figures

Fish, herring, Atlantic, raw. Values are the USDA row published on this site's food data pages.

The published row is Atlantic herring. Baltic herring is the brackish-water subspecies of the same fish and is typically smaller and somewhat leaner, so treat the fat figure as an upper reference.

Related published rows:

• Herring, pickled — 262 kcal per 100 g
• Herring, cooked — 203 kcal per 100 g
• Beet and herring salad — 116 kcal per 100 g

Typical round weight for the calculator: 40–150 g.

Herring is often eaten whole or as a butterflied fillet with the pin bones left in, so the edible fraction is higher than the working assumption.

Eating advice: Finnish Food Authority and Swedish Food Agency national advice on Baltic and inland fish. Contaminant ceilings and the Baltic derogation: Regulation (EU) 2023/915; weekly tolerable intakes: EFSA methylmercury (2012) and dioxins/dioxin-like PCBs (2018). Nutrition figures: USDA FoodData Central rows published on this site. Checked 2026-09-06.

Frequently asked questions

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