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Burbot
Burbot (Lota lota), Limited for children and in pregnancy; the liver deserves its own caution.. The national eating advice, why it applies, the rules that matter when you catch it, and what the kitchen changes about the numbers.
The liver is a delicacy and a concentrate — treat it as an occasional food, not a portion.
Where it lives
Cold, well-oxygenated lakes and rivers, and the colder parts of the coast. Burbot is the only member of the cod family that lives in fresh water, and it runs its whole life backwards relative to everything else here: it feeds hardest in winter and spawns under the ice at midwinter, which is exactly when it is fished, through holes, at night, in the least comfortable weather of the year.
Why the advice says what it says
Two separate things are going on in a burbot. The muscle is a long-lived predator's muscle, so the mercury reasoning that applies to pike and zander applies here too, and Finnish advice names burbot alongside perch and pike-perch for inland waters. The liver is a different problem. A burbot liver is enormous relative to the fish and is almost entirely fat — this is a cod, and cods store their oil in the liver rather than the flesh. Fat is where the fat-soluble contaminants sit, so a liver concentrates dioxins and PCBs in a way the lean white flesh does not. The same fat also carries a very large amount of preformed vitamin A, which is the reason fish liver and liver products are on the avoid list in pregnancy in every set of national advice in the region. A burbot liver is a genuine delicacy and there is no reason to make it forbidden; it is simply not a food you eat by the plateful, and it is not one to eat when pregnant.
The advice
| Who it applies to | What the advice says | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Children, and people who are pregnant or breastfeeding | Large burbot from inland waters: at most one to two meals a month. Named alongside perch and pike-perch. | Finnish Food Authority (Ruokavirasto) |
| Anyone who is pregnant | Avoid fish liver, including burbot liver, because of its preformed vitamin A content. | Standard national advice on liver in pregnancy across the Nordic and Baltic countries |
| Everyone else | The flesh is a lean white fish; the liver is a delicacy to be eaten occasionally rather than as a portion. | Reasoning from the fat-solubility above |
The rules
What the rule book says about this fish, described by instrument rather than printed as a number:
- Burbot is fished through the ice in midwinter, which means the binding safety rule is often not a fisheries rule at all: ice thickness, moving water and river mouths kill more anglers than any regulation protects.
- Some waters protect burbot during its midwinter spawning; others do not. This is water-specific and easy to get wrong because the season feels like a permitted one.
- Set gear — longlines and traps, the traditional burbot methods — needs its own permit almost everywhere.
- Where a minimum size exists it is local rather than national in much of the region.
In the kitchen
The flesh is white, firm and extremely lean, and it takes to poaching better than almost any other fish here; burbot soup is a genuine regional dish rather than a curiosity. The liver is fried or poached briefly and served on bread, the roe is eaten too, and both are winter foods precisely because that is when the fish is caught. Nothing you do in the kitchen changes the mercury in the flesh; skinning and trimming do reduce the fat-soluble load, but the liver is the fat, so trimming it is not an option.
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
| Per 100 g, raw | Amount |
|---|---|
| Energy | 90 kcal |
| Protein | 19.3 g |
| Fat | 0.8 g |
| Carbohydrate | 0 g |
| Fibre | 0 g |
| Salt | 0.2 g |
| Published row | Burbot, raw |
Related published rows:
- Burbot, cooked — 115 kcal per 100 g
- Cod liver oil — 902 kcal per 100 g
Typical round weight for the calculator: 800–3000 g.
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
Is burbot liver the same as cod liver oil?
It is the same idea — a cod-family liver, stored full of oil, rich in vitamins A and D. That is exactly why it is worth eating occasionally and why it is not an everyday portion: the vitamin A load is real, and fat-soluble contaminants concentrate in the same place as the vitamins.
Fish in the same advice group
Pike
Not in pregnancy at all; one to two meals a month for everyone else.
Perch
Small perch is everyday food; large inland perch is limited for children and in pregnancy.
Pike-perch (zander)
Limited for children and in pregnancy where it comes from inland waters.
All species compared
The full table, grouped the way the advice groups it.
Eat the fish, log the fish
TempoLife tracks what you actually ate against the same food data linked on this page, so a fish meal shows up in your omega-3, vitamin D and salt totals without a second thought.