Swedish chef cooking only on fire

At his Michelin-starred restaurant, EkstedtChef Niklas Ekstedt in downtown Stockholm brings the natural world indoors. Considered one of Sweden’s most famous chefs, he uses fire, ash, soot and smoke to turn the ingredients into fine dishes. Gas and electricity are not allowed.

For Ekstedt, this method brings Swedish food back to its roots. “For me, fire, it’s like human history. That’s the way we cook most of the time,” he said. Ekstedt took his parents to a modern restaurant to remind them of their childhood memories of going out to the woods with their parents in the small town of Järpen in northern Sweden and to evoke a sense of nostalgia. By his diner.

Part of the Scandinavian culinary revolution focused on modern molecular cooking techniques in the 1990s, Ekstedt became a national and international celebrity, hosting a Swedish cooking show called Niklas Mat, and several books. Is writing (his latest Happy food, Dive deeper into plant-focused diets) and serve as a Netflix judge Crazy delicious With American chef Carla Hall and British Heston Blumenthal.

But despite all his success and a bit of anxiety about what he wanted for a new restaurant venture, in 2011 Ekstedt took a break in the limelight with his family without electricity or gas. We decided to live together in a wooden hut in the forest, and learn the techniques of our ancestors to cook on open fire.

“I roamed the land around the summer villa in Ingmar in the Stockholm archipelago, thinking like the melancholic character of the black-and-white Ingmar Bergman movie,” according to his restaurant’s website. I did.

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After a deep soul quest, he was inspired by the quality that the birch tree and its smoldering trees lent to cooked food, which sent him to a new mission to bring him the skills to cook wood. .. After returning to Stockholm, he studied ancient Swedish recipes and found that he lacked one practical ingredient: instructions on how to actually cook.

“The interesting thing was that the technique wasn’t written down,” he said. “The recipe was written down, but it’s a technique they took for granted because they thought they knew how to light it, smoke it, and use coal and stoves.”

After trial and error, he learned how to apply techniques to a rustic yet sophisticated menu. New Danish cuisine.. Currently, he is equipped with a fire pit, a wood oven and a wood stove, and has acquired the ability to cook the following dishes: Cod smoked with juniper branches There is also a tasting menu of oysters, scallops and reindeer.

Vegetables are certainly part of his culinary norms, but Extet believes that eating meat and fish is sustainable if done consciously, “indigenous Scandinavian people living from reindeer, meat and land. Inspired by the group Sami, he continued, “and praising their meat will have broader cultural significance in Sweden.”

Eating locally sourced food in a sustainable way is the spirit of Ekstedt, whether cooking meat in open hearth or foraging in the woods for blueberries and mushrooms. He provides a sense of hope, believing that the lessons learned from Covid will teach us how to take good care of the Earth, worrying about the stress that humans put on the Earth’s soil and water. “The pandemic has taught us in the food world that nature can really come back soon,” he said.

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