The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e09 Episode Script
Winter
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
Every winter in Jãmtland, life retreats and time slows down.
At its darkest depth, the temperature hits -35, and the sun peeks above the horizon for only four and a half hours.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, the limitations of winter are an opportunity to explore how techniques once used for survival can be incorporated into his menu at Fãviken.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
Winter is a time of the year where you have to just simply think differently about things.
You can't just go on taking like the easy way out as you can in the summer, where almost everything is like immediately delicious.
And I try to see this as, rather than being as an annoyance, to be an opportunity to be creative, you know, to find new ways of making the restaurant into the very sort of particular experience that it is.
This part of Sweden is called Jãmtland.
And Jãmtland is the region where I grew up, where Fãviken is situated.
It's very scarcely populated.
It's about one person per square kilometer.
I like living here.
I didn't used to like living here, but I do now.
There's still so much of the culinary traditions and culture like being preserved here and being used in people's everyday life.
Not just a sort of stubbornness or sort of backwardness, but they actually just like doing things as it used to be done a long time ago.
Took the line.
Today we're in a small pond close to Fãviken.
And this is like where we usually go to catch the brown trout we need for the restaurant.
And today I was hoping we're going to catch two or three brown trout, just to filet them, salt them and then start to dry them.
Because this is the perfect season to dry fish.
Winter up here is especially like in the old days it was a time when the whole pace of life kind of just sort of slowed down a little bit.
Because there is not that much light and it's pretty cold.
Nothing grows.
So one thing that you had to do was you had to produce like all the food that you needed for a full year you had to produce during the summer and then store it somehow to maintain yourself and your family through winter.
The vegetable year at Fãviken, it starts in spring.
Picking out the right seeds, planting them at the right moment, taking care of the plants and then harvesting them when they're just right for what we plan to do with them.
Because that's also one of the things.
A carrot is not just a carrot.
Like it can be many different things depending on when you actually decide to pick it.
Here we store everything I'm working on at this moment.
And that can be anything that, you know, from stuff that's actually on the menu to different experiments.
So these here are gooseberries that are just dry-salted and then left to actually ferment.
And here you can actually see also like very typically how we work to write down exactly what we put into the jar.
And here you can see that someone started doing it and then perhaps a day later they put in 206 grams more of berries and 4.
12 more grams of salt because they probably found more berries that they just added on, on top.
Among many other things what we store are root vegetables like this turnip.
And the reason why this works, like why root vegetables keep really well in a cellar like this is because the climate in here kind of mimics the climate in the ground.
This particular turnip here, it already thinks it's spring, so it's started to sprout a little bit.
All of these root vegetables here, they are going to start feeling like come end of April or something that spring is on its way.
And there is a vent in the ceiling here that even though it's sealed from the outside, there's probably a minute amount of light sort of finding its way through here.
All of them are going to send their sprouts in this very direction.
Pork is a very significant product to many parts of the word, but especially to Scandinavia.
In the old days, you know, salt pork was a very large part of the protein intake that people had during the dark winter months.
And this dish kind of ties into that because we're using a part of the pig that is quite overlooked in many ways, which is the head.
What we do is that we take, like the whole head and braise it for a really long time until the skin and the meat becomes really tender.
Then we peel it all off the bone and mix it with pieces of meat into sort of a very succulent meat batter.
So this is Michael, who is responsible for this dish during service and also during the prep in the restaurant.
And we're going to make it as if it was service, basically.
So we're going to start with deep-frying them.
So after I've dredged the pig head in corn flour, I want to tap it a little bit on the dish so that there's no excess starch on the outside while I batter it.
When I go into the batter I'm going to give it a little stir because I don't want any bubbles on the pig's head.
And then I kind of give it a little roll like that before coming back down and dipping it straight into the oil.
It's very important to coat the stick like Michael did here, because when you fry this, this very sort of succulent meat batter in there, it melts and becomes almost liquid.
And if you don't have that piece of batter going up on the stem of the stick, it will just sort of wobble off the stick when you pick it up.
So it has to be it's like a handle.
We're going to keep that down in the oil until it's got a nice golden brown color.
And then usually I can do more than one at a time.
So I'll do another one.
Then during service we do 16 of these at a time.
And you like hold them between all your fingers and dunk them down into the deep fryer.
It's not easy.
So these are pickled gooseberries.
We take them when we're unripe and they're green, and we just dry-salt them and put them in jars and leave them to ferment in the cellar, in the root cellar.
And this produces something that tastes like a pickled, unripe plum, almost.
Very kind of savory, but also like acidic and fruity at the same time.
So I'm just going to cut two thin slices of that and place one on each piece of pig's head.
Like that.
So place the first pig's head here, on this box of hot stones.
How are you doing on the second one? About there, actually.
Into the box.
Season with that.
And then I have this very fragrant spruce salt.
It kind of smells like forest, you know, like walking in the forest.
And it's good to have this.
It brightens up the whole dish.
The flavor of the restaurant is very different, you know, through the seasons.
Like with most restaurants, I guess, but here what I think is fascinating with winter is that we're focusing completely in the opposite direction of summer.
Because in summer it's all about, like, freshness.
Whilst in the winter it's the other way around.
Because out of necessity and out of practical reasons, most of this stuff will already have been stored somehow.
So instead of trying to make that seem vibrant in a fake way, we rather embrace and enhance those characters.
We're about 300 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle.
And we're in the village of Nordskot.
It's one of the older fishing villages in Norway.
And to me, I moved here and said, "Wow, this is an amazing place, it's got amazing stuff in the sea.
" It's quiet, it's peaceful.
There's no big stress.
It's like I found this little paradise in the middle of nowhere.
And I'm really lucky to have found it.
Really lucky.
So it's about two degrees, and so that's quite warm for us.
But it's like when it's really harsh, it'll be down to -15 air temperature, zero degrees in the water.
That's cold.
And today we're going after the famous mahogany clams.
It's one of the oldest things on the planet, and a lot of people think, "Hey, what are you doing, fishing this ancient shell?" But the reality is the first 25 to 30 years of its life it's reproductive.
Then after that it kind of retires and just sort of lies in the sand and feeds for about, you know, the next 200, 400 years.
The best thing about living here is everybody named everything after my people back home in Scotland, yeah? If you look at this, okay, we've got a mountain here, which is called Skotstinderne, yeah? Where we are in here is Skotsfjord, yeah? And the village is Nordskot.
As I like to say to everybody I can, I live in Nordskot.
I am the Scot in Nordskot.
No, I want the kicker.
Basically what we're doing is we're having a quick look at the bottom.
I see the dead shells on top and they tell me what's around that area, yeah? Yeah, there's dead mahogany there.
It's quite old, though, because it's white, bleached out.
You got to respect these things.
You know, they've been around for a long time.
And you've got to make sure they're around for a lot longer.
But they taste good as well, which is the problem with them, you know.
They've got this amazing flavor that comes off them.
This is a diver's trick, yeah.
Hot water in the wintertime.
I live in this underwater environment, which is a really special place to me.
When you're in the water, okay, you have this pure silence.
All you can hear is the sound of your breath and the sound of your heart.
It's like a form of meditation.
Whenever we do this, it has to be very gentle.
Because it's like if you're not gentle with the ocean, okay, then it's like you just wreck it.
Technically we're not allowed to use any tools in Norway, so you have to actually work it off with your hand.
And then you'll see half the shell.
Just pull it out, put it in the catching net.
On an average site you probably get about 25 in a square meter.
You do quite a lot of waving, which is quite nice as well because it keeps you warm.
The next part of my job is to try and get it from here to them as in good shape as possible.
You know, so that when you're sitting at Fãviken, okay, you get a taste of here.
Oh This is like sweet umami from the sea.
This is just, you know After 60 years in the sea, okay, that flavor's just incredible.
So for me, this is a product that should be eaten raw.
And you need to open them and cut them into thin slices à la minute.
You can't really have them like open in your mise en place because then they will lose, what is to me, their most important feature, which is that really beautiful deep sea flavor combined with an almost crunchy texture.
These clams have one muscle about here and another muscle about here.
In order to open them you need to cut those out.
So you just insert the knife.
Just bring the knife like around the edge of the clam like this and it pops open.
So I'm just going to take it away from the shell.
So the next step is to clean the meaty part away from all the sort of gills and filtration stuff.
And I just try to kind of fold that away from the meaty part like this and then with a really sharp knife you just sort of cut like that.
And this we'll keep to make the custard from the juice of the mahogany clam, a little bit of cream and some egg yolks.
And then on top of that we're going to put some malted cabbage.
A little bit of pickled rowanberry, some dried rose hips and some dried garlic.
And then slices of raw mahogany clam.
So then we just cut this into, like, nice slices like that.
And you can see it's kind of almost cramping, you know, because it's very recently deceased.
So the next step is to take this custard, which is barely lukewarm, and we'll start with malted cabbage.
And it should be quite a lot.
You should kind of cover the custard completely.
And just start adding these other ingredients.
Almost like a kind of dry salad.
So a little bit of the rose hip like that.
Perhaps a little clam.
A few of these garlicky flakes.
Another piece of clam.
This is a dish that needs to have, like, a lot of the seasoning on top of it, you know.
Because this custard is really mild, and it's only really, you know, a texture.
And the texture of all these dry things is also quite cool with that almost crunchy compact texture of the clam and the very creamy texture of the custard.
So the last little thing is to just add a little herb salt.
And it shouldn't be too much because the clam itself, it is salty, but it's still important to provide a little bit of sharpness and a little bit of that freshness of summer into the dish, which is now complete.
I'm just going to gut these and then salt them and then finally nail them straight to the wall so that we can dry it from the sun and the wind as spring arrives.
I really like working with these fish because they are such good quality, and like they really taste where they're from, you know.
They taste like in the summer when you walk to that pond, you know, it tastes sort of like moss and forest.
So this here is just ordinary coarse salt.
A little handful inside of each fish like this.
The muscles are actually still twitching here.
If you would eat this now, like when we worked with the mahogany clam, for example, it has a very special kind of crunchiness, which isn't really crunchiness, it's just the very denseness of these still contracting muscle fibers from electrical activity that's still active within the fish itself.
If you had a slice of that raw now, you would kind of taste that electricity.
It tastes really, really special.
It tastes like like when it's snowing outside.
I think that having some limitations can be very, very good.
We decided ourselves that we wanted to work mainly with products from this area, an area that has six months of winter where nothing grows.
And that naturally adds restrictions in the way we have to work and the way we have to think and plan and so on.
Because if you have everything all the time, there's very little motivation for most of us to create something new and possibly better.
Support your PBS station.
Every winter in Jãmtland, life retreats and time slows down.
At its darkest depth, the temperature hits -35, and the sun peeks above the horizon for only four and a half hours.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, the limitations of winter are an opportunity to explore how techniques once used for survival can be incorporated into his menu at Fãviken.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
Winter is a time of the year where you have to just simply think differently about things.
You can't just go on taking like the easy way out as you can in the summer, where almost everything is like immediately delicious.
And I try to see this as, rather than being as an annoyance, to be an opportunity to be creative, you know, to find new ways of making the restaurant into the very sort of particular experience that it is.
This part of Sweden is called Jãmtland.
And Jãmtland is the region where I grew up, where Fãviken is situated.
It's very scarcely populated.
It's about one person per square kilometer.
I like living here.
I didn't used to like living here, but I do now.
There's still so much of the culinary traditions and culture like being preserved here and being used in people's everyday life.
Not just a sort of stubbornness or sort of backwardness, but they actually just like doing things as it used to be done a long time ago.
Took the line.
Today we're in a small pond close to Fãviken.
And this is like where we usually go to catch the brown trout we need for the restaurant.
And today I was hoping we're going to catch two or three brown trout, just to filet them, salt them and then start to dry them.
Because this is the perfect season to dry fish.
Winter up here is especially like in the old days it was a time when the whole pace of life kind of just sort of slowed down a little bit.
Because there is not that much light and it's pretty cold.
Nothing grows.
So one thing that you had to do was you had to produce like all the food that you needed for a full year you had to produce during the summer and then store it somehow to maintain yourself and your family through winter.
The vegetable year at Fãviken, it starts in spring.
Picking out the right seeds, planting them at the right moment, taking care of the plants and then harvesting them when they're just right for what we plan to do with them.
Because that's also one of the things.
A carrot is not just a carrot.
Like it can be many different things depending on when you actually decide to pick it.
Here we store everything I'm working on at this moment.
And that can be anything that, you know, from stuff that's actually on the menu to different experiments.
So these here are gooseberries that are just dry-salted and then left to actually ferment.
And here you can actually see also like very typically how we work to write down exactly what we put into the jar.
And here you can see that someone started doing it and then perhaps a day later they put in 206 grams more of berries and 4.
12 more grams of salt because they probably found more berries that they just added on, on top.
Among many other things what we store are root vegetables like this turnip.
And the reason why this works, like why root vegetables keep really well in a cellar like this is because the climate in here kind of mimics the climate in the ground.
This particular turnip here, it already thinks it's spring, so it's started to sprout a little bit.
All of these root vegetables here, they are going to start feeling like come end of April or something that spring is on its way.
And there is a vent in the ceiling here that even though it's sealed from the outside, there's probably a minute amount of light sort of finding its way through here.
All of them are going to send their sprouts in this very direction.
Pork is a very significant product to many parts of the word, but especially to Scandinavia.
In the old days, you know, salt pork was a very large part of the protein intake that people had during the dark winter months.
And this dish kind of ties into that because we're using a part of the pig that is quite overlooked in many ways, which is the head.
What we do is that we take, like the whole head and braise it for a really long time until the skin and the meat becomes really tender.
Then we peel it all off the bone and mix it with pieces of meat into sort of a very succulent meat batter.
So this is Michael, who is responsible for this dish during service and also during the prep in the restaurant.
And we're going to make it as if it was service, basically.
So we're going to start with deep-frying them.
So after I've dredged the pig head in corn flour, I want to tap it a little bit on the dish so that there's no excess starch on the outside while I batter it.
When I go into the batter I'm going to give it a little stir because I don't want any bubbles on the pig's head.
And then I kind of give it a little roll like that before coming back down and dipping it straight into the oil.
It's very important to coat the stick like Michael did here, because when you fry this, this very sort of succulent meat batter in there, it melts and becomes almost liquid.
And if you don't have that piece of batter going up on the stem of the stick, it will just sort of wobble off the stick when you pick it up.
So it has to be it's like a handle.
We're going to keep that down in the oil until it's got a nice golden brown color.
And then usually I can do more than one at a time.
So I'll do another one.
Then during service we do 16 of these at a time.
And you like hold them between all your fingers and dunk them down into the deep fryer.
It's not easy.
So these are pickled gooseberries.
We take them when we're unripe and they're green, and we just dry-salt them and put them in jars and leave them to ferment in the cellar, in the root cellar.
And this produces something that tastes like a pickled, unripe plum, almost.
Very kind of savory, but also like acidic and fruity at the same time.
So I'm just going to cut two thin slices of that and place one on each piece of pig's head.
Like that.
So place the first pig's head here, on this box of hot stones.
How are you doing on the second one? About there, actually.
Into the box.
Season with that.
And then I have this very fragrant spruce salt.
It kind of smells like forest, you know, like walking in the forest.
And it's good to have this.
It brightens up the whole dish.
The flavor of the restaurant is very different, you know, through the seasons.
Like with most restaurants, I guess, but here what I think is fascinating with winter is that we're focusing completely in the opposite direction of summer.
Because in summer it's all about, like, freshness.
Whilst in the winter it's the other way around.
Because out of necessity and out of practical reasons, most of this stuff will already have been stored somehow.
So instead of trying to make that seem vibrant in a fake way, we rather embrace and enhance those characters.
We're about 300 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle.
And we're in the village of Nordskot.
It's one of the older fishing villages in Norway.
And to me, I moved here and said, "Wow, this is an amazing place, it's got amazing stuff in the sea.
" It's quiet, it's peaceful.
There's no big stress.
It's like I found this little paradise in the middle of nowhere.
And I'm really lucky to have found it.
Really lucky.
So it's about two degrees, and so that's quite warm for us.
But it's like when it's really harsh, it'll be down to -15 air temperature, zero degrees in the water.
That's cold.
And today we're going after the famous mahogany clams.
It's one of the oldest things on the planet, and a lot of people think, "Hey, what are you doing, fishing this ancient shell?" But the reality is the first 25 to 30 years of its life it's reproductive.
Then after that it kind of retires and just sort of lies in the sand and feeds for about, you know, the next 200, 400 years.
The best thing about living here is everybody named everything after my people back home in Scotland, yeah? If you look at this, okay, we've got a mountain here, which is called Skotstinderne, yeah? Where we are in here is Skotsfjord, yeah? And the village is Nordskot.
As I like to say to everybody I can, I live in Nordskot.
I am the Scot in Nordskot.
No, I want the kicker.
Basically what we're doing is we're having a quick look at the bottom.
I see the dead shells on top and they tell me what's around that area, yeah? Yeah, there's dead mahogany there.
It's quite old, though, because it's white, bleached out.
You got to respect these things.
You know, they've been around for a long time.
And you've got to make sure they're around for a lot longer.
But they taste good as well, which is the problem with them, you know.
They've got this amazing flavor that comes off them.
This is a diver's trick, yeah.
Hot water in the wintertime.
I live in this underwater environment, which is a really special place to me.
When you're in the water, okay, you have this pure silence.
All you can hear is the sound of your breath and the sound of your heart.
It's like a form of meditation.
Whenever we do this, it has to be very gentle.
Because it's like if you're not gentle with the ocean, okay, then it's like you just wreck it.
Technically we're not allowed to use any tools in Norway, so you have to actually work it off with your hand.
And then you'll see half the shell.
Just pull it out, put it in the catching net.
On an average site you probably get about 25 in a square meter.
You do quite a lot of waving, which is quite nice as well because it keeps you warm.
The next part of my job is to try and get it from here to them as in good shape as possible.
You know, so that when you're sitting at Fãviken, okay, you get a taste of here.
Oh This is like sweet umami from the sea.
This is just, you know After 60 years in the sea, okay, that flavor's just incredible.
So for me, this is a product that should be eaten raw.
And you need to open them and cut them into thin slices à la minute.
You can't really have them like open in your mise en place because then they will lose, what is to me, their most important feature, which is that really beautiful deep sea flavor combined with an almost crunchy texture.
These clams have one muscle about here and another muscle about here.
In order to open them you need to cut those out.
So you just insert the knife.
Just bring the knife like around the edge of the clam like this and it pops open.
So I'm just going to take it away from the shell.
So the next step is to clean the meaty part away from all the sort of gills and filtration stuff.
And I just try to kind of fold that away from the meaty part like this and then with a really sharp knife you just sort of cut like that.
And this we'll keep to make the custard from the juice of the mahogany clam, a little bit of cream and some egg yolks.
And then on top of that we're going to put some malted cabbage.
A little bit of pickled rowanberry, some dried rose hips and some dried garlic.
And then slices of raw mahogany clam.
So then we just cut this into, like, nice slices like that.
And you can see it's kind of almost cramping, you know, because it's very recently deceased.
So the next step is to take this custard, which is barely lukewarm, and we'll start with malted cabbage.
And it should be quite a lot.
You should kind of cover the custard completely.
And just start adding these other ingredients.
Almost like a kind of dry salad.
So a little bit of the rose hip like that.
Perhaps a little clam.
A few of these garlicky flakes.
Another piece of clam.
This is a dish that needs to have, like, a lot of the seasoning on top of it, you know.
Because this custard is really mild, and it's only really, you know, a texture.
And the texture of all these dry things is also quite cool with that almost crunchy compact texture of the clam and the very creamy texture of the custard.
So the last little thing is to just add a little herb salt.
And it shouldn't be too much because the clam itself, it is salty, but it's still important to provide a little bit of sharpness and a little bit of that freshness of summer into the dish, which is now complete.
I'm just going to gut these and then salt them and then finally nail them straight to the wall so that we can dry it from the sun and the wind as spring arrives.
I really like working with these fish because they are such good quality, and like they really taste where they're from, you know.
They taste like in the summer when you walk to that pond, you know, it tastes sort of like moss and forest.
So this here is just ordinary coarse salt.
A little handful inside of each fish like this.
The muscles are actually still twitching here.
If you would eat this now, like when we worked with the mahogany clam, for example, it has a very special kind of crunchiness, which isn't really crunchiness, it's just the very denseness of these still contracting muscle fibers from electrical activity that's still active within the fish itself.
If you had a slice of that raw now, you would kind of taste that electricity.
It tastes really, really special.
It tastes like like when it's snowing outside.
I think that having some limitations can be very, very good.
We decided ourselves that we wanted to work mainly with products from this area, an area that has six months of winter where nothing grows.
And that naturally adds restrictions in the way we have to work and the way we have to think and plan and so on.
Because if you have everything all the time, there's very little motivation for most of us to create something new and possibly better.