The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e13 Episode Script
Traditions
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
For many chefs, the culinary journey can be traced back to the family kitchen, where ingredients, techniques, and flavors are passed down by hand through generations.
I just feel it in my heart when it's ready.
Cooking together is the only way to cultivate this knowledge.
For Chef Magnus Nilsson, the story of his restaurant Faviken is in many ways the story of these traditions.
Not every meal is a modern meal.
What keeps traditional Swedish cooking alive is the fact that someone uses it.
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.
Jamtland, the region, it used to be an independent country a long time ago.
It's a very original climate where it has been a challenge to survive.
Fostered a very singular character of the people living there, very determined to preserve their own culture.
All the food culture is still practiced in this region.
There are so many fantastic traditions that I didn't know about before starting to travel.
The sad thing is that many of them are on the verge of disappearing.
The only way for things to survive is if they are used, if they are practiced, if they are slowly adapted, with moderation, to the needs of today.
I'm sitting on the wooden kitchen sofa, which is brown and has a rag rug on top of it where Grandpa usually rests in the afternoons.
The cat, Tudor, is stretched out beside me in the heat from the radiator beneath the big window that towers up and frames picturesque Lake Kraksjon.
It is autumn, probably moose hunting season, and perhaps I'm waiting for my father to come home from the forest.
The colors in the trees are almost supernaturally bright in the crisp air, as usual in this season.
I hear Grandpa's heavy orange steel-capped boots coming up the steps and into the porch.
The air in the kitchen is hot and slightly damp, full of the scents rising from the stove and what Grandma is cooking at the other end of the kitchen.
I'm four years old, possibly five, and I really like being there right then at that moment.
I don't remember what she was cooking.
One of the scents I still remember, though, is that of melting brown sugar, the old fashioned sort white sugar mixed with sugarcane syrup.
The important thing is what Grandpa says when he comes into the kitchen from an afternoon working at the farm.
He sees what's being cooked and exclaims with approval, real food, food for a man.
It's not the words' literal meaning that is important.
It's the feeling they convey.
That entire moment can be condensed into one phrase real food.
I grew up baking flatbread both at my grandparents' farm and with my aunt at her farm.
A flatbread bakery used to be something that every farm had, but it's getting more uncommon.
My mom and my aunt are very, very, very technically skilled in the art of making traditional Jamtlandian flatbreads.
They've been doing it their whole life.
It doesn't exist in written form almost anywhere.
How did you guys learn this? I learned from my mother and my aunt and grandmother, I think.
You learned together, basically, both of you.
Yes.
I made this starter dough yesterday.
It's rye flour and milk.
In the old days, before the time of cultured yeast, the yeast that is dried up and resting in the grains of this wood will inoculate the starter dough and make it start rising, giving the final bread a very distinctive character.
In this pot we'll have some milk and a little bit of butter.
We have to have the syrup in.
Golden syrup made from sugar beets.
A little bit salty.
The feeling has to be right.
We season this dough with fennel seeds, anise seeds and caraway or coriander seed.
Some of the leavening agent.
It's quite hard work to mix the actual dough.
Yes, I know it's hard.
There are usually two or three people doing it.
That's started good now.
The right texture is elastic, and it's very sticky.
You make it too bright, you can't roll it out really thin.
I have some meal on the top.
So it doesn't form a crust.
Place it next to the hot baking oven to help it proof for about 45 minutes or so.
That's great.
When you shape the dough, you use a lot of flour.
When it comes sort of loose off your fingers in a very particular way, then that means it's done.
There could be eight, ten, 12 people working together to produce this bread.
And everyone had different tasks.
But when you're a kid, you start with simpler tasks.
One of the first things is this brushing of the flour.
It's extremely important to get all the flour off, because it burns at a much lower temperature than the dough itself.
After that, you graduate to more complex tasks.
You actually shape the dough by rolling it into thin rounds.
And in the very end, you will be allowed to start cooking the actual flatbreads.
Baking like this comes out of a history where it was necessary to store foods.
Bread that's baked, you can dry it, and you rehydrate it, for example, in broths, and eat it months or even years later.
It was regarded as a big undertaking to heat all that mass of stone.
When you'd done your baking, it wasn't uncommon to invite your neighbors to use the residual heat.
And when it was their time to fire up their oven, they would invite you back in return.
Looks great.
Yeah, it looks really good.
I have fantastic childhood memories of watching this dough fermenting.
Usually you just take a little bit of butter, let it melt on this.
Mmm.
And this is a special thing.
You always do this with the first cake.
Good.
Really good.
Nice work.
On the Faroe Islands, it's considered important to preserve these cultures that are still in use.
The traditional food culture is still practiced and alive in people's everyday lives.
Netting puffin, which is what Jogvan Jon is doing, used to be of extreme importance for the people living on these islands.
Because of their remoteness, it was absolutely essential for people's survival during the winter season to use whatever nature could provide.
One of the things that used to be abundant here were different seabirds like puffins and shearwaters and fulmars.
It's almost like it kind of gently sets the bird down midair.
It looks very, very special.
Getting that close to the edge of a 400-feet cliff is pretty spectacular.
Today very, very few people do this.
It has almost vanished.
Perhaps once a year they will net ten puffins to keep these traditions alive.
A long time ago, to waste something would have been unthinkable for the people living in these marginal climates on the islands in the Atlantic ocean.
Even today, the families here are so careful with the way they use things.
Do you know the origins of this recipe? This is a very unique combination to the Faroe Islands, because of the sweet cake batter inside of the cavity.
Maybe in older days we didn't have so much potatoes and such things like that.
The cake, was, like, a supplement.
Ah, so that was sort of the carbohydrate part of the meal.
Yeah.
It's a very unusual combination.
Yeah? But I really like it.
It sounds kind of unbelievable, almost, when you hear this.
Now you're breaking the backbone of the bird, and you dig it out of there.
Yeah, it's not easy to make it.
So this almost turned the bird into kind of a sausage skin, with meat already attached to the outside.
Yeah.
Did you learn this from your mother? Yeah, and she has learned from my grandmother.
I know that you guys don't do this as often anymore.
So this must be a pretty special thing.
Yeah, yeah.
More to show the children, so they and we could get a taste of it.
Because it's something that has been so important for the island, and we don't know how it's going to be in the future, so I'd like them to know how to do it.
You never know it could come back.
When I was a child, we always think about the puffins.
It was quite a big part of the income of the farm.
Let's say 30 years ago, how many puffins could you typically catch during a season? It was different from year to year, but I would say between 5,000 and 10,000 birds.
Yeah.
It's fantastic to see cake batter made from eggs like this.
Yeah, it's a stronger color.
Yeah, it's deeper, darker.
So now the batter is finished to put into the birds, right? Yeah, yeah.
Needles.
That looks nice.
We mustn't put too much in it, because they would be too full when they cook.
Explode.
Like that, and then they are ready to seal.
You said earlier that typically two birds like this would be one portion.
With the cake content inside, that's a pretty big portion.
Yeah.
But really makes sense when you're here, because you need all of that energy to be able to do all of this physically hard work.
Yeah.
Often when we have family and friends over, they always think, "Eating now, again?" It's really interesting, the dish like this that's so perfectly adapted to the circumstances on the place where it was invented.
And then everything being boiled really efficiently in one pot.
Yeah.
And just a little bit of salt, right? Yeah.
How long are these going to cook now? For two hours or so.
Until they are kind of tender.
Yeah, yeah.
Now they should be ready, yeah.
Wow, that looks fantastic.
So much fat has rendered out of the birds.
Yeah.
Floating on the surface here now.
It is bright orange, and it smells of shellfish.
So how do you eat these? We like it like this, filled with cake and potatoes.
We think that is a great meal.
It's quite a special thing these days.
Yeah, yeah, this is special for us, yeah.
A dish that I often used to eat as a kid, and it's very traditional to this part of Sweden.
It's quite particular.
Kalvdans literally means "calf's dance.
" Probably because it's made from colostrum, which is the first milk any mammal gives the first 24 hours after giving birth.
And in this case, it's the cow.
It comes from an old farmers' saying that when the calf drinks the colostrom, he dances, or she dances.
Colostrum is packed with everything that a newborn needs.
There are many, many nutrients.
And you can see how yellow it is compared to ordinary milk.
It looks like it has egg yolks in it.
It is very, very rich in protein, which makes it thicken when you heat it, as if you had eggs added to it.
So I'm going to add a little bit of cream to dilute, because otherwise it's going to become almost like an omelet when I cook this in the oven later.
And the only thing that goes into the colostrum, excepting the cream, is a little bit of sugar.
Some people put a little bit of cardamom or a cinnamon stick in there or something like that.
But I like it plain.
It has a very particular, extremely rich flavor.
I've kind of rediscovered how fantastic colostrum is as a product to work with.
We actually use it in one dessert right now at Faviken.
It's made into a much more lightweight dish than this.
Most people that have had this before, if they had my version that's served right now at Faviken, they might feel the flavor of the colostrum that is there, but they wouldn't necessarily make the connection, because it's so different.
This is part of me growing up.
It feels very natural that it takes a place in the menu.
The base of this dish is going to be a little eggshell-looking crust made from milk powder, water, and sugar, like a meringue, all most.
Lift them up and scrape that little tip off.
And then just hang them to dry.
Become, like, a crispy shell in the end.
The tricky part is to get them very even, and without any bubbles.
I'm going to start by setting the box, inserting these blueberry branches in between the stones.
So the last stage of it is to pipe these very thin, fragile shells with the colostrum.
And then with a little bit of the blueberry jelly.
All it really needs is something that's acidic and has a lot of fragrance to punch through the very fatty, sweet dairy flavor of the colostrum.
This has to be eaten almost straight away, because otherwise this kind of melts.
Kams is the dumpling of my region, Jamtland.
You have to serve with lingonberries and butter.
A dish that I have really, really fond memories from when I grew up.
And we are going to do it all together.
My mother, Anki, and my Aunt Ingis and my kids, Arne and Ella.
All over Sweden there are many different kinds of dumplings.
Most of them are made like gnocchi, with boiled potatoes.
This one is made with raw grated potato.
And this produces quite a different texture and taste.
The ingredients are very, very simple.
Salt pork that was available all though the year in the old days, barley flour and potatoes.
That's the only thing you need.
It used to be an everyday dish for people, but, you know, we cook it only on special occasions today.
Well, your grandmom did.
Yeah, she did.
For her, it was an everyday dish, yeah.
Yes.
Yeah I only ate it with both my grandmothers.
And I didn't like it much, either.
I kind of learned to like it, I think.
It takes a little while.
That's a very important aspect of the meal, cooking, the togetherness, and the learning from each other.
This is something that I've come to appreciate a lot more later in life, especially after being away from here and then coming back.
We experience these flavors and this great tradition that still exists.
So the next thing is to start mixing the actual batter.
We're going to add some salt, barley flour and a little bit of wheat flour into the grated potatoes.
Did you remember the salt? It's always been very important to have the kids in the kitchen, because that's the way you learn.
If you stop using the traditional techniques of cooking, they will very soon disappear.
So first we just divide it up like this.
And when you do it without flouring your hands it's very difficult.
I remember learning how to make these dumplings with my grandmother when I was a kid.
It was kind of Play-doh of potato and barley flour.
And I remember enjoying it a lot.
You shape the little balls, make an indentation, which you fill with big dices of salted pork.
You get a very rough, rugged, kind of fist-sized gray dumpling.
It has turned from everyday food into a food that we really cherish.
It is a link to the past that is being passed on to the future.
We just carefully let them down into the water like that.
To give that to my kids, to transfer this knowledge, to be able to spend time like this, three generations in one kitchen, is pretty special.
Three, four, five times a year, we all get together and we have a really good time.
It's really important to carry these traditions on to the next generation.
Delicious! Tastes like it should.
I don't think that I ate them like that when I grew up.
I never really realized the incredible skill that a lot of the people around me had in preparing different kinds of food.
Coming together and sharing a communal meal, it becomes an event where you can forge strong bonds within the family.
One of the things that has helped shape my passion for food is spending time in my grandmothers' kitchens, cooking at home with my mother, and hunting with my dad and grandfather.
I think that really helped shape the way that I think and how I feel about food today.
Support your PBS station.
For many chefs, the culinary journey can be traced back to the family kitchen, where ingredients, techniques, and flavors are passed down by hand through generations.
I just feel it in my heart when it's ready.
Cooking together is the only way to cultivate this knowledge.
For Chef Magnus Nilsson, the story of his restaurant Faviken is in many ways the story of these traditions.
Not every meal is a modern meal.
What keeps traditional Swedish cooking alive is the fact that someone uses it.
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.
Jamtland, the region, it used to be an independent country a long time ago.
It's a very original climate where it has been a challenge to survive.
Fostered a very singular character of the people living there, very determined to preserve their own culture.
All the food culture is still practiced in this region.
There are so many fantastic traditions that I didn't know about before starting to travel.
The sad thing is that many of them are on the verge of disappearing.
The only way for things to survive is if they are used, if they are practiced, if they are slowly adapted, with moderation, to the needs of today.
I'm sitting on the wooden kitchen sofa, which is brown and has a rag rug on top of it where Grandpa usually rests in the afternoons.
The cat, Tudor, is stretched out beside me in the heat from the radiator beneath the big window that towers up and frames picturesque Lake Kraksjon.
It is autumn, probably moose hunting season, and perhaps I'm waiting for my father to come home from the forest.
The colors in the trees are almost supernaturally bright in the crisp air, as usual in this season.
I hear Grandpa's heavy orange steel-capped boots coming up the steps and into the porch.
The air in the kitchen is hot and slightly damp, full of the scents rising from the stove and what Grandma is cooking at the other end of the kitchen.
I'm four years old, possibly five, and I really like being there right then at that moment.
I don't remember what she was cooking.
One of the scents I still remember, though, is that of melting brown sugar, the old fashioned sort white sugar mixed with sugarcane syrup.
The important thing is what Grandpa says when he comes into the kitchen from an afternoon working at the farm.
He sees what's being cooked and exclaims with approval, real food, food for a man.
It's not the words' literal meaning that is important.
It's the feeling they convey.
That entire moment can be condensed into one phrase real food.
I grew up baking flatbread both at my grandparents' farm and with my aunt at her farm.
A flatbread bakery used to be something that every farm had, but it's getting more uncommon.
My mom and my aunt are very, very, very technically skilled in the art of making traditional Jamtlandian flatbreads.
They've been doing it their whole life.
It doesn't exist in written form almost anywhere.
How did you guys learn this? I learned from my mother and my aunt and grandmother, I think.
You learned together, basically, both of you.
Yes.
I made this starter dough yesterday.
It's rye flour and milk.
In the old days, before the time of cultured yeast, the yeast that is dried up and resting in the grains of this wood will inoculate the starter dough and make it start rising, giving the final bread a very distinctive character.
In this pot we'll have some milk and a little bit of butter.
We have to have the syrup in.
Golden syrup made from sugar beets.
A little bit salty.
The feeling has to be right.
We season this dough with fennel seeds, anise seeds and caraway or coriander seed.
Some of the leavening agent.
It's quite hard work to mix the actual dough.
Yes, I know it's hard.
There are usually two or three people doing it.
That's started good now.
The right texture is elastic, and it's very sticky.
You make it too bright, you can't roll it out really thin.
I have some meal on the top.
So it doesn't form a crust.
Place it next to the hot baking oven to help it proof for about 45 minutes or so.
That's great.
When you shape the dough, you use a lot of flour.
When it comes sort of loose off your fingers in a very particular way, then that means it's done.
There could be eight, ten, 12 people working together to produce this bread.
And everyone had different tasks.
But when you're a kid, you start with simpler tasks.
One of the first things is this brushing of the flour.
It's extremely important to get all the flour off, because it burns at a much lower temperature than the dough itself.
After that, you graduate to more complex tasks.
You actually shape the dough by rolling it into thin rounds.
And in the very end, you will be allowed to start cooking the actual flatbreads.
Baking like this comes out of a history where it was necessary to store foods.
Bread that's baked, you can dry it, and you rehydrate it, for example, in broths, and eat it months or even years later.
It was regarded as a big undertaking to heat all that mass of stone.
When you'd done your baking, it wasn't uncommon to invite your neighbors to use the residual heat.
And when it was their time to fire up their oven, they would invite you back in return.
Looks great.
Yeah, it looks really good.
I have fantastic childhood memories of watching this dough fermenting.
Usually you just take a little bit of butter, let it melt on this.
Mmm.
And this is a special thing.
You always do this with the first cake.
Good.
Really good.
Nice work.
On the Faroe Islands, it's considered important to preserve these cultures that are still in use.
The traditional food culture is still practiced and alive in people's everyday lives.
Netting puffin, which is what Jogvan Jon is doing, used to be of extreme importance for the people living on these islands.
Because of their remoteness, it was absolutely essential for people's survival during the winter season to use whatever nature could provide.
One of the things that used to be abundant here were different seabirds like puffins and shearwaters and fulmars.
It's almost like it kind of gently sets the bird down midair.
It looks very, very special.
Getting that close to the edge of a 400-feet cliff is pretty spectacular.
Today very, very few people do this.
It has almost vanished.
Perhaps once a year they will net ten puffins to keep these traditions alive.
A long time ago, to waste something would have been unthinkable for the people living in these marginal climates on the islands in the Atlantic ocean.
Even today, the families here are so careful with the way they use things.
Do you know the origins of this recipe? This is a very unique combination to the Faroe Islands, because of the sweet cake batter inside of the cavity.
Maybe in older days we didn't have so much potatoes and such things like that.
The cake, was, like, a supplement.
Ah, so that was sort of the carbohydrate part of the meal.
Yeah.
It's a very unusual combination.
Yeah? But I really like it.
It sounds kind of unbelievable, almost, when you hear this.
Now you're breaking the backbone of the bird, and you dig it out of there.
Yeah, it's not easy to make it.
So this almost turned the bird into kind of a sausage skin, with meat already attached to the outside.
Yeah.
Did you learn this from your mother? Yeah, and she has learned from my grandmother.
I know that you guys don't do this as often anymore.
So this must be a pretty special thing.
Yeah, yeah.
More to show the children, so they and we could get a taste of it.
Because it's something that has been so important for the island, and we don't know how it's going to be in the future, so I'd like them to know how to do it.
You never know it could come back.
When I was a child, we always think about the puffins.
It was quite a big part of the income of the farm.
Let's say 30 years ago, how many puffins could you typically catch during a season? It was different from year to year, but I would say between 5,000 and 10,000 birds.
Yeah.
It's fantastic to see cake batter made from eggs like this.
Yeah, it's a stronger color.
Yeah, it's deeper, darker.
So now the batter is finished to put into the birds, right? Yeah, yeah.
Needles.
That looks nice.
We mustn't put too much in it, because they would be too full when they cook.
Explode.
Like that, and then they are ready to seal.
You said earlier that typically two birds like this would be one portion.
With the cake content inside, that's a pretty big portion.
Yeah.
But really makes sense when you're here, because you need all of that energy to be able to do all of this physically hard work.
Yeah.
Often when we have family and friends over, they always think, "Eating now, again?" It's really interesting, the dish like this that's so perfectly adapted to the circumstances on the place where it was invented.
And then everything being boiled really efficiently in one pot.
Yeah.
And just a little bit of salt, right? Yeah.
How long are these going to cook now? For two hours or so.
Until they are kind of tender.
Yeah, yeah.
Now they should be ready, yeah.
Wow, that looks fantastic.
So much fat has rendered out of the birds.
Yeah.
Floating on the surface here now.
It is bright orange, and it smells of shellfish.
So how do you eat these? We like it like this, filled with cake and potatoes.
We think that is a great meal.
It's quite a special thing these days.
Yeah, yeah, this is special for us, yeah.
A dish that I often used to eat as a kid, and it's very traditional to this part of Sweden.
It's quite particular.
Kalvdans literally means "calf's dance.
" Probably because it's made from colostrum, which is the first milk any mammal gives the first 24 hours after giving birth.
And in this case, it's the cow.
It comes from an old farmers' saying that when the calf drinks the colostrom, he dances, or she dances.
Colostrum is packed with everything that a newborn needs.
There are many, many nutrients.
And you can see how yellow it is compared to ordinary milk.
It looks like it has egg yolks in it.
It is very, very rich in protein, which makes it thicken when you heat it, as if you had eggs added to it.
So I'm going to add a little bit of cream to dilute, because otherwise it's going to become almost like an omelet when I cook this in the oven later.
And the only thing that goes into the colostrum, excepting the cream, is a little bit of sugar.
Some people put a little bit of cardamom or a cinnamon stick in there or something like that.
But I like it plain.
It has a very particular, extremely rich flavor.
I've kind of rediscovered how fantastic colostrum is as a product to work with.
We actually use it in one dessert right now at Faviken.
It's made into a much more lightweight dish than this.
Most people that have had this before, if they had my version that's served right now at Faviken, they might feel the flavor of the colostrum that is there, but they wouldn't necessarily make the connection, because it's so different.
This is part of me growing up.
It feels very natural that it takes a place in the menu.
The base of this dish is going to be a little eggshell-looking crust made from milk powder, water, and sugar, like a meringue, all most.
Lift them up and scrape that little tip off.
And then just hang them to dry.
Become, like, a crispy shell in the end.
The tricky part is to get them very even, and without any bubbles.
I'm going to start by setting the box, inserting these blueberry branches in between the stones.
So the last stage of it is to pipe these very thin, fragile shells with the colostrum.
And then with a little bit of the blueberry jelly.
All it really needs is something that's acidic and has a lot of fragrance to punch through the very fatty, sweet dairy flavor of the colostrum.
This has to be eaten almost straight away, because otherwise this kind of melts.
Kams is the dumpling of my region, Jamtland.
You have to serve with lingonberries and butter.
A dish that I have really, really fond memories from when I grew up.
And we are going to do it all together.
My mother, Anki, and my Aunt Ingis and my kids, Arne and Ella.
All over Sweden there are many different kinds of dumplings.
Most of them are made like gnocchi, with boiled potatoes.
This one is made with raw grated potato.
And this produces quite a different texture and taste.
The ingredients are very, very simple.
Salt pork that was available all though the year in the old days, barley flour and potatoes.
That's the only thing you need.
It used to be an everyday dish for people, but, you know, we cook it only on special occasions today.
Well, your grandmom did.
Yeah, she did.
For her, it was an everyday dish, yeah.
Yes.
Yeah I only ate it with both my grandmothers.
And I didn't like it much, either.
I kind of learned to like it, I think.
It takes a little while.
That's a very important aspect of the meal, cooking, the togetherness, and the learning from each other.
This is something that I've come to appreciate a lot more later in life, especially after being away from here and then coming back.
We experience these flavors and this great tradition that still exists.
So the next thing is to start mixing the actual batter.
We're going to add some salt, barley flour and a little bit of wheat flour into the grated potatoes.
Did you remember the salt? It's always been very important to have the kids in the kitchen, because that's the way you learn.
If you stop using the traditional techniques of cooking, they will very soon disappear.
So first we just divide it up like this.
And when you do it without flouring your hands it's very difficult.
I remember learning how to make these dumplings with my grandmother when I was a kid.
It was kind of Play-doh of potato and barley flour.
And I remember enjoying it a lot.
You shape the little balls, make an indentation, which you fill with big dices of salted pork.
You get a very rough, rugged, kind of fist-sized gray dumpling.
It has turned from everyday food into a food that we really cherish.
It is a link to the past that is being passed on to the future.
We just carefully let them down into the water like that.
To give that to my kids, to transfer this knowledge, to be able to spend time like this, three generations in one kitchen, is pretty special.
Three, four, five times a year, we all get together and we have a really good time.
It's really important to carry these traditions on to the next generation.
Delicious! Tastes like it should.
I don't think that I ate them like that when I grew up.
I never really realized the incredible skill that a lot of the people around me had in preparing different kinds of food.
Coming together and sharing a communal meal, it becomes an event where you can forge strong bonds within the family.
One of the things that has helped shape my passion for food is spending time in my grandmothers' kitchens, cooking at home with my mother, and hunting with my dad and grandfather.
I think that really helped shape the way that I think and how I feel about food today.