The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e14 Episode Script
Locality
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
At Fãviken, every ingredient is sourced from nearby regions.
Grain is grown and milled in Jãmtland.
Ducks are raised down the street.
Produce is harvested and stored on the premises.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, the menu here is both a reflection of and a connection to the location of the restaurant.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on really properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
So when I came here to start working with the restaurant, I realized that I enjoyed working with all these produce that I grew up having around me, but never really fully appreciated for what they were.
And that was an interesting realization.
That was what made me decide that we were going to work mainly with the produce from the area.
Tina Goldman runs a mill outside of Ãstersund.
And she mills the most fantastic flour that we use in the restaurant.
The mill is this really old wooden house.
There are no mills like this one anymore.
It's very cold.
And the work is very hard.
This is the perfect dish to eat when you're carrying so much sacks of flours kolbulle.
It's butter, and some oil, and pork.
And then we pour some kolbulle batter; water and wheat flour.
It's a Swedish dish used to eat in the forest.
It was easy and they needed the same thing as I do: warm food and fat calorie.
Kolbulle is perfect, perfect.
Ah, I feel happiness because I'm so tired now and I'm so freezing.
So this is porridge made from different grains from this area: barley, some flake wheat, a little bit of rye.
So most of this stuff that makes up this porridge, it comes from Tina and it's produced in her mill from grains that she buys from different farmers in the area.
So while this is boiling, I'm just going to prepare the infusion of leaves and moss.
And these leaves here, they've been lying under the snow for one full winter, so they're almost decomposed back into soil again.
It has a very sort of rich, humus aroma to them.
And then a piece of fresh moss.
We pick this in the summer and then we dry it.
And by dipping it in water when we're going to use it, we rehydrate it and it kind of almost becomes alive again.
It smells very intensely of like damp forest, you know, like walking through a coniferous forest in the summer.
So this is a light beef broth.
And then I'm just going to pour the broth slowly through the moss.
So as you can see now, it's thickened up quite a bit.
I'm going to add the butter.
Stir it into and kind of emulsify it around the grains.
And now I'm just going to grate some cheese into this as well.
I think this dish is so interesting because porridge is really breakfast food.
Like it's very rare that you see savory porridges.
The only savory porridge that I know of is perhaps a risotto in Italy, where you have rice and cheese, you know.
So the porridge is done.
It's nice, it's very, very creamy.
And this whole dish, it's built around that contrast between creamy and liquid.
I'm going to add some of these.
These are just pickled or fermented carrots carrots harvested in summer at the height of their maturity and then just brined and left to ferment.
They have a very nice acidity to them, and they're a little bit salty.
There should be quite a lot of it.
I'm going to sprinkle some of these grains.
This is the puffed barley.
A bit like a rice cracker or something like that.
So these are mainly here to provide like a textural contrast, but they also have a lot of grain flavor to them.
The second one is crushed rye.
Sprinkle that.
So to finish the seasoning of the dish we have dried chives.
I'm just going to sprinkle some of that on top.
Like that.
So we'll place this exactly like this in front of the customer, and then we'll pour the broth on the side of the dish like this.
And as we pour, the customer's going to smell this sort of very foresty smell and also all of these cereals are going to start smelling when we put the hot broth on top of them.
Peter, or as most people refer to him, "Mr.
Duck," is our poultry supplier.
The first time you meet him, it strikes you that he is a special character.
He has the passion for those birds that is just out of the ordinary.
We've been going back and forth with ideas, and I think that today he produces some of the best ducks that you'll find anywhere in the world.
This is the beginning of a life cycle that I try to follow.
I follow the seasons and I follow the whole life of the animal.
So in the beginning of the spring I collect the eggs.
And after one and a half year, when autumn comes, it's time for them to be slaughtered.
I spend a lot of time with them.
It's actually my best friends.
These are now six weeks old.
And I'm trying to have them a little bit tame, not so afraid of me.
But when I let them out after six to eight weeks, they will not come to me any longer.
When they have spent time with the big ones, they have learned that I'm not the safest person here.
So this is the worst part of the work.
When to choose a duck that I have to slaughter.
It's really hard, but I wouldn't let anyone else kill them for me.
I want to do it myself, even if I really don't like to kill them.
That's one of the reasons that I would like to stop this.
It's getting too hard.
I thought it would be easier after I have slaughtered a few hundred ducks, but it gets worse and worse every time I do it.
You have to treat them good during their lifetime and also after the death.
So I'm going to prepare an ordinary lunch.
Green leaves from the farm here.
Lichens.
Onions.
Some duck eggs.
This is a standard lunch for a duck farmer.
A few duck eggs, some leaves, whatever I can find.
So Peter is not only the supplier that we've worked the longest with, he's also the supplier closest to us geographically.
This is the one? Yeah, there it is.
Swedish blue.
It's a beautiful bird.
They have the summer colors now.
It's such a huge difference, you know, when you go from season to season.
The ducks are going to be good by the end of the summer and they're not going to be any good in April, and that's just how it is.
Yeah.
But most chefs and most consumers don't see it that way, you know.
If they want duck, they want duck regardless of the time of year.
Yeah.
So what are you going to do with it? I've actually been wanting to try to do like a Chinese duck dish.
Maybe taking a tall, narrow basket made of like metal mesh, filling it with charcoals and then having the duck hanging on a string next to that like to the burning charcoals and then like every once in a while spinning it.
These ducks wouldn't be the same if you produced 3,000 ducks a year.
It would be a completely different product.
Yeah, but this is not a good business at all.
I have spent between 25 and 30 hours per duck and I get one hour's salary for them.
That's not many smart people who does such things.
No, only passionate people.
This is really a first trial for a new technique, so it can seem very crude right now.
Some ordinary birchwood charcoal.
Because it's relatively slow burning and it doesn't give off too much smoky flavor.
Because I don't want this to be like a slowly smoked duck.
Just want it to have a little bit of smoke.
So this duck dish we're going to cook now is based on ideas from like several different places.
And the base of the dish is a French classical dish called canard à la ficelle, which is basically a duck hung up in a string, in an open fireplace somewhere, and being like tapped on the wing by everyone that passes by.
And then the other part of it is Peter's inspiration from traveling in China, working and eating the Chinese duck, but with all Peter's produce.
So the duck and his birch sap syrup will be the main components of the dish.
So I'm going to start with a glaze.
The base of it is going to be some of the tasty paste, which is basically beef stock and vegetables fermented with baker's yeast and then reduced until it's very, very savory.
So this is Peter's birch sap syrup.
It's really different from, for example, maple syrup because it has a lot of acidity.
It's almost like a kind of balsamic vinegar or something like that.
And that's because birch sap contains a lot of malic acid, so when it's reduced down, you have like this really, really nicely balanced sweet and sour flavor.
Some rhubarb wine.
This is going to give a really nice acidity to the whole preparation.
Shallots and some garlic, just very finely grated.
I want little tiny pieces kind of caramelized on the surface of the skin.
Yup.
So I'm just going to hang the bird.
And now I'm going to like while this is heating up, I'm going to put this, the sauce, under the bird, and just sort of give it the first baste.
This the idea as the acid cooks, the sauce is going to obviously reduce on the skin, but also there's going to be like meat juices and fat and stuff dripping down into this little pot, and eventually become part of the sauce.
And this is going to be pretty much all the seasoning of this dish, just the birch sap syrup and the tasty paste.
And it's pretty interesting because it's based mainly on products from Peter.
All the products that he makes for us, whether it's ducks, or really good quality wild mushrooms, or if it's birch sap syrup, or if it's, you know, dried lichens or whatever it might be, they all have kind of a distinct aroma that kind of relates them to each other.
You can feel like by how they smell and how they taste that they are from him.
So it's really, you know, like his terroir, the way he handles and treats things and the place in itself gives them a very, very particular character.
So I'm going to leave my brush here now and give it a kind of a first swirl.
So this has been hanging now for an hour and a half, and it's actually already cooked, and it's gone much, much faster than I expected it to.
So we're going to take it down from here, and then bring the little sauce with us and just carve it.
So this smells so good right now.
Like it smells of Mr.
Duck, Peter's place.
It smells of like cooked bird and smells very kind of sweet and savory of the glaze, which has reduced down.
It looks very good.
Like really nice and juicy.
And nice and golden and crispy on the outside.
I think that next time we do this, I'm going to do it slower.
Like over lower heat and for a longer time.
Because it went so quickly today.
So this is like the kind of feeling of an ordinary roast bird.
But I would like it to be like the fat to be more rendered down and the meat to be not kind of pinkish, but more braised, actually.
I think that would be really nice.
This is like really good duck, very, very strong tasting, nice and compact, but not tough.
Fatty, crispy and like sweet, salty and very savory, and like sort of dark tasting.
So this is not at all perfect, but it's very, very good sort of step towards a dish, and it's very delicious.
People can look at this as being a very remote environment.
And yes, it is remote, it's far from a lot of things, but there's definitely enough people here with creative ideas to produce outstanding products for a restaurant like ours.
Without all these people working with us in the area, providing us with the products we use in the restaurant, there would be no Fãviken.
Support your PBS station.
At Fãviken, every ingredient is sourced from nearby regions.
Grain is grown and milled in Jãmtland.
Ducks are raised down the street.
Produce is harvested and stored on the premises.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, the menu here is both a reflection of and a connection to the location of the restaurant.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on really properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
So when I came here to start working with the restaurant, I realized that I enjoyed working with all these produce that I grew up having around me, but never really fully appreciated for what they were.
And that was an interesting realization.
That was what made me decide that we were going to work mainly with the produce from the area.
Tina Goldman runs a mill outside of Ãstersund.
And she mills the most fantastic flour that we use in the restaurant.
The mill is this really old wooden house.
There are no mills like this one anymore.
It's very cold.
And the work is very hard.
This is the perfect dish to eat when you're carrying so much sacks of flours kolbulle.
It's butter, and some oil, and pork.
And then we pour some kolbulle batter; water and wheat flour.
It's a Swedish dish used to eat in the forest.
It was easy and they needed the same thing as I do: warm food and fat calorie.
Kolbulle is perfect, perfect.
Ah, I feel happiness because I'm so tired now and I'm so freezing.
So this is porridge made from different grains from this area: barley, some flake wheat, a little bit of rye.
So most of this stuff that makes up this porridge, it comes from Tina and it's produced in her mill from grains that she buys from different farmers in the area.
So while this is boiling, I'm just going to prepare the infusion of leaves and moss.
And these leaves here, they've been lying under the snow for one full winter, so they're almost decomposed back into soil again.
It has a very sort of rich, humus aroma to them.
And then a piece of fresh moss.
We pick this in the summer and then we dry it.
And by dipping it in water when we're going to use it, we rehydrate it and it kind of almost becomes alive again.
It smells very intensely of like damp forest, you know, like walking through a coniferous forest in the summer.
So this is a light beef broth.
And then I'm just going to pour the broth slowly through the moss.
So as you can see now, it's thickened up quite a bit.
I'm going to add the butter.
Stir it into and kind of emulsify it around the grains.
And now I'm just going to grate some cheese into this as well.
I think this dish is so interesting because porridge is really breakfast food.
Like it's very rare that you see savory porridges.
The only savory porridge that I know of is perhaps a risotto in Italy, where you have rice and cheese, you know.
So the porridge is done.
It's nice, it's very, very creamy.
And this whole dish, it's built around that contrast between creamy and liquid.
I'm going to add some of these.
These are just pickled or fermented carrots carrots harvested in summer at the height of their maturity and then just brined and left to ferment.
They have a very nice acidity to them, and they're a little bit salty.
There should be quite a lot of it.
I'm going to sprinkle some of these grains.
This is the puffed barley.
A bit like a rice cracker or something like that.
So these are mainly here to provide like a textural contrast, but they also have a lot of grain flavor to them.
The second one is crushed rye.
Sprinkle that.
So to finish the seasoning of the dish we have dried chives.
I'm just going to sprinkle some of that on top.
Like that.
So we'll place this exactly like this in front of the customer, and then we'll pour the broth on the side of the dish like this.
And as we pour, the customer's going to smell this sort of very foresty smell and also all of these cereals are going to start smelling when we put the hot broth on top of them.
Peter, or as most people refer to him, "Mr.
Duck," is our poultry supplier.
The first time you meet him, it strikes you that he is a special character.
He has the passion for those birds that is just out of the ordinary.
We've been going back and forth with ideas, and I think that today he produces some of the best ducks that you'll find anywhere in the world.
This is the beginning of a life cycle that I try to follow.
I follow the seasons and I follow the whole life of the animal.
So in the beginning of the spring I collect the eggs.
And after one and a half year, when autumn comes, it's time for them to be slaughtered.
I spend a lot of time with them.
It's actually my best friends.
These are now six weeks old.
And I'm trying to have them a little bit tame, not so afraid of me.
But when I let them out after six to eight weeks, they will not come to me any longer.
When they have spent time with the big ones, they have learned that I'm not the safest person here.
So this is the worst part of the work.
When to choose a duck that I have to slaughter.
It's really hard, but I wouldn't let anyone else kill them for me.
I want to do it myself, even if I really don't like to kill them.
That's one of the reasons that I would like to stop this.
It's getting too hard.
I thought it would be easier after I have slaughtered a few hundred ducks, but it gets worse and worse every time I do it.
You have to treat them good during their lifetime and also after the death.
So I'm going to prepare an ordinary lunch.
Green leaves from the farm here.
Lichens.
Onions.
Some duck eggs.
This is a standard lunch for a duck farmer.
A few duck eggs, some leaves, whatever I can find.
So Peter is not only the supplier that we've worked the longest with, he's also the supplier closest to us geographically.
This is the one? Yeah, there it is.
Swedish blue.
It's a beautiful bird.
They have the summer colors now.
It's such a huge difference, you know, when you go from season to season.
The ducks are going to be good by the end of the summer and they're not going to be any good in April, and that's just how it is.
Yeah.
But most chefs and most consumers don't see it that way, you know.
If they want duck, they want duck regardless of the time of year.
Yeah.
So what are you going to do with it? I've actually been wanting to try to do like a Chinese duck dish.
Maybe taking a tall, narrow basket made of like metal mesh, filling it with charcoals and then having the duck hanging on a string next to that like to the burning charcoals and then like every once in a while spinning it.
These ducks wouldn't be the same if you produced 3,000 ducks a year.
It would be a completely different product.
Yeah, but this is not a good business at all.
I have spent between 25 and 30 hours per duck and I get one hour's salary for them.
That's not many smart people who does such things.
No, only passionate people.
This is really a first trial for a new technique, so it can seem very crude right now.
Some ordinary birchwood charcoal.
Because it's relatively slow burning and it doesn't give off too much smoky flavor.
Because I don't want this to be like a slowly smoked duck.
Just want it to have a little bit of smoke.
So this duck dish we're going to cook now is based on ideas from like several different places.
And the base of the dish is a French classical dish called canard à la ficelle, which is basically a duck hung up in a string, in an open fireplace somewhere, and being like tapped on the wing by everyone that passes by.
And then the other part of it is Peter's inspiration from traveling in China, working and eating the Chinese duck, but with all Peter's produce.
So the duck and his birch sap syrup will be the main components of the dish.
So I'm going to start with a glaze.
The base of it is going to be some of the tasty paste, which is basically beef stock and vegetables fermented with baker's yeast and then reduced until it's very, very savory.
So this is Peter's birch sap syrup.
It's really different from, for example, maple syrup because it has a lot of acidity.
It's almost like a kind of balsamic vinegar or something like that.
And that's because birch sap contains a lot of malic acid, so when it's reduced down, you have like this really, really nicely balanced sweet and sour flavor.
Some rhubarb wine.
This is going to give a really nice acidity to the whole preparation.
Shallots and some garlic, just very finely grated.
I want little tiny pieces kind of caramelized on the surface of the skin.
Yup.
So I'm just going to hang the bird.
And now I'm going to like while this is heating up, I'm going to put this, the sauce, under the bird, and just sort of give it the first baste.
This the idea as the acid cooks, the sauce is going to obviously reduce on the skin, but also there's going to be like meat juices and fat and stuff dripping down into this little pot, and eventually become part of the sauce.
And this is going to be pretty much all the seasoning of this dish, just the birch sap syrup and the tasty paste.
And it's pretty interesting because it's based mainly on products from Peter.
All the products that he makes for us, whether it's ducks, or really good quality wild mushrooms, or if it's birch sap syrup, or if it's, you know, dried lichens or whatever it might be, they all have kind of a distinct aroma that kind of relates them to each other.
You can feel like by how they smell and how they taste that they are from him.
So it's really, you know, like his terroir, the way he handles and treats things and the place in itself gives them a very, very particular character.
So I'm going to leave my brush here now and give it a kind of a first swirl.
So this has been hanging now for an hour and a half, and it's actually already cooked, and it's gone much, much faster than I expected it to.
So we're going to take it down from here, and then bring the little sauce with us and just carve it.
So this smells so good right now.
Like it smells of Mr.
Duck, Peter's place.
It smells of like cooked bird and smells very kind of sweet and savory of the glaze, which has reduced down.
It looks very good.
Like really nice and juicy.
And nice and golden and crispy on the outside.
I think that next time we do this, I'm going to do it slower.
Like over lower heat and for a longer time.
Because it went so quickly today.
So this is like the kind of feeling of an ordinary roast bird.
But I would like it to be like the fat to be more rendered down and the meat to be not kind of pinkish, but more braised, actually.
I think that would be really nice.
This is like really good duck, very, very strong tasting, nice and compact, but not tough.
Fatty, crispy and like sweet, salty and very savory, and like sort of dark tasting.
So this is not at all perfect, but it's very, very good sort of step towards a dish, and it's very delicious.
People can look at this as being a very remote environment.
And yes, it is remote, it's far from a lot of things, but there's definitely enough people here with creative ideas to produce outstanding products for a restaurant like ours.
Without all these people working with us in the area, providing us with the products we use in the restaurant, there would be no Fãviken.