In the next Grass Fed: A very long, surprisingly personal interview with Rene Redzepi.
This brings me to another fact about my enthusiasm for Redzepi that I need to rectify, or at least confess: I have basically never eaten his food. I have eaten precisely one turnip prepared by Rene Redzepi.
I didn’t taste the meaty asparagus sauce at the event. Despite his invitation for the crowd to taste the nine dishes he prepared at the demo, the organizers kept forks away while cameras snapped. This went on for 15 minutes. Then the dishes were brought to the back to be cleaned. I followed, determined that I was going to try some Rene Redzepi food – there was a crazy two-year-old “vintage” carrot, slow roasted in goat butter, that I had my hopes pinned on once the asparagus sauce had cooled – but I was again blocked, the plates given over to an overeager photographer. When he was finally done, and Redzepi’s delicate herb and flower garnishes, which had been kept pert and fresh despite an overnight journey from Copenhagen, were wilting in the intense Brooklyn heat at the un-air-conditioned event, I was still ready to trash-pick the carrot when the chef told me not to. Too far gone. Butter congealed, temperatures off.
This month will see the arrival of Redzepi’s second book, “Noma: Time & Place in Nordic Cuisine.” It’s an art book and a catalog of the chef’s creations, something to be held and marveled at. His plating style is masterful; most of the book is made up of overhead shots of finished dishes. Fortunately, Ditte Isager’s photography is gorgeous, and she captures the dishes beautifully. I could have gone for more of her landscapes in the mix, but her photos of Redzepi’s raw ingredients – beautifully lit and styled – will make your heart ache the next time you go to buy berries (p. 140) or crabs (p. 167).
The next day at lunch, I watched from the kitchen while Redzepi and his helpers put together the meal. When the radish pot course was cleared, I noticed that a couple of the guests hadn’t finished their portions. At that point I knew that I wasn’t getting the assignment to write the story, and that meant I wasn’t going to Copenhagen, and who knows if I’d ever get to eat the food of Rene Redzepi. So I grabbed one of the pots from the bus bins and went at the leftovers inside of it, scooping up the soil with my fingers and a couple of leftover leaves — left over by someone who didn’t get that Redzepi had meant for the leaves to be there Coach bags outlet, that the leaves, as much as anything, were the point of the dish.
The book’s recipes are what I think of as “professional style” — scant on detail, heavy on ideas, mercilessly terse. Many require ingredients or techniques that none of us will ever have in our homes. But there are ideas and techniques throughout the book that the attentive and patient reader will be able to extract and put into play at home.
I’m confident of that because the first time I met Redzepi was at Omnivore, one of those newfangled European food happenings that are all the rage right now, and I saw him do a cooking demonstration that was probably the best I’ve seen. I attempted to take notes and sketch what he was doing. I took pictures and tape-recorded. But even though he talked and cooked with ease and authority, and had a sense of genuine wonderment and curiosity about him, it was hard to keep up. Nine courses of Noma food and all the ideas behind them are really hard to capture.
The holy-God-I-want-to-try-that-at-home detail: the sauce that finished the white asparagus dish was hot grilled asparagus that was quickly puréed, passed through a sieve and put on the plate. Redzepi said that asparagus, right at that moment – not cooled before puréeing and not the cooled purée but the à la minute preparation – had a taste and texture like an asparagus purée made with the richest meat broth. It was a technique that Redzepi said he stumbled upon via the oldest method of kitchen inquiry: constant tasting. During my time with him, it became clear that he is always paying attention to what is in front of and around him. Rene Redzepi is tuned in.
A well-meaning forager had delivered something for the event that was not at all what Redzepi was hoping it would be; botanically, I’d describe it as ditch weed. A few minutes after it had been taken outside to the trash, Redzepi was out there, picking it apart out on the street, tasting each section. He settled on some part of the tops as satisfying Coach bags outlet, and one of his helpers began taking the plants apart.
The ditch weed ended up, I think, in a variation on the dish Redzepi calls radishes in a pot, though there were things other than radishes in the pot for the lunch at Ko. The dish is this: a small terra cotta pot, filled with “herb cream” and “malt soil” that looks exactly like wet, moist soil. Radishes — only the prettiest, tenderest leaves still attached — are stuck in the “soil,” and eaten like they’ve just been pulled from the dirt, if dirt was crazy delicious and if the earth peeled and hand-cut and shaped each radish for you.
Back before Frank Bruni wrote his profile of Rene Redzepi — the chef of Noma, the Danish restaurant that was recently named as the best in the world by an influential European poll — for The Times, I thought I might be doing the same thing.
The less esoteric: a picture of white asparagus wrapped in spruce shoots. As the spruce heats, it exudes its essential oils, and the white asparagus takes their flavor. Redzepi made the point that the spruce grows along the asparagus field where the vegetables were from, which is how he made the connection.
Things didn’t work out with me and the assignment, but while Redzepi was in town in June, he was generous with his time. I arranged to spend a few days trailing him through a cooking demonstration at the Omnivore festival in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and his preparations for a media luncheon at Momofuku Ko in the East Village. The only time he had for a long, sit-down interview was during a lunch at Eleven Madison Park, so I joined him for that, too.
Because he was dealing with unfamiliar produce — from around New York City — he was tasting constantly. Certainly vegetables were more astringent, more acid, sweeter than their Nordic counterparts. Herbs were more peppery, or different in flavor from the herb with the same name in Copenhagen.
My favorite part of the book, maybe because I’m a sucker for a chef’s yarn, is Redzepi’s transcription of a diary he kept before he opened Noma. It records his impressions on a voyage around the Nordic region just as he was opening his eyes to what the raw materials of Nordic cuisine really were. I won’t spoil the read, but there are sea squalls and much puffin eating in there for those who take the trip.
And that was my moment of realization with Redzepi’s cooking: that all the technique, all the work, all the intelligence and passion, adds up to a very graceful, natural, almost obvious-seeming crescendo that can be powerfully delicious and ideologically engaging. But only for those paying attention. Otherwise, it can seem as ephemeral as the overlooked leaves of a turnip top, sent back into the kitchen to be thrown away.
My notebook turned into a blur. The second page included a couple of eye-opening if esoteric notes and one technique I knew I’d try. The most esoteric: “Beaver tastes like deer. But a bit fishy.” (If you want to know more about beaver cookery and see the photo of a whole roasted raccoon that’s been haunting me day and night, go here.)
This week, Peter Meehan writes the first of two epic Grass Fed postings on Rene Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen.
It was the night before he was preparing for a media luncheon, and he, a German cook named Thomas and a former Noma employee who now cooks in New York were working hard. I’d say feverishly — it was hot and rainy that night — but Redzepi runs a kitchen with cool economy. He deployed levity as needed. The volume and precision of the work was impressive; the results were picked flowers, perfectly cut vegetables. Very, very simple, very beautiful and natural.
He was preparing some tiny Tokyo turnips, turnips like Super Mario used to pull out of the ground. He was peeling them, tasting, peeling, tasting, turning Coach bags outlet, tasting. Once he’d gotten the feel for them, he took to their leaves, paring away what wasn’t necessary or beautiful. When I told him I’d never eaten turnip greens — I hadn’t, knowingly — he handed me a turnip, sculpted and ready for the soil pot. It was sweeter than any turnip I’d ever had; the greens, still so fresh, were aromatic, crunchy, a pleasure. I’m not really a huge turnip guy — I had a run-in with a stinky Richard Olney turnip sauce that I’m still recovering from — but man, if that turnip wasn’t good eating, wasn’t the best turnip I’d ever had.
Frank’s profile covers most of the important detail, fact and description territory of Redzepi and his food. If you’ve got time for a video, check out the one Mark Bittman made when he went to Copenhagen for a visit — it gives a nice feel for what Redzepi’s like: serious but not self-serious.
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