If you’ve been out for dinner in the last few years, chances are you ate something cooked over flames (Burger King doesn’t count). One of the most pervasive trends right now in professional kitchens is the use of fire and smoke, hence why even the trainee in your local gastropub is probably sweating over hot coals every night. It might seem strange to call fire-cooking a trend, given humans were doing it before they could talk, but the world over chefs are unplugging their hobs and reaching for the matches – and I’m currently watching the man responsible for this grating a piece of dried reindeer in the middle of a Swedish forest.
“The Sami people of northern Scandinavia hang these from their belts,” says Niklas Ekstedt, as he plates a dish of burnt leek, deer, fish roe and charcoal cream. “It was a snack that provided salt and energy on long journeys.” Actually, ‘plates’ is maybe the wrong word, since he’s serving it to me on a hewn log. I’m at the starters stage of an alfresco meal with this superchef and, although he won’t be around to cook for every visitor to the country in 2019, he is giving them the tools to do it themselves. As part of the Edible Country scheme picnic tables have been placed from Skåne in the south of Sweden to northerly Lapland.
After booking one on the website, you download a set of recipes, all of which make use of the bountiful ingredients found in 100 million acres of Swedish nature and can be cooked outside. The dishes have been created by four of the country’s best chefs, one of whom is currently chopping wood and looking like the sort of lumberjack that could inspire men everywhere to grow a beard and live in a cabin.
Forty-year-old Niklas is a household name in his homeland, a friendly and familiar face who for years demonstrated accessible but MOR dishes on his TV show and in bestselling books. After growing up in the northern district of Jämtland, he turned away from the simple, seasonal food of his childhood and towards the sort of high-tech culinary skills that MasterChef contestants love to bust out. He did stints in Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck and elBulli in Spain. Meanwhile, his contemporaries across Scandinavia were reinventing the very idea of cooking with their ‘New Nordic’ movement – René Redzepi at Copenhagen’s Noma (opened in 2003) and Magnus Nilsson at Fäviken (since 2008) let the land lead their pioneering, ultra-local cuisine.