Magnus Nilsson’s scallops
THERE is a restaurant way up in the tip of Sweden, 600 miles north of Stockholm that I have been longing to go to for quite some time — it’s called F‰viken. I managed to get a booking a couple of weeks before Christmas. It’s quite a mission to get there — you have to fly from Trondheim via Oslo, hire a car and drive two and half hours north through the snow.
We were greeted by Robert a friendly young man who sounds as though he is from New York. The rooms are cosy and chic, beautiful linen, lots of timber, spruce I think and Swedish grey paint. The sauna and shower is just across from our bedroom. After a delicious sauna and lots of cold beer, we go down to the comfy drawing room at 6.30pm. There are several clusters of seats and a big log fire. Magnus greets us warmly — I’d forgotten that I’d sent him a copy of Forgotten Skills last year and he’s planning to come to the Ballymaloe’s LitFest in 2015.
We had a couple of homemade Negroni. A couple from Sweden joined us and then delicious little bites started to come. The first was paper thin linseed crackers to dip in mussel sauce. Then a little crackly tartlet made from blood with trout eggs to be eaten all in one bite, next lingonberries and crow berries in a tiny bowl with a hot dashi like broth on top. All these bites came with instructions on how best to enjoy them. Next, on a flat stone, a beautifully arranged pickled herring that had been buried underground for two years. Then, a heavily disguised piece of pig’s head inside a crispy croquette on a little birch twig.
F‰viken serves only 14 people each night. It’s always full and guests fly in from all over the world.
In the dining room, the meal itself featured one delicious morsel after another, with 27 ‘courses’.
Altogether it was a memorable experience; the staff are all local and so sweet and knowledge and delighted to be part of F‰viken.
After dinner, there was a selection of little sweet treats, homemade liqueurs and fresh herb infusions and Swedish snus for those who felt inclined.
Magnus gave us a tour of the butchery and curing room and the underground oot shed where they store all their root vegetables and pickles during the Swedish winter.
Magnus only uses local ingredients with a couple of rare exceptions. They don’t even use citrus or spices but use lots of preserved, pickled and fermented foods in the winter. Magnus has tremendous respect for inherited wisdom and tradition and an insatiable appetite to learn time honoured ways of doing things. He and his small team of five chefs kill their own deer, moose, elk and wild fowl and catch brown trout in the summer. They butcher them and use every scrap, including the delicious nutritious blood.
Early this morning we had a rare breakfast that lived up to the dinner the night before. There were several unusual things, a smooth reindeer p‚té, potted trout, a kind of special Swedish yoghurt and a Nordic porridge, as well as cloudberry jam and sour cream, homemade caviar and wonderful handmade butter.
As we drove back to the airport we fantasised about how Ireland could be the new centre of the gastronomic world. We certainly have the produce and without question, many of our young cooks and chefs have the skills, but do we have the combination of curiosity and respect for our traditional food culture and appreciation of what’s unique in our landscape? This is the special experience that brings people from all four corners of the globe on a daily basis to places like Noma in Copenhagen and F‰viken in Northern Sweden.
¦ Magnus Nilsson’s book, F‰viken, Phaidon Press, €45.
This is a dish I am very proud of. Not only is it very close to perfection at every stage, from the raw product to the technique used to cook it to the presentation, but it is also our only truly iconic dish. The reason I love this particular recipe is that it exemplifies everything that I think is desirable in a dish. It is a perfect product cooked very simply and presented with an even greater simplicity, which tells the diner a story of passion, and in which you can sense the skill of the chef ’s cooking in every bite and sip.
The origins of this dish go back to when I was around 20 years old, at a Biarritz beach barbecue. As I was sitting there, talking and enjoying myself, I remembered a Swedish friend telling me some time before about placing some oysters, whole in their shells, on a grill, cooking them until just barely warm and then enjoying them straight from the shell.
I asked a friend if she thought we could find some oysters somewhere at this hour. She took me by the hand and we walked to the cliffs. We managed to harvest about 10 small oysters after quite a lot of hassle, some badly bruised knuckles and a lot of laughter. When I placed the branches on the hot coals it began to smoke a little and we set the oysters out, straight onto the embers; after a minute or so they slowly opened and we picked them off the heat and ate them as we watched the sun come up over the Bay of Biscay. They were briny and creamy, utterly fresh and had a faint aroma of sweet smoke. It was a magical moment.
It was the basis of what I started developing some years later at F‰viken, ending up with what it is today. We don’t use oysters at F‰viken because there aren’t any this far to the north; we use scallops instead.
Even though it is a very simple dish, it is extremely demanding to produce. The scallops must be nothing less than perfect, the timing of the cooking has to be very precise and the process needs to be perfectly rehearsed to be executed quickly enough. You need to have at least two people working on it, otherwise the critical moments will take too long and the precision, which makes for perfection, will be lost.
The iodine saltiness of the almost-raw broth, together with the perfect scallop eaten and drunk directly from the half-shell covered in fresh smoky soot, is excellent with some good bread and mature butter.
Light your birch charcoal with a hot-air blower or an electric coil — never use lamp oil or any other chemical. Spray the hay or moss lightly with water.
Put the juniper branches on top of the charcoal and when they start burning, cook the scallops directly over the fire. They are finished when you hear them making a crackling noise around the edges.
Open each scallop up and pour the contents into a preheated ceramic bowl. Separate out the scallop meat and put it back in the bottom shell.
Strain off the beards and intestines quickly and pour the cloudy broth back into the shell with the scallop in it.
Put the top half shell back on, place the whole scallop on the dampened hay or moss with some fresh juniper and hot coal for a few moments, then serve right away with good bread and mature butter.
No more than 90 seconds must pass between taking the scallop off the fire and serving it.
This recipe, together with the scallop over burning juniper, is the most iconic that this young restaurant has come up with. Served as an appetiser before the main meal, I love it for its deliciousness, and for the egg-yolk flavour of the trout roe and its popping texture.
Mix together the flour, salt, double cream, 50g pigs’ blood, egg yolk and melted butter to make a batter and leave it to rest in the fridge overnight. If you rush this you will get bubbles in your croustades.
Heat the oil with the croustade iron in the casserole. When it is nice and hot, take the iron out and dip it quickly into the batter, then put the whole thing quickly but carefully back into the oil and cook until crisp. Loosen the little croustades from the iron and place on a paper towel.
When all the croustades are cooked, dip them one by one into the blood and place them upside down on a rack so the excess blood runs off. Turn them right way up again and place on a baking tray. Cook at 150C (300F) until the blood is dry and completely coagulated. Repeat until the desired thickness is achieved — it depends on the thickness of the blood, but 3 times is usually enough. To make the custard, place all the ingredients in a Thermomix and process at 80C (175F) until thick and silky smooth. Place in a piping (pastry) bag and keep it at room temperature until later.
When the croustades are ready, halfway-fill them with custard and warm them through in the oven at 150C (300F). When warm, spoon a nice mound of roe into each croustade and place them on preheated stones or plates. Finish with a tiny pinch of salt on top of each one.
200g linseeds (flax seeds)
40g potato starch
5g salt
Mix the dry ingredients. Pour 700g boiling water over the seeds, whisking thoroughly. Leave to soak for 20 minutes, or until thickened.
Spread out onto a sheet of baking paper, cover with another sheet of paper and roll out to the desired thickness.
Remove the top sheet, transfer the dough on the bottom layer of paper onto a baking tray and bake at 150C (300F) for about 10 minutes, or until perfectly dried. Leave to cool on paper — as the temperature falls the crisp will shrink a little and release from the paper.
Serve within an hour or two; it does not get any better with keeping.
Wall Pennywort or Navelwort, Umbilicus Rupestris grows in mossy stone walls and is abundant at present. The slightly crimped thick roundish leaves are juicy and succulent and delicious in salads and make an intriguing garnish for starter plates. Presumably named navel worth because of the indentation in the centre of the leaf but they also have several local names like ‘Bread and Butter’ or ‘Walkers Friend’ because the leaves hold moisture in summer and are known to be thirst quenching. Just pick them, rinse and add to your green salad.
Do you want to blog, but don’t know where to start? Join Lucy Pearce, and some of the 12-week certificate students at Ballymaloe Cookery School, for ‘Get Blogging’ on Saturday, Feb 1, from 9.30am to 1pm. Price: €70. In just three hours, Lucy will have you fired up and ready to go. She is a member of Irish Parenting Bloggers and Irish Food Bloggers, and is the creator of four blogs, two of which were short-listed for the 2012 Irish Blog Awards. She is Darina Allen’s personal blogging consultant and teaches blogging in the UK and Ireland.
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