A Yule Feast

posted by Josh Evans

The holidays drew near and with them came the need to give the lab a deep clean before the break. And the best way we know to clear out the fridges and freezer is to cook.

It is common in Denmark to have a julefrokost at one’s workplace – a ‘Christmas lunch’ with food, drink, and good company that starts in the afternoon and often goes into the night. An NFL Julefrokost would be the perfect way to put our leftover ingredients and experiments to good use: by turning them into dishes. And it would give us the welcome opportunity to celebrate the season together and the end of these past few months’ good work.

Best of all, it gave us the chance to spend a good few days just cooking with and for each other.

We cooked together all afternoon, sat down and ate together all evening. A relaxed, family-style meal with colleagues to welcome in the holidays.

A big thank you to Chris Tonnesen for the photography.

Julius, a masters student in Gastronomy and Health from Copenhagen University, has been working on smoking. He built a smoker out of an old closet and has been churning out a steady stream of duck, goose, venison, pig, and all manner of flesh and organ meats. He made us an appetiser – a reinterpretation, in crostini form, of liver and onions. Pâté of duck liver and heart and smoked garlic, onion jam with rhubarb vinegar and beet juice, smoked white onion and thyme.

Emil took care of the veggies. A chef de partie at noma, he was with us at the lab for the past month before he heads off to Tokyo for a stint at Ryugin. Turnips cooked slowly in butter, carrots, brussels sprouts, pearl onions, with lots of fresh parsley. Sunchokes, given the same treatment, with black garlic and lemon thyme.

Nurdin was also with us for the past month, he is an r&d chef with Raymond Blanc in London, a student of nutrition, and a  supper club leader. He created a beet raviolo stuffed with broccoli purée and quail’s egg yolk, with blanched broccoli, toasted hazelnuts, shaved celery and hare consommé.

I made a dish of brined wild apples, green elderberry capers, and tarragon oil – the result of a few experiments with lacto-fermentation. It had quite a strong flavour on its own but worked well with the meats.

Skyr mousse and verbena kombucha granité. Jonas is working on kombuchas and this was the perfect outlet for the verbena, a particularly successful trial. He included some of our bee larvae granola for colour and texture. It was good, but we decided to make another without it, to focus on the stark whiteness of the creamy skyr and frozen kombucha, the contrast in mouthfeel as they melted together.

Happy Holidays from Nordic Food Lab.