Nordic Food Lab

by Johnny Drain This series is about oxidation, rancidity, and aging butter. In Part 1 I gave some background about butter, rancidity and the cultural context for eating aged butter. In this second part, I’ll explore the science of oxidation in fats and the safety of eating them. I’ll then describe the results of my work on culturing butters with unusual sources of bacteria in Part 3 and on aging butters in Part 4. In Part 1 of this series, we examined how rancidity, culturally speaking, is rather poorly defined: foodstuffs can be seen as rancid depending on historical precedent and context, even though they may involve similar or identical chemical processes in foodstuffs we regard as delicious. From a scientific perspective, rancidity can be defined a little more strictly, though we will see that discussing the science of rancidity, oxidation, and their relationship to each other can still become … Read more

by Johnny Drain This series is about oxidation, rancidity, and making aged butter. In this first part, I’ll give some background about butter, rancidity, and the cultural context for eating aged butter. In the second part, I’ll explore the science of oxidation in fats and the safety of eating them. I’ll then describe the results of my work on culturing butters with unusual sources of bacteria in Part 3 and on aging butters in Part 4. Butter. A symbol of purity in India and of depravity in the hands of, amongst other things, Marlon Brando. Butter is a vector for taste. It carries fat-soluble flavour and odour compounds and therefore facilitates the expression of non-water-soluble flavours and aromas, such as of spices and herbs, in our food. In this role it is a workhorse of many classical canons of cookery, most notably that of France. It’s also delicious as a … Read more

by Josh Evans and Guillemette Barthouil It must have been in the spring of 2013 when one of our hunters, Jesper Shytte, brought on board a beast none of us had ever worked with in the kitchen. Late April and early May, he told us, was the best time to hunt beaver, and he had brought us one, along with its castor sac and a sample of castoreum tincture he had made. We cooked the tail for staff meal (it takes some finesse, we later learned; Jesper has since offered to show us how) after immediately popping the castor sac into 70% ethanol to make tincture our own. Castoreum is the secretion of the castor sacs of the Eurasian and North American beaver (Castor fiber and Castor canadensis, respectively), which they mix with urine to mark their territory. Beavers have been valued for centuries in Europe and North America for their … Read more

by Anna Sigrithur and Meradith Hoddinott In the quest to obtain sensory pleasures, the seeker sometimes puts ethics aside. This conundrum is especially true when it comes to food and eating. But what if taste could help us participate in flourishing ecologies by attuning us to when and how best to eat certain organisms? The answer is complicated, in part by our human tendency to assign value unevenly to different organisms—a phenomenon aptly described as ‘non-human charisma’ (Lorimer, 2007). In this episode, we explore how non-human charisma colours the tension between deliciousness and conservation. Our main story takes us to the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic sea, the site of a troubling drama between cod, local fisherman, a lot of worms, and an overpopulation of protected grey seals. But first, we take you back up into Sápmi where, for Sami reindeer herders, the endangered golden eagle is less majestic treasure, more economic … Read more

by Josh Evans It was in the heart of winter of 2013, just after solstice. Guillemette and I took up to Nordskot in Norway, above the Arctic Circle, to visit our supplier Roderick Sloan for the first time. The sun would not rise, per se—more approach the horizon asymptotically from below, hover for a while under the glow, and descend again. There was, for a few hours if there was also luck, some light, and none of it direct. Sometimes we used our brief day out on the water, checking sites, scouting new ones. Others we spent walking the wet heath, fishing with the kids at the fjord’s inlet, and stumbling upon things surely known to others but not, at that time, to us. The birch bud was the primary one. Birch trees surround Roddie’s property. As we walked through the brush we would absent-mindedly pick a twig, a leaf, or in this … Read more

by Rosemary Liss As an artist my role at Nordic Food Lab was somewhat more fluid. Yet what began as a gentle anxiety—”what is my purpose? where do I belong?”—became the driver of my projects and interactions. I found a space between the experiential, the edible, and the data-driven. While my research took many directions, I also worked to create installation pieces for the space that manifested both the principles of the lab and my personal experience of it.  I began to gather discarded materials: vegetable scraps, sauerkraut, kombucha mothers. Even within an organization that champions the latent possibilities of the unwanted we continue to accrue waste. But here lies more beauty—within this waste, other types of inedible yet aesthetic elements emerge. Texture, colour, form are still richly present. The building blocks of sculptural installations reached out to me. I wanted to create work that spoke of these things: the interactions … Read more

by Rosemary Liss This project was born out of a type of failure. The kombucha membrane is the perfect medium to tell this story. The look, the feel, colour, texture, flavour. I wanted to touch and taste. I found myself in a gelatinous substrate, a mother, a zoogleal mat. Suddenly I found a confluence of art and fermentation. I became obsessed. Eating the SCOBY brought up rich and diverse imagery. Films where food stands in for sex: that scene in Tampopo where a mobster and his moll pass a raw egg yolk back and forth with their tongues in coital bliss; MFK Fisher’s budding sexuality conveyed in eating her first oyster. I find this appealing, some find this disgusting. Taste happens. With these tropes in mind, I drafted some dishes using the mother. I paired SCOBYs with salt, cream, spice, smoke, umami agents. I used chartreuse-hued coal oil, mauve dashi, … Read more

by Anna Sigrithur The chaga mushroom (Inonotus obliquus;Báhkkečátná in Sami language) grows on birch trees. It has become a trendy ‘superfood’ in recent years, marketed as a mystical Siberian tonic for many ailments. Yet it has also been used as a traditional medicine for thousands of years in Sápmi, the territory of the indigenous Sami people in northern Scandinavia, as well as in other regions of the sub-Arctic. Use of chaga has declined over recent generations. Yet, after researchers began studying the fungus for its health benefits and it became a health supplement sold in pill form, younger people started to reclaim interest in chaga’s traditional use. In this episode, Sami teacher Laila Spik Skaltje talks about both the uses and cultural meaning of báhkkečátná, and Sami journalist Máret Steinfjell shares her perspective on what she describes as chaga’s youth-driven renaissance.

by Kristen Rasmussen Enjoying food is similar to enjoying music—we have preferences from an early age, but by learning more about a longtime favorite or exploring a new genre, we can better understand and appreciate nuances and new styles. Cuisine is not one-note, but rather a combination of factors: the central baseline of chemicals that register taste, the chords and melodies determined by hundreds of aroma compounds, and the tangible percussion of texture and trigeminal effects, such as temperature and spice, all merge to create the songs of gastronomy. Like music, we all come to the table with culture and history that shape our experience and no one combination will work the same for every diner. Given this high potential for variation and the subjective nature of preference, how do we know what makes for a successful combination of ingredients?  In a previous article, Calibrating Flavour Part I: measuring the … Read more

by Anna Sigrithur It is nowadays an all-but-forgotten practice, but there is also a Sami tradition of insect-eating. It was never a huge part of their diet, but as Laila emphasises, when you must survive in the arctic, every little thing helps, especially nutrient-dense and, for some, particularly tasty morsels like these—which is why her father taught her to eat the larvae of Hypoderma tarandi, the Reindeer Warble Fly.