I'm going to talk about
flavour, and appetite
for flavour.
So a few months ago I was
in the kitchen, it was
dinner service. We'd just finished
it and we were talking about
creativity,
and it went on
an hour or two, and by the
end of the session, one of the chefs
comes up to me and says
'Chef, I'm not sure I get it
How is it that I'm going
to be creative?'
And of course, I had to laugh because
I still don't know that completely
I actually learned a lot today about
it,
but I told him that
we-, twelve years ago
we had one navigation
point, which was 'shed
off all preconceptions
about flavour',
which has been very, very important
for us.
So,
having done that,
it changed our idea of
what flavour is fundamentally
Our outlook changed. We've
grown to understand
ways in which flavour has never
been used.
Ways that it can actually be
used as a driver for change
even social change.
So I'm going to start by taking
you back to one of the worst winters
in Copenhagen, something we have
quite a bit of, unfortunately.
It was in the beginning years of Noma
and we were in trouble
because back then, we
didn't know what we know today, about
how to stock up during
the growing months. Today
we have thousands of kilos of food that we're
already putting in our larder for
the cold winter, but back then we didn't
and we had, I believe, 48
days of straight frost
day and night. Some days -30°C
at night, some days -10°C
Nothing grows, literally everything
stands still. There we were, with our
promise to cook the best the seasons
have to offer, to distil
a moment in time onto
a plate.
So, in the midst of this
gloom, I'd call up one of my
chefs or one of my friends
a farmer called Sam Viov (ph
02.15), and I told him 'Bring everything you
have,' and he brought a pile
of carrots.
They were old carrots. He'd told me beforehand
'These carrots are old, and I've had
them in my storage room for a long time.'
I was looking at them, and they
were old and gnarly
and I could actually bend them into
a circle.
But when you're there and
guests are coming at night, you think
to yourself, 'Okay.'
So, here's a carrot
We're put off by how old it
is, but that's because we're told
or learn, that fresh is
best.
What actually happens to a carrot
when it's a year or two old? The chef
gave it to me because he liked
the flavour. There was something in it
that he liked.
You weren't just going to peel-, I have three
daughters, I wasn't going to just peel it and
give it to my daughters to eat, then
they wouldn't like it.
But what can come out of this
vegetable if I change my mind-set
So, that's what I tried doing
I told myself, 'This isn't
a root vegetable, this isn't a
root vegetable.' I tried to convince
myself a few times. I said
'Value it as a slab
of meat, a very expensive
cote de boeuf that you paid £50
for.'
And of course, that changed everything
for how you cooked it. Suddenly, it wasn't just
'gemüse', it was a valued, precious
thing that I had to get something
out of because I don't want to throw money
away. So I cooked it,
and I twisted and I turned
and I cooked it, and I added butter
and I twisted and I turned
and I cooked it like the best
chef
would do a premium cut from a good
restaurant. After an hour
or so, maybe an hour and 30 minutes
this carrot transformed. The
skin was now crunchy but also
leathery, and fruity, like a blueberry
The flesh inside had condensed
and reached a point of tenderness
and pulpiness that I'd never seen
before. It was fragrant
and it had an intensity and
lushness to it that I'd never
ever seen in a carrot. It was
meaty.
So that carrot not only changed the
perspective on edibility
as it did deliciousness
How many of us would have just
overlooked it, or simply thrown
it in the bin?
600 billion tons
of fruit and vegetables hit the
trash before it hits our
plate, and that's only in Europe.
Oftentimes, they don't
even make it off the farm, not
because of quality or taste
but because of aesthetical reasons
Broadly speaking, we as consumers
are too bent over misshapen
apples, and we're deadly scared
of expiration dates. I won't
even get into touching
raw meat or raw fish.
So for a while, with all
these new epiphanies, and all this
thinking, we thought, 'Let's provide
a stage somewhere where we
can, you know, talk about the vintage
carrot and what it can potentially
lead into.'
We let the idea saturate and
over a few years, it gave birth to
something that we call MAD
M-A-D. 'Mad' actually
means 'food' in Danish
and it is an organisation
that's designed to keep up with
this rapidly changing
trade which is the food trade in
general, to provide a
meeting place for ideas and to make
food better for everyone.
So at the first MAD, it took the form
of a symposium. We wanted
first, to provide a place where the
people in our industry could meet
and share their breakthroughs
So, you know, the
ones that keep your eyes and vision
sharp and clear.
Recently, MAD has been taking
action,
focusing on projects
that can bring about change
through technologies and information
accessibility.
Over the years we've seen the birth of quite
a number of ideas, actually
One of my favourites was born
again, out of a shitty
day during the end
of winter,
but now, this
idea has started to reach
its potential, not just
on the menu of Noma.
When I say it was a shitty day, it
was truly a shitty day, and
actually, it was even shittier than
that because I was on a Scandinavian
beach. I don't know if any of you have
ever been to a Scandinavian beach
There should be a new word invented for 'Scandinavian
beach'. It is just awful
There is rotting seaweed
carpeting
the whole sand, and
I was there in my boots, walking
around, trying to see
some new growth so we could kick-start
the year. For us cooks, the year
is not New Year's Eve. The new
year is when the first green shoots
start coming. That's when we start
planning and life starts again
So I was looking for green shoots
and I was walking through
with my rubber boots in this
rotting seaweed, with biting
flies all around, and I
remember the sound of,
like, a toilet plunger sound when
my boots were sinking into
this rooting seaweed. I saw
this patch of green.
I went towards it,
and
somehow, this looked good
It looked good, and I snapped
it. It looked like chives
I snapped it and it had a crisp-
like, when you break an asparagus
or when you cut into a watermelon
and that fuelled me with confidence
to think, 'This is edible.' This is
something I usually don't do, and I wouldn't
encourage all of you amateur
foragers to go out and start
eating things when you don't know what they are
unless you have an affinity
to instant diarrhoea
or something like that,
which is something everybody at Noma
has tried at least once in
their career.
But I ate it, and I was chewing
and at first it was just
salinity from the beach
and then the flavour hit me. It was actually
coriander.
So I stood there for minutes
completely flabbergasted
Could it really be this flavour that
I've, you know, travelled to Thailand
for, or had in Mexico City
over tacos?
That it had been here all along
disguised as beach grass
coming through rotting seaweed
I mean, we're in good old
Protestant spiceless Denmark
'We don't have things that taste
as good as coriander,' I thought to myself
On the way back, I was as anxious as
a child to share this discovery
because I also felt
a new sense of urgency
that I hadn't had before. I just wanted
to know more. What other gems
were there? From that day on, the world
really looked different for us
Instead of a shitty beach, or
just a forest, suddenly it was pantries
and larders we could see. The
world was edible. I had a new
appetite.
The taste of that leaf,
eleven years ago, has now grown
into a programme that we call Wild
Food, 'vilde mad (ph 09.10)' in
Danish.
Wild Food's ambition is to map
out the edible landscape, starting
with Denmark.
To encourage people to navigate
and explore it, from school
kids to the chef at the kitchen
counter.
We want everybody to be taught
about seasonality
how to eat from the landscape
and, of course, also how to take
care of it, very importantly
We actually recently got funding
to start this project
and we are excited to see
how flavour, taste
can form a pact with the
natural world.
In Denmark, this is already
happening.
Twelve years ago, when we opened
we put on a little plant called
'ramp'. In short it's 'ramp'
in English you call it 'ramsons'
You may have smelled
it in early spring, it smells like
garlic, it looks like a tulip
leaf,
and we put that on the menu
twelve years ago. To locals, it
was like having zebra meat on
the menu, it was that exotic
even though it was just found
around. Today, it's on
pizzas in Copenhagen
It's in supermarkets in its
season. Some of the 60 varieties
of strange berries that you never hear
about are now in yoghurts all
throughout the supermarkets. There's
a real change happening
So in Copenhagen, we've already begun
the process of information
diffusion, but there's still so
much to do here. Imagine
that children, as part
of their schooling, are taught
about what's edible and not
That they are brought up understanding
that trees are not only paper
flooring or a new patio
but also actually something that can nourish
you.
Now imagine if you were out for
a hike, a jog in the park
or a walk downstream, that you
could snap a photo of
something and then instantly access
its potential for nutrition
and deliciousness. This
is what inspires us, and this
is where we believe can have a huge
impact in how people engage
with nature, once they start eating
it.
Just so you know,
we haven't stopped at just
simple plants or
berries. That will sway anybody
in the end.
No, for some time we've been working
on a project that we called
'Deliciousness as an Argument
for Entomophagy'. Entomophagy
is eating insects
and the project started at
the first MAD symposium we
held. It came from an idea
from a chef called Alex Atala
He's Brazilian, and he's this big
bearded ginger guy, and he came
up on stage, literally, and just
said, 'My name is Alex Atala. Why
don't you eat insects?'
At first, I said, 'Because they're disgusting.'
But then, of course, I thought a bit about
it and said, 'Shut off those preconceptions
that you have about what's food
and think about it.' I thought, 'Well
you know, I do eat honey, that's
the vomit of a bee. So why
don't I just eat other insects
too?' I thought to myself. He passed
around little jellies and there was a
huge Amazonian ant in it
and I chewed, and it tasted like
ginger and lemongrass, an explosion
of flavour, and that's the moment where
I was convinced, 'Yes, bugs
why not?'
So, that was one little seed
a new inspiration and a new
layer to our work. Since then
we've taken so much ridicule
in the gourmet world
because, 'Come on, you're
replacing foie gras with
crickets? Ha!' You know, it was a running
joke for three, four years
but we've found a way to transform
these creatures from a different
dimension into
umami-rich bee larvae
broths.
Spicy ant pastes
We fermented a mix of
mouldy barley, grasshoppers
and wax moth larvae
into a beautiful condiment
that actually tastes like a mix
between Mexican mole and aged
soy sauce. We believe this
range of ingredients have so
much potential that we have no 401 00:13:09,380 --> 00:13:09,070 idea.
I don't need to tell people here
what a great ecological benefit
could be if we could replace
10% of meat consumption
with a more sustainable protein
let's say insects.
Of course, the nemesis here, again
is fixed preconceptions
It's not the easiest leap to make
But let's envision
a scene, though, where
in the future, there's a table
set and there are two plates
Option A, Option B, and a couple
sits down.
Option One is the fattest
juiciest steak you can imagine
It's tender beyond belief
and the juices just burst into
your mouth as you eat it.
Option Two is steamed
rice and lots of crickets
Dozens of dead eyes are staring
at you.
Which one will we choose?
We believe that we will choose
the one that's the most delicious,
and we want to show, at MAD
that we can make the outcome
of this scenario less
predictable. We can absolutely
make insects as delicious
as steak,
if not more.
A lot of these ideas, they begin
at the restaurant. That's the powerhouse
because that's where we work with taste
and flavour day in and day out
But the best of the ideas, where we feel
there's big potential for
change, we push them over
to MAD, because MAD
holds the real future, we
believe, the real possibilities
Nowadays, you see it all
over in our shifting trade
Cooks, they are actually trying to use
their knowledge like that, not just
for the sake of the 40 people
at night, they want to take care of
the guests long after the bill has
been paid.
They also want to do things
that use their skillset for the
benefit of society,
like all you successful
engineers.
So today, what we see is a whole
new world of opportunity for
flavour.
That's what I wanted to say.
That I hope that you can join
us, especially in these parts
of the world, in these good old Protestants'
world, where flavour equals
good times, and good times is
not good.
That you can join us
in a new appetite for flavour
and then I think we can create
real sustainable change
in the food world. Thank you very much