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For a closer look at some of Sweden's lesser-known gourmet products, we visit Lena Engelmark,
a specialty producer who is packaging up some of Sweden's wildest flavors.
And we'll take a lesson from Swedish cheese-maker Claes Jürssas, as he shows us a few of Sweden's favorite cheeses.
In Sweden, we have a long history, we have what we call Allemansrätt, which means everyone's
right to walk along the land and pick and forage, so you can survive because of the long distances.
And so it's quite common, you go into the forest and you pick your own berries, you pick your mushrooms,
but the plants, we've lost, somehow during the way.
And I think it's a pity because there's so many interesting tasters and flavors in the plants.
This, everyone would know, this is the flower of chives.
You could eat it whole. The most common thing is that you eat the leaves but
you can eat the whole flower, you could also take...
it's a bunch of small flowers so you can actually eat the flowers themselves and they're beautiful when you look closely at them.
You can also pickle them - the buds - and that's what I've done here. I pickled the buds.
Another thing I know you have in the United States as well, is this one. I call it chickweed.
And if you take the tip of it, it's one of the best wild herbs.
Mild and a bit nutty in taste, great for putting in a salad.
So you can eat it in salads, you can also cook it and make a stew or a soup from it. Very mild in taste.
Another one, I don't really know the English name for it,
but you find them growing wild and it tasted like peas.
Beautiful flowers, there are different - a number of different kinds, and they're all edible.
In Swedish, we would call it a Vildmorot.
We have a spruce shoot. Also edible.
Most people know that you can eat them when they're really, really young, like this. Really small.
And they taste almost just like lemon.
Very little of the Spruce taste,
but then you can experiment. The longer they get, the older the shoots get, the more taste you get of spruce.
So I pickle the small ones.
I make syrup when they're a little bit older. You still have this freshness, a lot of acid in it.
And when they get really green and nice, I'll make oil.
This spruce oil, with this green lovely clear color, is oil spiced with the Spruce. When the shoots get longer and stronger in the Spruce taste.
So, Norwegian Spruce is what we have here in Sweden, growing wild, and that's the one I'm using.
And you can smell the smell of Christmas tree of it.
I'm also trying some of the more spicy things, in with the technique of capers, with salt and vinegar
So, these are dandelion buds. Dandelion has a very strong, bitter taste to it and also slow.
Which you normally never eat - the slow berry itself.
You just pour boiling water on it, let it cool, take the water off, heat it up again, and do that - repeat that - three times and then you add sugar to it you get a wonderful lemonade
with a very strong color, a very fantastic taste.
If you try the berries themselves, they're so tart that your whole mouth just scrunches together. It's terrible.
But if you wait until late in the fall, after a couple of nights of frost, most of the tartness goes away.
So when I did this, it came out really fruity. Interesting.
And it has small pits (like plums) in it, because it is a plum relative. So, that's an interesting one.
I make a few marmalades. And when I do them it's because we have a lot of fruits and berries on the ground where we are.
I have a plum marmalade, and I always love to keep the skin of the plums, which gives a bit of a burnt taste. So I spike this with hop.
Goes very well with cheese.
And I also make a black currant marmalade, and I grow a chocolate mint.
So I just add a little bit of chocolate mint to this black currant and I cook them in a way to get the caramelization taste, not just the fruity marmalade.
But the really - cooked for a long time. I really condensed it and caramelized the taste.
I'd say wilderness is part of the flavors in Sweden when it comes to berries, mushrooms and meat.
It is becoming more of what I'm doing now with the spruces, with the slow elder flower, etc - is now becoming bigger and bigger in Sweden.
We see a definite trend. We have Noma, who's inspired quite a few here in Sweden.
We have one up in the Jämtland, Fäviken, with the same traditional ones
using what's around you with the nearby. So that's definitely coming very strongly and I can see there's an amazing interest for the products that I'm doing and that
is not because I'm doing unique products itself. It's because the interest of these products.
Rediscovering what we have here in Sweden.
Re-establishing the Swedish edible plants as well.
Which is fantastic and I'm really happy about it.
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We are in the middle of a region called Sörmland in Sweden.
And the small city called Film and we have our small dairy there.
We don't have any cows at all. Overall, we buy the milk from four different farms, biological farms around us, and produce artisanal cheese from that.
Hundred years ago, every farm made their own cheese. Everybody could make cheese on their farms, so....
Then, there's like the structure, it become all over the world, it becomes too big, a bigger units.
And twenty-five years ago, when I started, there were about 15 small-scale producers in Sweden.
That's nothing I mean we
are 9 million people, so it's nothing.
Every cheese that was made, of this tons of cheese every day, was made in industrial way.
And they made good cheese. It is no problem with that. They made good cheese, but it's not that little bit of extra you can get on a small-scale production.
Nowadays, there are about 140 small-scale dairies in Sweden, working with both cow milk, sheep milk and goat milk.
So, it has increased a lot during this last 25 years and the curve of the increasement is rather going straight up.
I brought here some samples all the typical Swedish cheeses I think.
We are, of course, making Camembert and Brie and things that we normally import from France but
those are not typical for Sweden. So...
I brought those on. That is hard and semi-hard cheeses.
To start with, we have what we call Djulö - that's an old type of Castle Cheese
It's made from - in different castles all around Sweden.
And the mixture of acid, bacterias, milk acid bacteria - are very special for this one.
This one is stored about six months. That's minimum, I think.
But you can store it for another six months without problem. It's just getting stronger and more taste.
So, this one you can add it on a sandwich or with a knife, in pieces like this, after dinner.
We have a small one here called the Brukets Blå. Very Swedish name. It's dedicated to an old football team in a small village near us, Hälleforsnäs.
And it's wax on the outside, blue wax, that keeps it from drying out.
And this one is a speciality from the south,
the southern part of Sweden, it's called Småland, and they call it "home cheese."
They had the milk stored for several days until they get enough milk to make a cheese of it, and while it was stored it was becoming more acidic
and they took away the cream, and they made the butter of the cream, and what's left, they made a cheese out of it.
And this one is very acid compared to the other ones.
We have modernized it a little bit, so we don't take away the the cream, we make it on whole fat milk and put a little more acid in from the beginning
in a special blend, of course, from mixture.
That, we found out, will work for this one.
We store it in in vacuum bags and, before selling it, we take away the vacuum bag, dry it and wax it.
This one is - we call it a hard cheese, but it's not so hard - it is a semi-hard, semi-soft, all that.
But this store for one year about.
The next one is a little bit special. This is - we made this one for a special occasion.
It's called His Majesty the King's Birthday Cheese
Because when he was turning 60-years old, it was supposed to serve this one on the official dinner, together with beer and schnapps
And we also had some pickles on on the plate.
And it contains herbs, you see, it's old spice in it. It's not the common sheep's herb, but...
This one will be served with -- not with wine-- with beer after dinner. Or after dinner but before the dessert.
This big one here, this is typical Swedish.
The structure of the texture of this cheese is what we called "little green peeping" in Swedish, I don't know how to translate it, but as you can see, it's small, not round holes in it.
And the type of cheese is, what we in Sweden call, "Preachers Cheese."
That's a very old traditional recipe that it's made for several hundred years back.
And this one we store at least one year. We don't take it out of the storage room before one year. And it's stored in its wax like this.
It can be a little bit of a problem. It's easier to do like I did with this one.
Store it in a plastic bag and then wax it because the cheese is is alive so it's moving,
The moment, you can have some small blessed sarin on the surface, but not a big problem.
Do we have a blue cheese? Yeah. This is not from the beginning, a traditional Swedish cheese.
But, it's our big seller and everybody asks for blue cheese in Sweden.
Every small-scale farm or cheese producer makes some sort of blue cheese because everybody is asking for it.
And this one, I have to be a little bit proud of it, because we have won the Swedish Championship.
I think six or seven times with it. So it's our bestseller.
The traditional Swedish cheeses are - this one - I think. It's a lot of hard cheeses or semi-hard cheeses that was made long ago in all of Sweden, I think.
And it's stored for - to run a long time - nine to 12 months at least.
And we have a tradition of eating it on our sandwiches. That that is the most common way to eat cheese in Sweden.
You put it on your breakfast sandwich. So you eat the sandwich every breakfast in Sweden.
Yeah, for the last 20 years, you have got influences from Southern Europe.
And we have started to eat cheese after dinner like they do down there.
But we still have kept the traditional of cheese on the morning sandwich.
The traditional morning sandwich in Sweden is a white bread or a rye bread or a hard bread with butter on it, and one or two or three slices of hard cheese.