[Hip synth music]
Back on Fjäderholmarna Krog, we joined CIA Chef Instructor Lars Kronmark
for a dockside demonstration of several varieties of pickled herring.
Accompanying Lars Kronmark is Steve Jilleba
a certified master chef and the executive chef for Unilever Food Solutions.
[Lars Kronmark speaking] Steve, we're going to talk about herrings.
And I'd like to show you how herrings is made from the salted state.
How it's made and becomes a marinated herring dish and how we can make different variations.
So, herrings come in a salted fillet like this.
Very rough. And the only way you can use this is just like when you de-salt cod
You basically water it for 24 hours to get the salt off.
After the saltiness comes off the herring, it looks a little bit different. It looks a little bit smaller.
And the herring is now de-salted, but quite flavorless.
The next thing we need to do is to put it into a herring brine.
This herring brine is one part vinegar. In Sweden and Scandinavia, they use a very strong vinegar, it has a very high acid.
The second part is - so it's one part vinegar, two parts sugar, and three parts water.
This herring is just placed in this marinate for about 24 hours minimum.
It can stay in here for as long as 2 to 3 months.
At this stage, as you can see it has onions and carrots and bay leaves and mustard seeds.
White herring is never sold whole like this. It's always cut up.
Herring is placed on the table, cut into four pieces at an angle.
It's very important to remember that there are two kinds of herrings in Sweden: there's a fatty herring and a lean herring.
[Chef Jilleba speaking] I guess they explained also, I think the herring from the Baltic is actually smaller and less fatty, which is more local. And from north, it's fattier...
[Lars Kronmark speaking] And they swim less and they eat more. There be better food. So the Baltic Herring is always the skinny one we see many times back in the United States, we see the Baltic Herring.
At this point, I can make this herring into several different flavors.
First one is a mustard herring. Mustard, sour cream, seasoning.
Second one is Lingonberry Herring, which consists of sour cream, mayonnaise and creme fraiche and lingonberry sauce.
And the last one is easily done. It's simple. The marinated herring.
Served with some of the marinaded onions.
And here's your first herring table with strong aged cheese. This cheese is actually aged for 40 months.
Served with cracker bread, a Knäckebröd, as we call it in Sweden.
The last one is really my favorite. It's the plain simple vinegar marinade herring, that I explained earlier.
[Chef Jilleba speaking] So this is actually the base for all these. I mean, really, they use this as the base.
And I see we have some Aquavit that definitely goes with this.
[Lars Kronmark speaking] Yes, you want to try one? [Chef Jilleba speaking] Of course.
[Lars Kronmark speaking] Yes, let's go ahead. This is what the Swedish people drink with the herring and also in many all parts of Scandinavia.
And this is an O.P. Anderson. It's a very classic one. You notice how small the glasses are, Steve?
And the Aquavit is not frozen. But many people believe that you have to freeze the Aquavit. Obviously if you freeze the Aquavit, the vodka, you don't taste it.
We've heard that earlier from Gert [Klötzke], that if you keep it room temperature, you smell and you taste all the different herbs that are involved in the aquavit.
We have three versions here. Well, let's go ahead and taste this one.
Cheers.
[Lars Kronmark speaking] Delicious. [Chef Jilleba speaking] Very good. [Lars Kronmark speaking] What do you taste?
[Chef Jilleba speaking] Cumin, little caraway...
[Lars Kronmark speaking] Yes. Dill. And of course, it's made of potato spirits.