The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e11 Episode Script
Creation
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, the menu at his restaurant Fãviken evolves in a very particular way.
Research can be done and techniques can be practiced.
I think this looks pretty good.
It looks almost like natural lake ice, right? Yeah.
But only when time, place, ingredients and concept merge does a dish come to life.
When it's good like this it's like winning the lottery.
This is the creation of a dish.
This is definitely going to make the menu.
We'll do a few more tries and see to it that we get it going.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on, properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
A long time ago a huge cow stood there, licking a block of ice in Ginnungagap.
The yawning void before the universe was made.
She licked and licked and licked.
Finally she licked out of the ice the form of a man, the giant called Ymir.
As he stood up, stretching his stiff body, melting ice dripped out of his dark beard.
And he leaned forward to drink the warm milk straight from the cow's udder.
From Ymir's left hand, a man and a woman grew, while his foot was spawning a six-headed son.
At one point the cow licked a stone covered in frost.
She licked so hard that she squeezed a creature out of the stone itself.
That creature was Búri, and Búri had a son called Borr.
Borr he met Bestla, which was Ymir's granddaughter, and they had three children: Odin, Vili and Vé.
The three children killed their grandfather Ymir, and from his body they created the world in which we humans live today.
From his flesh they created the soil, from his blood they created lakes and streams.
From his hair, the trees and all the grass.
And his skull became the sky above us.
So this is like sheets of ice has frozen on top of snow melt that is in itself floating over the actual ice of the pond.
And I kind of really like these textures.
And even the sound they make like when you handle them.
And I'm kind of thinking this could be a really, really very nice dessert.
I always remembered as a kid I liked to eat icicles that's hanging off the roofs.
And I kind of think that this would be sort of the same sensation.
That sort of feeling of ice crushing against ice in the mouth, which you don't really find in food in general because most frozen things in the kitchen would be soft like ice cream or sorbet and stuff like that.
Very rarely hard and crunchy.
The most difficult part is going to be to fake these very special circumstances that you have out here with a layer of almost subzero temperature water and the little sheet of ice freezing on top of that that we can lift off.
For any creative person, whatever you produce is going to be the sum of everything that you have with you, what you've experienced and what you have around you.
For me, nature is a very clear part of many of the dishes at Fãviken.
I might not know in which way it's going to end up on the menu.
But chances are pretty good that one day it just fits.
So it kind of seamlessly merges into a concept for a dish.
There is no clear train of thought because that's the whole point of creating things like this.
What's important is that it's a reflection of the place where the restaurant is run.
What do you think about this one 1023? What age is that cow? Seven? That's perfect, huh? Yeah, it should be right for you.
So what's going to happen to this cow now before I can have her delivered to the restaurant? She's going to stay here until we get the transportation.
And then as she arrives to the slaughterhouse, she's going to wait as long as she needs.
Because transport is stressing for a cow.
Transport is stressing, and they've got this principle they would never force a cow into the slaughtery.
So they will all walk in by themselves by their own will.
Which is quite rare in slaughterhouses.
It's super rare.
But they're really doing that.
And it's I mean that's I mean that's not much to ask after a whole life to give them that kind of respect in the end.
Yeah, definitely.
Especially when it gives it taste.
It means that much to the taste of the meat as well.
It definitely does.
So it comes together.
Be nice to the cow and they'll be nice to us.
When you were a kid, did you ever have like a glass of soda with ice in it, and then when you were done drinking the soda did you chew on that ice? Yes, I did, yeah, many times.
That's the best part of it.
Sort of, like it's a very satisfying texture, right? Yeah.
So like I've been thinking about this since kind of you remember in the midwinter we had the like period of time when it was warmer? The lake melted and then it kind of refroze? And I saw like a sheet of ice like that and I've been thinking about this since then.
Basically we're going to layer two different liquids on top of each other.
This one here is sugar syrup, which has a higher density than water.
So the water should float on top like a thin little layer.
And when you put it into the freezer, the sugar syrup won't freeze because it has sugar in it, whilst the water will freeze to a crispy, crunchy ice.
How thick you want it to be? As thin as possible without losing the texture.
Because we want to have that piece of ice really, really crunchy to that point that it almost makes a sound in your head when you're eating it.
They're going to pour it very carefully along the side of the tray so that we don't interrupt the sort of perfect smoothness of the surface of the sugar syrup.
To recreate something natural like this is really very difficult because this is more not really recreating, it's actually more mimicking a natural process.
As soon as this has covered the whole surface, we're going to put it into the freezer.
There.
I enjoy working with meat like this.
It's essential to understand these processes if you're going to be a good chef.
And you can really see the difference from animal to animal like how they lived and what affects what in terms of quality.
For example, I can see that it's been grass-fed.
I can see that in the color of the fat.
And some people they even say that you can't get beef of any quality from feeding them only grass and hay, and that they don't get fat the way they should and all that.
And this is clearly a good evidence that, you know, that's not the case.
This piece here now is pretty much ready for aging.
We're going to leave it for one week.
We want it to be completely dry on the surface so that the kidney fat will adhere nicely to it.
The reason why we cover all the meat surfaces with the kidney fat is because we want to keep the meat from drying out too much and to keep too many microbes to be introduced into the meat after it's put to rest to mature.
I don't know what kind of dish I'm going to make with this.
I'm just going to have to see like how the meat tastes, how it turns out and what's available to go with the meat when the meat is actually ready.
So this is the rib eye, which has now been aging for about five months encased in kidney fat.
And the next step now before cooking it is to take it off the bone and then trim like all of this fat and like the oxidized parts of the actual meat.
What's happened here during this period of aging is that a lot of the connective tissue has broken down, so the meat has become a lot more tender.
And this is actually one of the main reasons to why we use older animals because they have much more connective tissue in them so they can withstand a much longer aging process without becoming like unsuitably tender.
As we go further in, it's just to me absolutely fascinating that when you cut the crust away and first you have this sort of sensation of really strong, gamey aromas and bleu cheese and mold and stuff like that.
But like in here it smells like fresh cream.
It smells like when you pour it into a bowl and you're about to start whisking it.
Every time I do this, like when it's time to open up a new piece of meat and see what's inside it's kind of like a lottery, you know.
And when it's good like this, it's like winning the lottery because you never really know.
It saddens you when it goes wrong, when it goes rotten, which happens.
And I also believe in like not playing it safe all the time with everything you do.
Because that kind of very easily turns boring.
But it's kind of worth that when you get a completely unique product that you can serve to your customers, which they will never get anywhere else.
Or it is really worth that when it works.
This is now trimmed down and ready to be cut into slices and cooked.
When you have beef of this quality that has been aged for such a long time, I like to do a very simple dish that doesn't really create a lot of complexity around the meat, but rather it underlines that sort of initial beefiness and meatness of the protein.
And in this case, it's a dish that's based on several different items containing a little umami.
One of them is sugar kelp.
And I like it because it has that kind of sea iodine flavor.
Another item on the plate is something we call tasty paste.
It's an almost soy sauce tasting paste, which is basically pure umami, it's very, very savory.
It kind of really reinforces that meat flavor.
So I'm just going to put this into the hot cast-iron pan.
Put a little bit of butter in.
Kind of keep this meat moving around so that we don't get any spots in the pan that heat up more than other spots.
And then the whole point is to create a really nice caramelized surface without burning neither the meat nor the cooking fat, the butter, but just having like a deep, dark taste of caramelized dairy.
And I keep it moving all the time.
And this is really the most efficient way of browning meat.
I think that's going to be enough for now.
I'm just going to leave this until the exterior that we just fried has a temperature which is lower than what we're aiming for the middle to have.
So now the temperature of the sear of the meat has gone down and it's time to give it like one last blast.
This butter here is like darkly browned, but it's still not burnt.
Like it tastes super good.
It's kind of an additional seasoning to the meat.
Not going to keep it in the pan for very long.
Something like that.
While this is resting for a few more minutes, I'm just going to give it one more basting of this garlic and thyme butter.
This is now cooked and ready to go.
I'm going to take a sheet of kelp and just kind of glaze it in this slightly thickened version of beef stock.
A little bit of fermented mushroom powder, which is also very, very savory.
A little bit of kelp oil to give kind of a stronger green flavor profile to the kelp.
And a little bit of the savory tasty paste.
So there, rib eye of dairy cow aged for five months to acquire really savory, concentrated beef flavor.
The whole idea with this dish is basically to create the foundation on which the flavor of this fantastic grass-fed dairy cow can kind of shine.
When I moved back from France to Sweden, I was very fed up with cooking because the produce that I had on hand, it just wasn't any good.
And nor was the stuff that I cooked either.
So I actually stopped cooking and I decided to become a sommelier.
When you go to a wine school, they teach you how to talk about perception, how to talk about what you feel when you experience something.
A wine like this, for example, you would start by saying something about the first smell that hits your nose.
In this case, it's immediate tones of raspberry.
Perhaps even still on the bush.
When you speak about it, it kind of it almost inevitably sounds kind of pretentious.
But the point of this language is actually to make it easy to describe for someone what to anticipate when they eat or drink something.
After the primary fruit you have some secondary aromas.
And in this case, even though it smells like cow, which is to me a positive thing, I would probably say that it smells like warm animal.
And then there's also kind of an herbaceousness in the end.
Smelling and tasting something that's presented for you like a glass of wine or a dish, it's kind of looking into the past, because by analyzing what you have in front of yourself and what you perceive, you can tell quite a lot of how it's made.
But sometimes, like for me in the creative process it's also very important to be able to describe how something is going to be, to kind of anticipate the future.
And to me, working with a team, I'm able to translate what I'm feeling into something that someone who's working on a dish with me can actually understand and work with.
Like this a little bit, you know.
My idea for this dish was I wanted to have something that contrasts that very special crunchiness of the ice in a good way.
And I asked you like a couple months ago now to start working with yogurt.
You want to tell me a bit on what you've been working with? What I have been trying is the amount of time where you heat yogurt.
The longer you heat it, the hotter and the more sour it's going to get.
Okay, so firmer.
Yeah, firmer, and more grainy.
The texture is so good.
To have that kind of fatty creaminess first hitting your tongue, followed by the yogurt kind of breaking up into little pieces, releasing all of that very refreshing whey.
It's super delicious.
And it's still fermenting, but not like closed flavor.
You can feel that there's stuff happening there.
I think this is very, very good.
We're going to try the ice on the still lukewarm fermenting yogurt with these like really nice, fresh little summer cucumbers and just pass them through the centrifuge and get a little cucumber juice.
It smells so good in here now.
Like it smells all like green and summery, right? I think that's going to be very delicious.
Should we bring the ice out, perhaps? I think this looks pretty good.
It looks almost like natural lake ice, right? Yeah, and it feels like it's going to hold and keep quite good.
I think it will, you know, I think it will.
Pretty big pieces of ice I think should be And I like this whole layering of the ice.
It looks kind of like a little ice salad.
And we'll kind of just season the ice with a little bit of the cucumber juice because this is just water, this ice.
And like a few little drops of vinegar perhaps.
Have a taste? Yes.
And the idea is that you have a little bit of the creamy yogurt and a little bit of the crunchy ice and you kind of bite through the thing.
It's really nice.
And the acidic in the yogurt is filling down.
Definitely, it's definitely balanced now.
I think it's a good start because like the main problem with this now is that you and I had one bite each.
It kind of looks like vomit.
We'll have to get the yogurt to stay more firmly to the bottom.
And the second thing is to try to find a way that produces the yogurt kind of like tofu, you know.
Like imagine like tofu splits, yeah.
More solid piece.
Yeah, kind of silky.
And the ice, I'm very happy with the ice, actually.
I think that worked really well.
This is definitely going to make the menu.
I would like to get it on like quickly now while we still have the kind of early summer cucumbers.
We'll do a few more tries with a firmer yogurt and we'll see to it that we get it going.
We just have to figure out how we're going to plate it for 16 without the ice melting.
Development for the sake of development is pointless.
Development for the sake of improvement is good.
I never take anything off the menu unless I have to because we run out of produce or because we come up with something better.
The actual creation of a dish is to me something very intuitive.
I never sit down and make little drawings and little plans on paper and stuff like that.
I just sort of cook dishes.
It's really difficult to know when it's right by trying to figure it out, but you feel when it's right.
You can feel when a dish like really sings to you, you know, when it really, really works.
And that's a kind of an impossible thing to anticipate.
It just happens, it just turns into a good dish or not.
One spring, the winter would not give way to warmth and light, but last for three full years.
This winter would be followed by failing crops and famine.
Brothers fight and society will crumble, as will the mountains themselves.
The Fenrir wolf devours the sun and the time of the wolf will reign.
The Midgard serpent thrashes the sea and waves the size of buildings hammered ashore.
Naglfar, the warship built from fingernails of the dead, unmoors.
The three roosters crowed.
Surtr, the fire giant, swings his sword glowing brighter than the sun itself and the sky shatters.
The last battle between the gods and their enemies will stand at the plains of Vígrí r, dwarves cowering in the burrows and everyone will be in fear.
By the end, the whole world will be on fire and sink into the ocean.
All that will be left is Ginnungagap, the yawning void that was before the gods created the world in which we lived.
Support your PBS station.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, the menu at his restaurant Fãviken evolves in a very particular way.
Research can be done and techniques can be practiced.
I think this looks pretty good.
It looks almost like natural lake ice, right? Yeah.
But only when time, place, ingredients and concept merge does a dish come to life.
When it's good like this it's like winning the lottery.
This is the creation of a dish.
This is definitely going to make the menu.
We'll do a few more tries and see to it that we get it going.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on, properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
A long time ago a huge cow stood there, licking a block of ice in Ginnungagap.
The yawning void before the universe was made.
She licked and licked and licked.
Finally she licked out of the ice the form of a man, the giant called Ymir.
As he stood up, stretching his stiff body, melting ice dripped out of his dark beard.
And he leaned forward to drink the warm milk straight from the cow's udder.
From Ymir's left hand, a man and a woman grew, while his foot was spawning a six-headed son.
At one point the cow licked a stone covered in frost.
She licked so hard that she squeezed a creature out of the stone itself.
That creature was Búri, and Búri had a son called Borr.
Borr he met Bestla, which was Ymir's granddaughter, and they had three children: Odin, Vili and Vé.
The three children killed their grandfather Ymir, and from his body they created the world in which we humans live today.
From his flesh they created the soil, from his blood they created lakes and streams.
From his hair, the trees and all the grass.
And his skull became the sky above us.
So this is like sheets of ice has frozen on top of snow melt that is in itself floating over the actual ice of the pond.
And I kind of really like these textures.
And even the sound they make like when you handle them.
And I'm kind of thinking this could be a really, really very nice dessert.
I always remembered as a kid I liked to eat icicles that's hanging off the roofs.
And I kind of think that this would be sort of the same sensation.
That sort of feeling of ice crushing against ice in the mouth, which you don't really find in food in general because most frozen things in the kitchen would be soft like ice cream or sorbet and stuff like that.
Very rarely hard and crunchy.
The most difficult part is going to be to fake these very special circumstances that you have out here with a layer of almost subzero temperature water and the little sheet of ice freezing on top of that that we can lift off.
For any creative person, whatever you produce is going to be the sum of everything that you have with you, what you've experienced and what you have around you.
For me, nature is a very clear part of many of the dishes at Fãviken.
I might not know in which way it's going to end up on the menu.
But chances are pretty good that one day it just fits.
So it kind of seamlessly merges into a concept for a dish.
There is no clear train of thought because that's the whole point of creating things like this.
What's important is that it's a reflection of the place where the restaurant is run.
What do you think about this one 1023? What age is that cow? Seven? That's perfect, huh? Yeah, it should be right for you.
So what's going to happen to this cow now before I can have her delivered to the restaurant? She's going to stay here until we get the transportation.
And then as she arrives to the slaughterhouse, she's going to wait as long as she needs.
Because transport is stressing for a cow.
Transport is stressing, and they've got this principle they would never force a cow into the slaughtery.
So they will all walk in by themselves by their own will.
Which is quite rare in slaughterhouses.
It's super rare.
But they're really doing that.
And it's I mean that's I mean that's not much to ask after a whole life to give them that kind of respect in the end.
Yeah, definitely.
Especially when it gives it taste.
It means that much to the taste of the meat as well.
It definitely does.
So it comes together.
Be nice to the cow and they'll be nice to us.
When you were a kid, did you ever have like a glass of soda with ice in it, and then when you were done drinking the soda did you chew on that ice? Yes, I did, yeah, many times.
That's the best part of it.
Sort of, like it's a very satisfying texture, right? Yeah.
So like I've been thinking about this since kind of you remember in the midwinter we had the like period of time when it was warmer? The lake melted and then it kind of refroze? And I saw like a sheet of ice like that and I've been thinking about this since then.
Basically we're going to layer two different liquids on top of each other.
This one here is sugar syrup, which has a higher density than water.
So the water should float on top like a thin little layer.
And when you put it into the freezer, the sugar syrup won't freeze because it has sugar in it, whilst the water will freeze to a crispy, crunchy ice.
How thick you want it to be? As thin as possible without losing the texture.
Because we want to have that piece of ice really, really crunchy to that point that it almost makes a sound in your head when you're eating it.
They're going to pour it very carefully along the side of the tray so that we don't interrupt the sort of perfect smoothness of the surface of the sugar syrup.
To recreate something natural like this is really very difficult because this is more not really recreating, it's actually more mimicking a natural process.
As soon as this has covered the whole surface, we're going to put it into the freezer.
There.
I enjoy working with meat like this.
It's essential to understand these processes if you're going to be a good chef.
And you can really see the difference from animal to animal like how they lived and what affects what in terms of quality.
For example, I can see that it's been grass-fed.
I can see that in the color of the fat.
And some people they even say that you can't get beef of any quality from feeding them only grass and hay, and that they don't get fat the way they should and all that.
And this is clearly a good evidence that, you know, that's not the case.
This piece here now is pretty much ready for aging.
We're going to leave it for one week.
We want it to be completely dry on the surface so that the kidney fat will adhere nicely to it.
The reason why we cover all the meat surfaces with the kidney fat is because we want to keep the meat from drying out too much and to keep too many microbes to be introduced into the meat after it's put to rest to mature.
I don't know what kind of dish I'm going to make with this.
I'm just going to have to see like how the meat tastes, how it turns out and what's available to go with the meat when the meat is actually ready.
So this is the rib eye, which has now been aging for about five months encased in kidney fat.
And the next step now before cooking it is to take it off the bone and then trim like all of this fat and like the oxidized parts of the actual meat.
What's happened here during this period of aging is that a lot of the connective tissue has broken down, so the meat has become a lot more tender.
And this is actually one of the main reasons to why we use older animals because they have much more connective tissue in them so they can withstand a much longer aging process without becoming like unsuitably tender.
As we go further in, it's just to me absolutely fascinating that when you cut the crust away and first you have this sort of sensation of really strong, gamey aromas and bleu cheese and mold and stuff like that.
But like in here it smells like fresh cream.
It smells like when you pour it into a bowl and you're about to start whisking it.
Every time I do this, like when it's time to open up a new piece of meat and see what's inside it's kind of like a lottery, you know.
And when it's good like this, it's like winning the lottery because you never really know.
It saddens you when it goes wrong, when it goes rotten, which happens.
And I also believe in like not playing it safe all the time with everything you do.
Because that kind of very easily turns boring.
But it's kind of worth that when you get a completely unique product that you can serve to your customers, which they will never get anywhere else.
Or it is really worth that when it works.
This is now trimmed down and ready to be cut into slices and cooked.
When you have beef of this quality that has been aged for such a long time, I like to do a very simple dish that doesn't really create a lot of complexity around the meat, but rather it underlines that sort of initial beefiness and meatness of the protein.
And in this case, it's a dish that's based on several different items containing a little umami.
One of them is sugar kelp.
And I like it because it has that kind of sea iodine flavor.
Another item on the plate is something we call tasty paste.
It's an almost soy sauce tasting paste, which is basically pure umami, it's very, very savory.
It kind of really reinforces that meat flavor.
So I'm just going to put this into the hot cast-iron pan.
Put a little bit of butter in.
Kind of keep this meat moving around so that we don't get any spots in the pan that heat up more than other spots.
And then the whole point is to create a really nice caramelized surface without burning neither the meat nor the cooking fat, the butter, but just having like a deep, dark taste of caramelized dairy.
And I keep it moving all the time.
And this is really the most efficient way of browning meat.
I think that's going to be enough for now.
I'm just going to leave this until the exterior that we just fried has a temperature which is lower than what we're aiming for the middle to have.
So now the temperature of the sear of the meat has gone down and it's time to give it like one last blast.
This butter here is like darkly browned, but it's still not burnt.
Like it tastes super good.
It's kind of an additional seasoning to the meat.
Not going to keep it in the pan for very long.
Something like that.
While this is resting for a few more minutes, I'm just going to give it one more basting of this garlic and thyme butter.
This is now cooked and ready to go.
I'm going to take a sheet of kelp and just kind of glaze it in this slightly thickened version of beef stock.
A little bit of fermented mushroom powder, which is also very, very savory.
A little bit of kelp oil to give kind of a stronger green flavor profile to the kelp.
And a little bit of the savory tasty paste.
So there, rib eye of dairy cow aged for five months to acquire really savory, concentrated beef flavor.
The whole idea with this dish is basically to create the foundation on which the flavor of this fantastic grass-fed dairy cow can kind of shine.
When I moved back from France to Sweden, I was very fed up with cooking because the produce that I had on hand, it just wasn't any good.
And nor was the stuff that I cooked either.
So I actually stopped cooking and I decided to become a sommelier.
When you go to a wine school, they teach you how to talk about perception, how to talk about what you feel when you experience something.
A wine like this, for example, you would start by saying something about the first smell that hits your nose.
In this case, it's immediate tones of raspberry.
Perhaps even still on the bush.
When you speak about it, it kind of it almost inevitably sounds kind of pretentious.
But the point of this language is actually to make it easy to describe for someone what to anticipate when they eat or drink something.
After the primary fruit you have some secondary aromas.
And in this case, even though it smells like cow, which is to me a positive thing, I would probably say that it smells like warm animal.
And then there's also kind of an herbaceousness in the end.
Smelling and tasting something that's presented for you like a glass of wine or a dish, it's kind of looking into the past, because by analyzing what you have in front of yourself and what you perceive, you can tell quite a lot of how it's made.
But sometimes, like for me in the creative process it's also very important to be able to describe how something is going to be, to kind of anticipate the future.
And to me, working with a team, I'm able to translate what I'm feeling into something that someone who's working on a dish with me can actually understand and work with.
Like this a little bit, you know.
My idea for this dish was I wanted to have something that contrasts that very special crunchiness of the ice in a good way.
And I asked you like a couple months ago now to start working with yogurt.
You want to tell me a bit on what you've been working with? What I have been trying is the amount of time where you heat yogurt.
The longer you heat it, the hotter and the more sour it's going to get.
Okay, so firmer.
Yeah, firmer, and more grainy.
The texture is so good.
To have that kind of fatty creaminess first hitting your tongue, followed by the yogurt kind of breaking up into little pieces, releasing all of that very refreshing whey.
It's super delicious.
And it's still fermenting, but not like closed flavor.
You can feel that there's stuff happening there.
I think this is very, very good.
We're going to try the ice on the still lukewarm fermenting yogurt with these like really nice, fresh little summer cucumbers and just pass them through the centrifuge and get a little cucumber juice.
It smells so good in here now.
Like it smells all like green and summery, right? I think that's going to be very delicious.
Should we bring the ice out, perhaps? I think this looks pretty good.
It looks almost like natural lake ice, right? Yeah, and it feels like it's going to hold and keep quite good.
I think it will, you know, I think it will.
Pretty big pieces of ice I think should be And I like this whole layering of the ice.
It looks kind of like a little ice salad.
And we'll kind of just season the ice with a little bit of the cucumber juice because this is just water, this ice.
And like a few little drops of vinegar perhaps.
Have a taste? Yes.
And the idea is that you have a little bit of the creamy yogurt and a little bit of the crunchy ice and you kind of bite through the thing.
It's really nice.
And the acidic in the yogurt is filling down.
Definitely, it's definitely balanced now.
I think it's a good start because like the main problem with this now is that you and I had one bite each.
It kind of looks like vomit.
We'll have to get the yogurt to stay more firmly to the bottom.
And the second thing is to try to find a way that produces the yogurt kind of like tofu, you know.
Like imagine like tofu splits, yeah.
More solid piece.
Yeah, kind of silky.
And the ice, I'm very happy with the ice, actually.
I think that worked really well.
This is definitely going to make the menu.
I would like to get it on like quickly now while we still have the kind of early summer cucumbers.
We'll do a few more tries with a firmer yogurt and we'll see to it that we get it going.
We just have to figure out how we're going to plate it for 16 without the ice melting.
Development for the sake of development is pointless.
Development for the sake of improvement is good.
I never take anything off the menu unless I have to because we run out of produce or because we come up with something better.
The actual creation of a dish is to me something very intuitive.
I never sit down and make little drawings and little plans on paper and stuff like that.
I just sort of cook dishes.
It's really difficult to know when it's right by trying to figure it out, but you feel when it's right.
You can feel when a dish like really sings to you, you know, when it really, really works.
And that's a kind of an impossible thing to anticipate.
It just happens, it just turns into a good dish or not.
One spring, the winter would not give way to warmth and light, but last for three full years.
This winter would be followed by failing crops and famine.
Brothers fight and society will crumble, as will the mountains themselves.
The Fenrir wolf devours the sun and the time of the wolf will reign.
The Midgard serpent thrashes the sea and waves the size of buildings hammered ashore.
Naglfar, the warship built from fingernails of the dead, unmoors.
The three roosters crowed.
Surtr, the fire giant, swings his sword glowing brighter than the sun itself and the sky shatters.
The last battle between the gods and their enemies will stand at the plains of Vígrí r, dwarves cowering in the burrows and everyone will be in fear.
By the end, the whole world will be on fire and sink into the ocean.
All that will be left is Ginnungagap, the yawning void that was before the gods created the world in which we lived.