From Nothing 'Till Something

hey i'll talk the title chosen is from nothing to something let's just describe how my journey has been from child to to now i'll come back to this and which what gives you the appetite to continue this was the question i got from rene i really didn't want to come but i didn't felt i had anything to say so so i had a problem but when he asked this question is just i understood what he was thinking about it's probably too many problems i have had to change culture from the need of eating you know to survive and to enjoy food and this i will also come back to i come from fair islands just in the middle of the atlantic oceans not so big we are only 50 000 peoples we are more sheeps than we are people and mainly almost all our export is fish the first we can read about the fairways culture or food is in a very old document which we call the sheep's letter from 1298 is from an old bishop from norway which was living in faroe island and he was writing about some laws and things like that and there was something about whalings and sheeps so we know what they have been eating but not how they have been eating it the next we are next argument is a danish priest lucas tepes he was writing a book pharaoh pharaoh reserrata from 1673 and he was writing a chapel about food and that was a poor text it was terrible to read because they were almost eating nothing it was only fish and meat and grain so it was a variation of that in a different way but there was nothing else there were no vegetables and and things other things but he writes in the start of this chapter other countries location are praised for their great wealth several metals mineral precious stones pearls wines and grain but all this god and nature has denied the fairies and that's some way true but there are some good things but that will i will come too as i will speak the circumstance has been very poor through the time you know everything has been been self sufficiency whaling fishing and catching birds and eggs and you can see baccalau and the right bottom there the famous pacalao it was probably the only thing we had to export at that time or for 100 to 200 years ago fish is our main export and nearly all family has a boat a little boat like that my father has that boat and we eat everything on the fish liver hat and everything and we we have fresh fish and then we have also what we call fermented fish and aged fish it's uh there was a guy talking about umami that's an umami bomb you can call it and then we have dried fish this we also use for meat the climate is perfect to hanging something out if if it's wasn't for this climate i think no one was living on the island because there was no freezer and there was no vegetables and if you only can use the meat for two days there will not be any fairies people there was also birds you can see in the right upper picture there there are four cooked birds and there are there is um spongy cake they were they filled the birds with this spongy cake i don't know why i think it's because they wanted it to stretch longer the fruit has always been done not so culinary everything is put in one pot if you have meat plumper or potatoes everything in the same pot and it was not a matter of enjoying it was a matter of surviving lamp we have seven thousand lamps we are important hundred thousand from iceland and ten 000 from new zealand here we have the same we have fermented meat we hang it out we have dried meat and you can see it's where they are going whaling this was very vital at that time in old old days but today it's just dying out slowly and one of the reason is because the health environment tells us to stop to eating it because it's so full of mercury's because of the pollution of the big countries in the atlantic oceans vegetables and fruits you can see it's very difficult to make fields to cultivate on when the mountains are like that and there's a lot of stones and things in the earth so that's one reason and it's only seven percent of faroe island which is cultivated and that's with all the houses where they are standing you must choose between if you like to have vegetables or you would like to have cows because you can't have both so today we have mainly cows the weather is is a maritime soup arctic climate which says that in the winter it is not so cold it's -4 usually but it can be -10 but that's very seldom in the summer it's usually between 10 and 20 degrees you can see the storm and the sea there how tremendous it is and if you have vegetables they will be ruined the same day probably i went to iceland and studied biology and there i experienced many good things about food i've never been so much out in to eat in faroe islands because there are no restaurant really restaurants there are steak houses and pizzeria and i came as a rasmus corford told you about this picture of this guy inspired kolbek that was also one of the reason why i became chef that was when i have seen this here picture in in smargo bihak a danish magazine and i tried to come in to him but i he he did not get allowed to get apprentice and it lasted for one year and then i started at this restaurant restaurant and it was a usually good restaurant but you suddenly were probably one of the best known restaurant in scandinavia at that time to come from faroe islands and come to uh probably one of the best restaurants in denmark that's a revolution in my head you know you used to catch your own food or my father was catching the food you know five days a week we were eating something he had been catching or fishing and if it should be fine it was probably danish meatballs or something like that but it was no fine food and people were eating to to survive not to enjoy really i came back to faroe islands and i had no ambition to be in denmark because i didn't feel that i had anything to do in denmark in as a chef because my goal when i was working at the commandant it had slowly been building up a goal what i what i had in my head and i went back to fair island and started this restaurant remain and that was very ambition when you only have pizzeria and steakhouses in fair island so and i got invited to come to denmark to this uh new nordic cuisine and there i met a lot of people renee was one of them and there are heard some ideas i had never been thinking about before because i i was living in feral islands you were always eating at home what you did how at home and at this french restaurant which i was working at that commandant we did import everything from france in italy and other places and now sadly they started to talk to use what is outside your window and this makes sense in my head because when i was starting this restaurant and they came tourists and things like that they were always asking about um why are you making french or danish food why do you not have anything fairies and this question i got a lot and the problem was i couldn't just do fairies food because then the ferris people will not come because they were eating it each day so they were a little tired of it so after this talk it makes sense in my head what i should do slowly but not right away some months after and the next problem or challenge was to i was not allowed to serve all these hair things so i could not serve fairy islam i was serving icelandic lamb so i could choose between to lie or tell them as it was but um i i'm not lying so i told the truth that it was icelandic lamb sometimes we were cheating and using fairy's lamb instead we were not allowed to it today we are allowed to serve this these things we have used a lot of time to talk with politicians and businessmen to get this possible because the country is so little that you cannot make an industry out of it to slaughter lambs and things like that no one will buy fairways it's too cheap not too expensive and and they're always buying the cheapest things so we were the only one who were buying it so next year we will try to get all the shellfish is amazingly good but we are not allowed to serve it what gives you the appetite then we come back to this question these here two words appetites and ambition are a little similar with if you think about appetite it's something you smell you are seeing something or and you gotta eager to get this and it's the same with the ambition you get eager to do something so my appetite has been the ambition to change things change things from what they were to something else i'm very proud of my old culture but it's not so what it's not updated to now that's the problem people should not think that we are chao people living there so in many relation you know to get food up to the present day also change other aspects in the society for example if you would invite someone out to eat we could not at that moment serve wine because it was not allowed to survive so people thought we were a little stupid so it has been a hard work to come to where we are today there are not so many chefs who are talking about food on faroe islands so the mostly they are just working and doing pepper steak or what they are doing um so i felt very alone sometimes but it's very good to come to things like this because you get the courage again to do something it gives me appetite to see that things are shaping up and people think that this is not so stupid what we are doing some are angry because we are changing the old culture but it's okay with the new restaurant cox we have a new start cox is walking in the beaten off the beaten track and we are like most uh fine dining or gourmet restaurant a little below the things we think enough is to make nice food and get people to enjoy themselves renee said about certain videos that in a speech to survive the cern is properly the alphabet for the culinary alphabet for norma and we are looking for our alphabet we are not found all our letters yet but um today we are focusing on what we have and then we are taking the challenges uh stay calm wild plants were the first thing i was trying to work with because i couldn't serve a meat and things like that so angelica and cochlearia was two of the major plants in faroe islands to survive because there were no vegetables there were only those two which can you see with our mind we are here part luck it's fantastic because when the sea is coming over the portalack is just tasting like oysters another thing we are done with it last month is to put them in a blender with a little water and oil and it's just like an emolution it's without eggs and things like that it's get getting thicker as it's standing so we can put it on things and things like that and has a fantastic oyster flavor but oyster taste of salt so it's maybe what make the difference vegetables we do not have so many we have only if we should serve all the vegetables for some families a year we would only have for 300 families a year because you you must choose between to have cows or have vegetables because there is so there is no field to grow this on but what we have is fantastic renee is writing about this turnips in his last book where he's getting a turnips to coffee one day he's eating at fair island and it's just like to eat the juicy apple you can see how it's transparent here and it's not only a slice we have carrots and we have potatoes in greenhouses we are tried to make strawberry last year and it was fantastic probably the best i ever have tasted and the reason is probably because the sun is the limited factor in the growth in faroe island and the heat in the earth so it's growing very slowly but it's sucking everything up from the air from the earth and getting this fantastic taste we could probably do more and we will properly next year we have not so many so many activity of a microorganism in the earth which makes the vegetables also very sweet because when there are many organisms in the earth they will attack the vegetables and they will do layer outside which makes the vegetables bitter and that we do nearly not have i invited cern we used to come to fair island i met him at a party and i called him i had the i was just thinking uh i will call him and i will invite him next week and i i did so and right away he found four new things which we never had seen before in fair islands and he he has 150 products on what he's doing and he says we can probably do the half of it and we will probably never do for whole the whole faroe islands but we will do for the restaurant that will be fantastic to show people what we have we have the fairways lamb which is fantastic cox is getting the lambs from this island here a little island it's always going on the mountain they're using the muscle a lot if when they are using the muscle they make also a taste because you know the tenderloin a sirloin is not used so much so it tastes not so much so more use of the muscle more taste it's grassing the whole year outside which makes it very strong in the taste and just like wild there are two kinds of fat in it it's white fat and there is transparent fat and transparent fat is the old fairwees lamb but we have imported from iceland and other places with white fat so now it's mixed but if it has this transparent fat is fantastic it's just like kobe meat because it's melt very easy and it tastes fantastic and especially if you are hanging it up we have two kinds of cut but this one is a very special pharaoh bank cut it's living in a very restricted area four light dots to the left and the first one there the stream between shetland or hetland and vero island is tremendous there is 2500 meters deep they say in one second there is coming as much as it is fresh water in the whole world so it's taking you know all the food up and and when it comes here over to the ferry bank it's going stream like this so there's always enough food in the ferry bank it's much what you call it it's not falling apart so easy so it's a fantastic structure in the in the meat and the taste is just like shrimps and things like that it's a little different it has two extra bones in the vertebrate and it's white inside the belly flap and that's why we got so good price for it when we were selling it to bakalao because you will see a white instead of gray inside it's growing three times as fast as usual code i will lightly go through some of our uh products some of our products and our usual menu at cox this is our lobster ask renee about it it's fantastic and the reason why the cut and lobster is so good are so good it's because the temperature is steady in the water in other countries it's ranging 10 degrees you know it's changing all the time here it's only a half degree to 1 degree which is it is changing so it's very stable that means the meat is go is also more stable and firm lamb fish first year we have got extra lump fish no one was selling fish in fair island when i came there you were they were selling you know big trucks out of the country but not to restaurants so it's a new thing so first year with the lump fish here we have or what you call it scallops queen scallops very small and monkfish at cox we are making you know international food global but we try to make it very easy or simple because we are only three in the kitchen so it has to be very easy to do this is the backbone of an ferrous cut it's only the region of the stomach of the cod here we have a crisp of dried fish and dried skin of place this is like a starter and this old man told me he was fishing shrimps and he will he would take them and go down to the engine and put them there to dry and that was fantastic to eat in the evening so i was thinking about this and i went down and put them in the dehydrator but it didn't function so but i've forgotten them for two days and then i went in to throw them out and i tried and then they were perfect perfect crack in them fight ancillary young served with tilt oil and danish apple juice fairy salmon and the salmon tastes tremendous good because it is eating fish the leftover and in the rest now in the fillet factories you know the skin and things like that is going to the food to this salmon with some ferrous plant on top crab lumpfish eggs cletonia siberica and what you call it bird grass and this is the lobster before i only fry it on the pan a little and put some seaweed salt on top and seaweed salt was the only salt we had before for 150 years ago this only salt you must burn your own salt call it black salt put it in this jar and lit the pine and then serve it like this halibut and this ferris turnips this is dark with the crisp of the skin on top in fairy islam we cannot serve fermented lamb because it's too strong for foreign people so we have fried fermented lamb and then we have powderized it so we can put it on top of the meat but about three years we will serve really fermented meat because that's the way we are going this is a low age when i was uh putting my youngest to sleep i fall down in his pillow and i was smelling something strange and i didn't know what it was but i thought it was a lacqueries but then i realized it was low age and cinema on top there is what you call it seaweed lightly caramelized seaweed and the granite with grass and sorrel or this sour plant and at the end sour milk dessert with fresh cheese cucumber and radish and the important thing here is the sugar the what do you call it estragon well tarragon sugar on top we have when we make dessert we have only a few things we have rhubarbs we have milk we have beer and we sometimes use chocolate but that's the only thing we have to do from nothing to something that was it and when i think about this title here we started with nothing today we are in the beginning to to try to find something and try to find something for the future thank you i i just want to make i just want to make a comment uh to life because i the life is is too modest with himself basically so i'm gonna praise him a bit so on your islands there where nobody really wants to eat the food that you do they want a piece of overcooked meat you can't even get the products that you need you change legislation you go bankrupt why do you keep doing it why is it that you keep doing it and you're changing things for the whole region for the flavor and this is what he's doing this is what i thought was so courageous and influential that he is sort of just keep going no matter what people say to him and there's a lot of people that are making fun of him that things that this is not even food of the general population so in my book life is a he's a very very important figurehead of food in um in in the pharaoh and in the world really because he has an undefinable sort of passion and drive and commitment and patience that i when i ask him he doesn't even know where it comes from and i never ask you if you are a masochist but you are not no pessimist so your pessimist but yet you're still there you're still trying yeah you're still trying to grow vegetables you're still trying to take it from nothing to something and i think that is just very very special i think we should clap again for life thank you