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As northern Sweden makes its annual rotation
toward the sun, the landscape explodes to life
in the perpetual light.
Ice melts, rivers swell,
the flowers and trees burst to action.
The once-frozen world is on the move.
For Faviken Chef Magnus Nilsson
and friend Chef Christian Puglisi,
springtime brings fresh ingredients
and new inspiration.
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.
Spring up here in Jamtland,
it's a very bright season.
Like, the light is bright.
It's coming back after winter.
The vegetation is very bright.
It's, like, bright green.
It's almost like... like, walking in the forest
this time of year is like walking through salad.
There are flowers everywhere.
The air is bright.
When I'm working on something in the middle of the winter,
I'm looking forward to spring.
And it's that kind of anticipation of a new season
coming that really, really inspires me to come up
with new things.
When I grew up, I spent a lot of time in the outdoors.
To me, that's something really important.
And it's something that I like to share with other people
as well to show them, especially if they aren't exposed
to it that much from before.
So this river where we're going now,
it's called Medstugeån.
It's a really special place to me.
I basically grew up here, with my family, fishing
and camping and spending time outside in the woods.
Pretty different to Copenhagen.
Well, yeah.
Copenhagen is a green city, but not this green.
Christian Puglisi is a friend of mine
who is also a chef.
And he's never really spent any time in the northern parts
of Scandinavia.
It's a very nice thing for me to show him the region
this time of year, in the spring.
The sound of the river.
It's nice, huh?
It's beautiful.
I think this little spot down here is going to be
very good for a little campsite.
Have you done a lot of camping, Christian?
Does it look like I've been doing
a lot of camping?
I'm pretty useless in this context.
No, I've not.
I've not been a big camper.
Well, you can anchor that to the ground.
All right, I'm putting this in the...
Like that?
Well done.
In the family it was always kind of said that you were
not allowed to use more than one match per fire ever.
All right.
You didn't have a lot of matches?
You can ask that, but I think it was just
kind of some macho thing.
Of course.
I feel like a young Boy Scout with a master.
The one-match wonder, Magnus Nilsson.
Did you bring some stuff?
I did bring some stuff with me from Faviken.
I always hated camping without good food.
A little pork chop.
The butter from Myhrbodarna.
Tinfoil.
Some leeks, cabbage.
Beer.
Here.
Well, we have one frying pan, and that's it.
We should get some salt on the pork so that
it can melt a little bit.
Some nice fat on that pork.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Can you fit it in the pan?
Muscle it in there.
Whoa.
It's fun to be by the fire.
It feels powerful.
It's nice.
And obviously, like, when you have this,
you know, cooking, you'll never have the same precision,
and you never aim for the same precision as you do
in the restaurant either.
Precision and perfection is not really
something that you can have in your life all the time,
you know?
No.
And it gets...
Really boring.
It gets really boring.
You lose out on a lot of things
if that is the goal, because it sort of takes over
from everything else.
Also being on your knees cooking something is also...
Yeah, you're right.
Literally brings it down to the ground,
that we are...
On our knees cooking.
Water's just there, and the meat's right there.
It's really fun, and it's making me hungry.
Yeah, same here.
Smells so good right now.
The smell of caramelizing pork.
This looks pretty good, right?
That smell.
Going to put a little bit more butter
in there.
Maybe a little bit of garlic as well.
Garlic and hot butter.
Yeah.
And the thyme, the thyme twigs that go
in there as well sometimes?
The little popping thing.
Put some juniper stuff on.
There you go.
A little juniper.
Wow.
Taste good?
Yeah, tastes very good.
Tastes super good.
Actually, I have something for you.
Oh, yeah, really?
This is a bit of a fun thing that we've been
playing a bit at the restaurant.
We call this strawbe-bushi.
And it's unripe strawberries.
We use the same technique as you do with umeboshi.
Ah.
The plums, the Japanese plums.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Can I have one?
Yeah, please try it, please try it.
Smells super good, huh?
Very briny, very salty, but super fresh and fruity.
I'm thinking I could take the pan,
put some of those strawberries in there,
in that butter...
Sounds like a very good idea.
Just a little sauce.
Yeah.
Sauce, a little more sauce.
That's the way you should sauce every plate,
right?
Right.
Straight from the...
The one meter-long pan, just straight on.
I also have the leeks, too.
Those smell... they smell delicious as well.
Sweet, nice.
This is a pretty nice plate.
This is not bad.
I think we can be proud of this.
Yep.
It's kind of nice sitting like this
at 11:30 at night, having a little pork chop
in the forest.
All light.
I think it's very important for anyone who works with food
to understand where the food comes from.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be, like, wild nature,
you being out camping in the deserted wastelands
of northern Sweden.
It can also be visiting a farm.
Myhrbodarna, it's a farm where you brought your cows
in the spring to feed on the green and lush mountain grass.
And while they were there, you milked them and produced
salted butter and cheese.
Anita Myhr is the person who runs Myhrbodarna.
She's a widow since ten years, and she's been taking care
of her five cows, moving them up to Myhrbodarna
in the early spring every year for 47 years now.
She's one of the last people keeping these traditions alive,
kind of transferring this knowledge of how to run
these places into the future.
So what you're going to do now is to assemble
the mechanical separator
that separates the milk from the cream
by spinning it really fast in a centrifuge.
The lighter the liquid, the further up it will push.
Because cream is lower in density than milk,
pushes further up to the sides of the big bowl, and then
sort of separates off from the milk.
So look at the color of that, huh?
You spin it at a certain pace.
And you listen to this little kind of ping to keep
the pace steady.
How's my pinging?
I think your pinging is starting to be okay.
Before this machine was invented, you had to separate
the cream and the milk by skimming it,
by pouring it all in a big vat and then sort of skimming it off
with a spoon, basically.
Look at that foam on the milk.
That looks pretty delicious, right?
It's like a huge cappuccino.
Look at that foam, then, the cream foam.
What Anita is doing at Myhrbodarna is not only
important because it keeps the traditions of producing
the food with these specific techniques alive.
I think it's also really important because it shows
a whole other way of living...
spending time in the mountains, living very close to the animals
that provide us with the raw material to produce
these fantastic foods.
So that's the butter churn.
The butter, the first thing you do is using
all the butterfat, like taking all the cream
out of the milk.
It almost looks like soft serve ice cream.
Yeah, sure.
And the color also, like,
that deep yellow whitish color.
We can hear as the churning is starting to happen
inside of the churn when it separates, you can hear
on the sound from the churn when it's time to stop.
Now it's starting to slush in there.
Now you can hear the buttermilk coming out.
Yeah.
Look at how the color has changed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the... it just turned from white to yellow.
So now it's time to wash the butter.
You put the butter in water, and you squeeze it to get
buttermilk out of the butter and into the water,
and then you change the waters and repeat
until it's crystal clear, until all the buttermilk has been
expelled from the butter.
If you don't do that, it goes rancid straightaway.
Okay.
Looks fantastic, right?
Oh, it looks beautiful.
I thought the churning was extremely physical,
but this is just as hard, no?
You want to try?
Yeah, I'll try.
Dig in.
The butter is going to look really nice on your watch.
On my Casio.
Looks a lot easier when Anita does it, right?
Well, it should, no?
She's done it 47 years.
The texture of it is really nice.
How cold do you think this is right now?
I don't think how cold it is.
I know how cold it is, because my hands are
in the freezing water.
Sorry.
Is it enough?
Yeah.
So now it's time to salt it.
It's fascinating to think about how
these processes were made up at one point, no?
Yeah, who came up with it?
Yeah.
This is technology that is very...
you can understand it, no?
You can see it before your eyes.
Time to taste.
Good?
Yeah.
That's very good butter.
This feels pretty fantastic.
We're standing here in a northern Swedish
sort of hillside, watching butter being made
in front of our eyes from the cows that are standing,
like, over there.
Like traveling back in time.
Yeah.
This butter gets sold straight when it's done,
so I'm very, very happy that we can actually even
get some of it.
That first day of spring
is something really fantastic to me.
As soon as the light comes back, all the green
just kind of grows, almost explosively,
out of the ground.
You can see it growing by the day.
All of the insects, they come back at the same time,
and, like, just buzzing everywhere.
Opening the beehive for the first time
in the early spring is very exciting.
When you pull a frame up from the hives,
and you watch the sun strike the wax,
and you can see the bees still working on the frame,
walking around and doing their little chores,
I think it's absolutely fascinating.
You can feel from the atmosphere and from the scent
that the hive sends out in which mood the colony is.
When it's a happy hive, and you smell it,
it feels good.
So this drink is based on a very particular sensation
that I get from working with beehives.
When they've had a good day of kind of harvesting honey
and they are nice and calm, they kind of smell
a little bit like bourbon, you know?
They have that kind of grainy, waxy, aromatic smell.
So this drink is basically that.
It's good bourbon, honey, and this time of year,
the bees, they mainly harvest dandelion nectar to make
their honey.
A little bit of bourbon.
A little bit of honey.
Smells like kind of a warm summer day.
One nice piece of ice into the glass.
A little bit of the bourbon-honey mix.
Just pour it over the ice.
Just a little bit of dandelion.
And then this white vinegar.
And, like, just a little bit to one side of the glass,
so that you have a little bit of complexity
while you're drinking it.
So here it is, the drink that smells and feels
like when you're working a warm summer afternoon
with the bees in a field full of dandelion.
I think being in the restaurant working and spending time
outdoors camping or fishing or doing something like that
kind of all belongs together.
I don't see them as separate things.
It's not camping and cooking in the restaurant.
It's kind of all of that at the same time,
kind of seamlessly being the life that you lead up here.
So we've been very unsuccessful in our fishing today.
I'm used to it.
But thanks to the miracle of television,
my magic bag not only contains one perfect brown trout,
it also contains one liter of pristine strawberries
for dessert, which is very nice.
I thought we'd just sort of wrap the trout up
in some tinfoil with a good lump of butter, some of the leeks
from yesterday, and maybe pick some of these that are
really aromatic in my... sort of spruce shoots.
All right.
I like these little spruce shoots,
because they have a very unexpected acidity.
I like them a lot with fish.
So this is something that we used to do
when I was a kid for lunch, like, the second day of fishing,
when we'd hopefully caught something.
Just wrap them up in foil
with a little bit of butter and maybe some herbs or onions
or stuff like that, and then just cooking them straight
over the embers like this.
Beautiful.
I think I'm just going to put some twigs
and stuff on top, so it kind of cooks from all directions.
Maybe putting all those twigs on there
wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done.
I didn't expect it to be that big a fire
from those little twigs.
But it's definitely frying in there.
Yeah, you can hear it.
Yeah, it's sizzling nicely.
Steam is definitely coming out.
It smells fantastic.
Wow.
It smells a lot like sweet leek
and the aromatic spruce tree.
And it looks like it is cooked.
It looks juicy.
This looks really good.
Want some fresh spruce on there?
Why not?
That can be a good idea.
Oh, that juice is so delicious.
A little butter with fish and leek and spruce
and all that stuff.
I'll get us a little bit of bread.
Get that in there.
Have you had a good time camping out and fishing,
even though we didn't catch anything?
Apparently it doesn't matter
if we catch anything or not,
because it ends up in my belly anyway.
So I think that's very successful camping.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for coming.
So how are you going to deal with these strawberries?
Some of this, perhaps.
Some really good, like, mild, cheesy,
fantastic sour cream.
Wow.
I love this time of year,
when it's sunny until 10:30 in the evening,
and you can still sit out
by midnight and read a book in the garden.
You can spend time with your family during the day.
You can work in the evening.
And then if you want to, you can go out at night fishing
for a couple of hours before going to bed.
To me, the spring is a time when we can be really busy.
It's a time of the year where so much can happen.