Mjx

Right. It's understood that 'gayette' is almost certaily 'galette', the waiter's pronunciation was apparently a bit... misleading Thanks to fellow member the greek, I am able to pass along the information that a gayette is a 'small sausage patty made with pork liver and bacon, wrapped in caul fat' (the link to which he directed me:www.patriciawells.com/glossary/french_english_food_glossary.pdf), and I'm sure we're all looking forward to Soundman's elaboration on this in his upcoming write-up.

We're driving down to Berlin next week, and I was wondering whether there were any kitchenware shops particularly worth looking into. There are a few things I'm interested in (e.g. a jeweller's scale, instant-read thermometer, certain modernist ingredients), but browsing is great, too. So what I'm interested in is pretty much any unusual/substantial, kitchen-related shop, and I'd love to hear your recommendations. Thanks!

Did you come across any other places serving quick, casual food (apart from [curry]wurst; I can easily get that downtown where I am, if I wanted to), or good, reliable bakeries?

For sorbets, I'd check out Harold McGee's The Curious Cook, which devotes an entire chapter (with tables of the proportions of fruit juice/puree, sugar, and water for over two dozen fruits) to his experiments with sorbet and its relatives.

Well, no: bone contains a good bit of collagen, since proteins comprise the bone matrix in which the minerals are suspended. But collagen doesn't bring much to the party in terms of flavour (unless you brown it, which doesn't happen when the collagen is extracted by boiling/simmering) so you're going to get a really weak broth if you use just bones. Bone is connective tissue.

Check out the primer mkayahara linked to; I just took a quick look at it, and realized this was a must-save.

I count on bones to add gelatin, not flavour. When I save bones, I never scrape them clean, I usually roast them first, and I use plenty of meat, too. I hate wasting the leftover meat form making, so I usually freeze it to eventually add to soup or tortellini/ravioli filling.

Most of the Danes I've met seem to favour margarine (when my boyfriend's mother needs butter for a recipe, she usually borrows it from me, since she rarely buys it). Lurpak is a popular brand , but mostly because it's almost the only brand of butter you find in many supermarkets. The thing about smørrebrød is that it simply means 'buttered bread' (smør is 'butter', and brød is 'bread'), so it effectively covers a really broad range, from plain bread and butter to the most elaborate sandwiches (these are always open-faced). On festive occasions there is often at least a gesture towards the formal, traditional combinations, usually as part of a larger kolde bord (the Danish equivalent of the Swedish smorgåsbord), but the general trend in sandwich-making here is pretty much the universal 'let's see what we've got in the refrigerator... oh, better use that up!'

Thanks Dejah! I actually have the necessary ingredients to attempt this, and I think it's interesting to see this modernist technique entering the mainstream, ready-to-eat market

Are those essentially alginate spheres? I've had standard tapioca pearls in bubble tea, but I've never come across these... they look delicious, though.

Thanks to everyone who followed along this week (and to Kristoffer, Inge, Helene, Lasse, and Mads, who have invariably answered my apparently endless questions about Danish food with apparently endless patience)! I hope you enjoyed seeing this tiny bit of a Danish summer through the eyes of a foreigner as much as I have, and I leave you with my latest find, pineapple strawberries (yep, they smell of pineapple):

We made a quick trip to a small ‘farm shop’ nearby, which manages to be a sort of greengrocer/general store: the owners sell an intriguing array of things, in addition to their own produce (and others’): Various juices and some ceramic ware: A terrific selection of liquorice: Some cook books, and the omnipresent scrubbed (thanks, Mette!) potatoes in water. They also sell chalk paint, slippers, watering cans and garden gnomes (that’s just the tip of the iceberg). There’s a good-sized green house right next to the shop, where you can get various flowers and herbs in pots, and there’s a very substantial grape vine occupying about a third of the roof (the green mass at the far end): Dinner was venison with the fennel and carrots I picked up at the farm shop. There were a few changes to the original plan, and the hokkaido-chestnut soup was broken down into hokkaido puree and caramelized chestnuts. Tonight, we had dinner with my boyfriend’s parents: And now I’m sitting here, finishing off the last of tonight’s wine

That's Swedish (the ö instead of the ø gives that away)! In Danish it's called det kolde bord ('the cold table'), and basically, it's just the stuff that gets made for lunch, although more substantial and varied selections show up at events like julefrokoster (where you can find a fair number of different kinds of herring, but since by the end of the night it may well be being used for body sild, I'm not sure this really gets noticed). Thanks! I actually enjoy the Danish summer and feel a bit guilty about it, because when everyone is looking out the window and wishing it would stop raining, I'm hoping it will just keep on I made a note to give allspice a go in frikadeller, they really do need something to bring out the flavour. And scrubbed, hm? I should have noticed that...

For lunch, we had an adaptation of smørrebrød. Right before we started, my boyfriend remembered that lettuce was kind of required for dyrelægens natmad, se we went out and picked some greens in the garden: This is the selection of ingredients we went with: The sort of wet-looking pink meat in the centre is salt beef, then clockwise from the dark brown stuff, which is beef aspic, you have liver paste, the last two frikadeller, onion and dill for topping, baby greens, mustard, mayonnaise (I know, I know), smoked salt, and salmon. The results: Apart from the dyrelægens natmad (the one with the onion rings and slab of aspic), these are all improvisations, not anything formally recognized (@brucesw, if you're at all familiar with this, you probably noticed that this isn't close to a full-on, authentic smørrebrød), although it's still a good bit more elaborate than what we usually do. Tradition stipulates that shrimp and salmon are eaten on white bread, and most other things are eaten on rye bread, but that went out the window when my boyfriend stood firm on his preference for fresh bread. Also traditionally, you eat smørrebrød with a knife and fork, but there was no way any standard table knife could make a dent in the crust of this bread, so we just picked them up and ate them. DKK 90, actually, so close to USD15 (but that includes tax, and since wait staff are paid a living wage you don't tip, so the price includes everything).

Breakfast today included Guinness Stout ginger cake, which you may notice is a little. . . dark: Okay. The top is burnt black: Even reducing the temperature to compensate for the oven’s tendency heat spikes didn’t help (although it seems to have interfered with the rise a bit ). Fortunately, the thing wasn’t incinerated, and with the thin carbonized layer trimmed away, and if it didn’t look beautiful, it still delivered in terms of flavour (it’s so good with coffee), and the recipe is one I highly recommend. The cake is also a bit paler than usual, because at about 22.45 last night I discovered that I was out of molasses (difficult to find here), so I frantically racked my brains for a substitute, and hit upon a combination of cane syrup, pureed prunes, and cider vinegar. As a substitution, this was passable, but hardly ideal (but hey, I did promise at least one culinary fiasco).

Oh yes, and we were lucky to find these Thanks! I do love eating here. There are several versions of both hot and cold smoked fish, and in the containers of things that are not smoked fish, going left to right, there are shrimp (small, square glass container), behind the shrimp are crab claws, quite large ones (metal bucket), then there are prawns (metal container), a mystery item that no one I've asked today could identify from the picture, but there are lemon slices and what appears to be a tomato based sauce, so I'm guessing that it's some sort of seafood appetizer (foil tart tins in glass container), fish frikadeller (glass container), and some lightly dressed shrimp (glass container to the right of the row of three triangular containers of various condiments, at the back). It's just coarse salt, which has a tendency to roll off the fish, so you have to sort of dab it up from the plate. They offer several choices of sauce, including remoulade and ketchup (I'm not much of a sauce person, and really dislike anything creamy with savoury dishes, so I passed); that one is aïoli, which my boyfriend described as a very good take on it. If you look at the first image, you can see a body of water in the middleground; the water gates regulate the flow of water from the bay to the inlet, and prevent flooding (I think it's just to protect homes, I don't believe there is any pisciculture going on). By the way, if you look closely, you can just make out something else that is very Danish: the row of ten windmills on the right side of the horizon.

Who still uses this term?!

I mentioned earlier that dinner was going to be dinner was fish and chips. I should say, fantastic fish and chips with a lovely view, preceded and followed by a drive through a landscape that is almost insanely photogenic and picturesque. There are still plenty of tiny Danish towns that are simply bursting with half-timbered and thatched houses, and interspersed with fields containing small scatterings of attractive livestock knee-deep in clover (or whatever it is they’re consuming). Unfortunately, most of it has no connection to our dinner or food, but I figured a few shots of the area around our destination, Fiskehuset (‘The Fish house’), were justified. Our destination is somewhere in the cluster of houses in the centre of the picture: And this is Fiskehuset, at the marina in Norsminde: When they're open, which is only at certain times, the place is usually fairly crowded, so there's no guarantee of a seat: The fish and chips were as fantastic as ever (the fish is hake); we also got one of the old, non-wobbly tables with an iron base and slate top: Afterwards, we took a walk around the marina, and we noticed some kids crabbing: A few more shots around Fiskehuset: (No recipe for jellyfish, but give me a little time. . .) Danes eat early: by 19.00 there’s hardly a soul in sight: And something to finish with:

Pickled herring is popular. There also used to be a lot of klipfisk (dried fish, cod, I believe) but it's not very popular anymore. Too whiffy for modern tastes, apparently. Thanks! Denmark is one of those places that is really hard to stop photographing

I didn't notice that the oats contributed anything to the flavour, in fact, the frikadeller were quite bland. Next time I make these, I'm adding thyme and a little nutmeg. And maybe replace the 'panade' with chopped mushrooms. Let me kow how your bread comes out Do you do a sample before you make the whole batch? To taste for seasoning, etc. Often, what's perceived as (or what is actually) bland just needs some punching up with salt and pepper...often, more than you think is needed! I didn't sample, but I did err on the side of using too little salt, since my boyfriend's parents asked to be dealt in on this, and they like things less salty than I do. There's also a weird thing about salt in Denmark: it takes a while for it to dissolve fully. It might be the hardness of the water, although I cannot imagine why that would affect it. But the salt seems to take quite a while to dissolve, and it's easy to over-salt (it happened a lot when I first began cooking here). When I had one of the cold frikadeller this morning, the saltiness was fine. But it was still pretty bland; or perhaps it would be better to describe them as not up to their full flavour potential.

Today, breakfast was skyr with blueberries, vanilla bean powder, and chestnut honey: Today’s schedule includes making bread (all sifted spelt, this time), some shopping and planning for tomorrow (venison and hokkaido-chestnut soup for dinner), and going out for fish and chips this evening. You’ve probably noticed that there hasn’t been any dining out, so far. This is partly because something casual like grabbing a sandwich is complicated by my having to decide whether I’ll enjoy said sandwich enough to deal with the consequences (which is a bore), and partly because more upscale dining is often disappointing/not great value for what you pay. Although there are several restaurants in Århus that deliver good to exceptional meals (e.g. Malling & Schmidt, Substans, Mefisto), they are much more expensive than at least equivalent dining experiences in Italy, and we seldom eat out here; instead, we tend to go all out when we travel. On the other hand, my passion for fish and chips is of a ‘screw the consequences’ intensity, so this evening we’re heading out to the only place we’ve found (so far) that offers an excellent iteration of fish and chips. I’m puzzled by the difficulty of finding not-dreadful versions of fish and chips in the area (the fried fish is where it all seems to break down entirely), particularly since we’re on a coast. I sometimes get the impression that, outside of Denmark, people have the idea that Noma and other restaurants with a similar aesthetic/approach reflect Danish food trends in general, but I haven’t seen evidence of any significant trickle-down effect, and the traditional dishes, prepared the traditional way, remain solid favourites. Although by no means always the case, there is a tendency for ordinary Danish food to be bland and overcooked, although there’s usually plenty of it. Even sauces (which I think of as intended to add flavour) tend to be based on flour and milk, possibly with kulør (caramel brown) added for colour (the last line of text on the web page [Klassikeren til den gode mad!] says ‘The classic for good food!’). Still, there is the (for me) rather elusive smørrebrød. By ‘elusive’ I mean I haven’t come across it that often, although I’ve been visiting Denmark since 2000. This morning, I pumped my boyfriend for information on this, and didn’t get much: Yes, there are plenty of shops selling smørrebrød, mostly butcher shops (where it’s presumably made to order, since I haven’t noticed it in the display cases). He further contends that it’s mostly eaten by people over fifty. What?! I point out that he brings a (very) modified version of smørrebrød to work pretty much every day. He admits this, and regards the topic as done. I try again: the traditional ones have names, right? He mentions dyrlægens natmad (‘the veterinarian’s night food/meal’ – rye bread, liver paste, slice of salt beef, beef aspic), which I know; the only other one I know by name is stjerneskud (‘meteor’ – white bread, plaice filet, shrimp, lemon). ‘Anything else?’ ‘Mmph’. The traditional, full-scale smørrebrød may be a victim of Denmark’s having apparently jettisoned formality in a big way over the past couple of decades. The first time I visited Denmark (a one-night layover with my parents, when I was about 7), my father was outraged at being excluded from the regular dining room because he wasn’t wearing a tie; today, there probably are no more than a few (if that) restaurants that require men to wear ties. Denmark is almost unrelentingly casual, and the time and structure of traditional smørrebrød probably seems to fussy for most occasions. So, when I do a really modified version of smørrebrød tomorrow, my feelings of guilt will not be overwhelming

I didn't notice that the oats contributed anything to the flavour, in fact, the frikadeller were quite bland. Next time I make these, I'm adding thyme and a little nutmeg. And maybe replace the 'panade' with chopped mushrooms. Let me know how your bread comes out

Sure. It's one of the offerings in a 'traditional herbs' line offered by urteteket (these inlcude dill, and several others). ETA My mistake: ramsløg (what I was talking about) are ramsons (Allium ursinum), not ramps, although they're relatively closely related. Sorry about that!

Here are the frikadeller: I wanted to stay at least reasonably faithful to traditional recipes, but I wanted to experiment a bit, to see whether I could get around the rubbery/dry consistency that shows up fairly often. Often, they’re also really bland. I began by pulling out On Food & Cooking, Modernist Cuisine (v. 3), and various issues of Cook’s Illustrated (why not turn any meal into a hefty research project?), to get an idea of how I could make the frikadeller come out substantial and tasty, rather than bouncy and dry. Half an hour later, I had some ideas, and got things going. I used the Ny Nordisk recipe I mentioned a bit earlier today, to establish a sort of baseline for the relative amounts of meat, dry ingredients, moist filler, and liquids. Since I had 500 g of veal/pork mixture, I upped the weight of the other ingredients accordingly; I also replaced the potato (grated and added raw in the Ny Nordisk recipe) with an equal weight of a sort of panade of rolled oats and broth (I’m not enthusiastic about dairy in savoury dishes), and, memories of childhood nut loaf in mind, replaced the seeds/coarse bread with more rolled oats (there is a long tradition of using oats in frikadeller, mostly when meat was scarce). I swapped in broth for the milk, and dissolved 1 g of gelatine in it (this was inspired by the research phase, since gelatine would both add cohesiveness and moisture), and mixed the meat vigorously with a hand mixer (also to improve cohesion). I added fresh lovage and dried ramps to give a bit more flavour. I added the rolled oats (the ones not in the 'panade') last, to make sure I didn't make the mixture too dry; they were definitely needed, though, and adding them turned the mixure from a soupy mess to a workable texture: I let the mixture sit and set up for three hours before frying these. Plan A involved rice, but my boyfriend’s parents prefer potatoes (they asked to be included in this endeavour), so I roasted some small new potatoes (boiled is traditional, but I like roasted so much better). The inside looked like this: The frikadeller weren't bad, crunchy and nicely browned on the outside and moist on the inside, but the texture was a tiny bit pasty (but not rubbery!); my boyfriend said that usually they have a coarser texture (but ate seven anyway). Next time, I'll pass on using the mixer on the meat, since I think the gelatine was enough to give it the necessary cohesiveness.

I think that is what you call crackling; it's the skin, when the fat renders from beneath it, and it turns hard-crunchy, you need good teeth to chew on it (I have some large holes in my meat knowledge, because I was raised vegetarian, so I didn't hear terms like 'crackling' when I was growing up). And no, there's 25% sales tax on everything