New Noma Nordic Cuisine Book

[jk1002]

http://www.amazon.com/Noma-Time-Place-Nordic-Cuisine/dp/0714859036

It's coming end of September.

[KCWilkinson]

My life might finally be complete.

[Brianemone]

I got my copy this morning. It's a beautiful book.

There is a picture for every dish and everything is very easy to read, from the intro right through to the glossary.

[ScottyBoy]

Sooo excited, me being Swedish and all

[jk1002]

Say something swedish .....

[ScottyBoy]

Skål!

[ScottyBoy]

Ohhh just got my copy, geeking out pretty hard!

[adey73]

Does it have the batter ball/Aebleskiver recipe like the first book?

Are the two books similar?

[mkayahara]

Does it have the batter ball/Aebleskiver recipe like the first book?

There is a recipe in the new book for "Aebleskiver and Vinegar Meringues." Is that the same as the one in the first book?

[jk1002]

I am a bit frustrated. Obviously it is difficult to cook but what bugs me is that they separated the titles, then just have pictures, then finally have recipes. Clearly for the coffeetable .....

I would have loved to have at least some minor description on the pictures so i know what i am looking at whole perusing.

[Bricktop]

I am a bit frustrated. Obviously it is difficult to cook but what bugs me is that they separated the titles, then just have pictures, then finally have recipes. Clearly for the coffeetable .....

I would have loved to have at least some minor description on the pictures so i know what i am looking at whole perusing.

Agreed. And I don't expect I will see any blogs of people cooking their way through Noma.

[plum tart]

Yes it is a beautiful coffee table book but the ingredients are so rarified and the techniques are so beyond my home chef abilities not to mention my batterie de cuisine that I can only look at the pictures and dream.

I have examined most of the recipes hoping to find one or two that are possible. The Aebleskever recipe is somewhat accessible but still not completely doable unfortunately.

[Renn]

Well, that's exactly the thing...the whole book is about a certain time and place. No one but noma will have the nordic ingredients, resources, talent, much less the 7 years of hard work that it took Rene and his team to make the restaurant and its dishes possible. But replication really is beside the point.

Yes, even if you can't replicate a dish in its entirety, you can still char grill cumbers on one side only to avoid overcooking them....If you can't find bulrush, you can still look in your neighborhood for wood sorrel. Or you might just see how he cuts pickled cippolini onions and shallots and cut them the same way for your own dish. Everyone can start to think more about taking their local products and being more creative about them.

Look for tidbits to incorporate and make them your own. The brilliance of the book is in the smallest details and in the story that those details tell. And in the end, inspiration is all about a person's willingness to try something unfamiliar....

[FoodMan]

Well, that's exactly the thing...the whole book is about a certain time and place. No one but noma will have the nordic ingredients, resources, talent, much less the 7 years of hard work that it took Rene and his team to make the restaurant and its dishes possible. But replication really is beside the point.

Yes, even if you can't replicate a dish in its entirety, you can still char grill cumbers on one side only to avoid overcooking them....If you can't find bulrush, you can still look in your neighborhood for wood sorrel. Or you might just see how he cuts pickled cippolini onions and shallots and cut them the same way for your own dish. Everyone can start to think more about taking their local products and being more creative about them.

Look for tidbits to incorporate and make them your own. The brilliance of the book is in the smallest details and in the story that those details tell. And in the end, inspiration is all about a person's willingness to try something unfamiliar....

Very well said and I could not agree more. I am still gobsmacked by how lovely and "different" the recipes and plating style is than other high-end books (like Alinea, Fat Duck, French Laundry...). I am NOT saying it is better, just that it is unique to the chef's sensibilities, style and ingredients just like each one of those books is. This one, to me, is a bit more foreign is all. The internet is your friend when trying to translate some of these ingredients (how does ingredient "A" taste like? What do I have that compares? Can I omit it? WTF is malt flour??). I think oone of the first recipes/techniques I might try will involve a vegetable dish and some "soil".

That being said, the design of the book seperating the recipe list from the pictures and recipes themselves is odd, serves no purpose and is very annoying. At least the recipes should've remained associated with their respective pictures.

[Mjx]

Well, that's exactly the thing...the whole book is about a certain time and place. No one but noma will have the nordic ingredients, resources, talent, much less the 7 years of hard work that it took Rene and his team to make the restaurant and its dishes possible. But replication really is beside the point....

I haven't seen this book, but I'm wondering how accessible it would be, even to Danish cooks. I spend a lot of time here in Denmark, and one of the first things that struck me is that the selection of available ingredients is really restricted, when compared to what you can find in a medium-sized Italian or US city; almost all you find in most places are bog-standard staples, and even speciality shops all tend to have the same things. I have a feeling that, as is the case with most high-end Danish restaurants (e.g. Malling & Schmidt), the owners of noma make arrangements with various farmers, and get many of their ingredients specially grown for them, since they are otherwise not available.

So, this is really a coffee-table/daydream book, with the option to try things out if you ever do get your hands on the odd bundle of bullrushes.

[jane@eatyourbooks]

You might be interested Mjx that Noma needed the most number of new ingredients added to our ingredients database out of any of the 1,400 cookbooks we have indexed. 81 new ingredients in 95 recipes even though we have 7,700 ingredients listed already. For comparison Alinea needed 32 and A Day at El Bulli 29. If you want to look at the recipe listings (names and ingredients) you can at http://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/80266/noma-time-and-place-in

Interestingly Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy which we have just indexed is number 2 to Noma with 55 new ingredients, including black iguana, chapulines (grasshoppers), chicatanas (flying ants) and rayada wasp nest. Makes Noma's bulrushes and sea buckthorn juice seem tame.

[Mjx]

Thanks, Jane, that's actually breathtaking. It also confirms my suspicions that many of the ingredients would need to be specially grown, or harvested from the wild. Some of the recipes look intriguing (others look like they're trying way too hard). Lokks like a beautiful book, anyway.