in Denmark FORAGER’S FEAST
Lauded restaurant Noma may have made foraging in Denmark famous, but cooking with produce plucked from the wilds, from cicely to salsify, is now commonplace in kitchens across the land
Juicy, dark dewberries. Fragrant, leafy sweet cicely. Light, umami-rich yellowfoot mushrooms. Not sounding familiar?
Don’t worry – they’re all foraged ingredients that are only rarely enjoyed, and unless you’ve spent time eating your way around Denmark, there’s a fair chance you won’t have tried them.
World-famous restaurant Noma was just the beginning. The past two decades have seen a revolution in Danish cuisine, with chefs up and down the country celebrating their landscape with dishes that are laser-focused on provenance, sustainability and seasonality. A big part of this ‘New Nordic’ cuisine, as it’s commonly referred to, is the desire to redefine eating habits with long-forgotten or lesser-known ingredients – and many of these are foraged rather than farmed.
With its hooked landmass and spray of islands, all thrust out into bracing seas, Denmark has endless summer nights and snow-blanketed winters; surf-beaten beaches and dense forests. The cooler climes and markedly different seasons have allowed plenty of unique wild things to flourish. But while foraging has been permitted for centuries – on public land or private areas along footpaths – it wasn’t until Noma noma.dk started grabbing headlines in the early 2000s with its locavore approach to cooking that the rest of the world really took notice.
Chef René Redzepi revolutionised the typical restaurant ingredients list, treating the likes of tart sea buckthorn, textural bladderwrack seaweed and savoury crab brittlegill mushrooms with love and care. Now the Copenhagen restaurant has changed form, but René continues to work with foragers such as Thomas Laursen at Wild Fooding wildfooding.com to celebrate the myriad local landscapes through food.
And, 18 years after Noma first opened, the trend for foraging has expanded across the country. Blotted off the coast of
Sweden, the Danish island of Bornholm – all charming fishing villages, verdant valleys and dramatic coastline lined with cliffs and sandy dunes – has a shining example in Kadeau kadeau.dk a relaxed beachside eatery.
Here, overlooking delectable panoramas of blue sea, head chef and co-founder Nicolai Nørregaard shows off the island’s bounty just as readily. Every Sunday is foraging day, where chefs pick sweet cicely flowers for oozy syrup; giant nobilis fir cones for savoury-sweet desserts; and baby spruce cones for pickling. They use wood ants as an unusual, citrusy garnish and where they can’t forage, their own kitchen garden helps out – producing, among many other delights, a particularly fragrant honey.
Plunge into the forests of western Zealand, outside of Copenhagen, and you’ll encounter a distinctly different vibe: a historic castle, complete with wood-burning hearth, vistas to parkland and an upmarket dining experience at Dragsholm Slot dragsholm-slot.dk in the Lammefjord. This spot is Denmark’s prized vegetable bowl and bountiful fields of carrots, potatoes, parsley root and salsify mean the restaurant’s chefs never need to stroll far from the kitchen to find top produce. Wild herbs and mushrooms – changing with the seasons – are collected from the surrounding woods and nearby beaches to infuse every bite with the character of the land.
Foraging is even happening in the capital city itself. Not only has Copenhagen planted public fruit trees, from apples to blackberry bushes, but René Redzepi’s free (and English language) foraging app, Vild Mad, helps locals and visitors identify wild foods such as sorrel or elderberry.
Prefer to leave it to the professionals? You’ll find several casual Copenhagen restaurants serving up foraged foods without a Noma-esque price tag. Seafood bar Kødbyens Fiskebar fiskebaren.dk in the Meatpacking District uses foraged ceps and lion’s mane mushrooms from Sydhavnen to complement a menu of Limfjord-landed blue lobster and whole roasted turbot from Langø. Across the city, 16-seater farm-to-fork (or rather, sea-tofork) seaside shack La Banchina labanchina.dk serves pickled foraged seaweed and coastal herbs. And if that’s not Scandinavian enough, you can pair a meal with a steam in the on-site sauna.