Cooking up some northern delights in the forests of Swedish Lapland

GETAWAY James Butler raids the larder of this snowy region near the Arctic Circle - and discovers it’s not all meatballs...

Moose, moose, moose!’ Our car ground to a halt in front of the half-tonne horned obstruction that could rip the roof from your car in a collision.

Thankfully, it let us pass, trotting into the snowy pine forests that cover picturesque Swedish Lapland.

With 250,000 people living in a space the size of Austria, Sweden’s northern-most region breaches the Arctic Circle, where summer days never end and winter nights of -30°C descend at lunchtime while the aurora borealis flickers above.

Here, people say ‘when you see food, eat it’. But Norrbotten County’s ingredients are used for more than fuel.

Take our friend the moose. A quarter of its 400,000-strong Swedish population are culled annually and, with a similar taste to beef, it is delicious filleted with potato gratin.

But the most decadent ingredient can be found in the Bothnian Bay near the city of Luleå: Kalix löjrom, or vendace caviar.

In 2010, the eggs from this small cousin of salmon became the first Swedish produce to be granted the EU’s Protected Designation of Origin, alongside Parmesan cheese and Champagne.

The Nobel Prize dinner staple can only be fished by 35 companies in the bay’s brackish waters, which give the eggs their unique taste, while the vendace are in season: five weeks in early autumn.

One company belongs to Lars Ökvist, 59, whose family has fished here since the 1700s. His favourite way to eat the delicate morsels is the ol’ favourite: toast, dill, sour cream and red onion.

But Luleå’s restaurants are harnessing the Nordic-fusion trend to revitalise the formula.

Cue James Thomson, head chef of Villgott at Bryggeriet, who served the caviar with chilli aioli on a tempura flour disc – a posh prawn cracker.

The Englishman said there was a ‘food revolution’ here away from