Q&A: The Nordic food lab

The Nordic Food Lab was founded by Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer, the same team that introduced the world to the restaurant Noma and the New Nordic Cuisine. Noma is now the world’s number 1 restaurant, according to the San Pellegrino rankings. The now-famous restaurant sits in a quiet corner of the Copenhagen docks. A few steps away is the lab itself, moored on a converted houseboat. The lab has many familiar features for a scientist: water baths, centrifuges, conical flasks. But it is also clearly a kitchen, with steel surfaces, ovens and chopping boards. A large white board covers one wall, with scribbled phrases such as ‘find use for cryo bottle’, or ‘check for aflatoxins’ and even ‘buy a rocket’. Noma championed the use of local ingredients, which meant that French foie gras, Spanish ham and Italian olive oil were not on the menu, and were replaced by wild berries, Limefiord oysters and seaweed. The lab seeks to develop new foods, flavours and recipes based on the New Nordic Cuisine and is headed by Lars Williams, an American chef who trained in some of the world’s top kitchens.In a Q & A with Flavour, Lars talks about his background, his approach to science and cooking and some of the new food products his team is creating.I have a chef’s background but have had the luck to work in kitchens that are very curious and have a scientific approach to cooking. This is both at wd~50 (Wylie Dufresne’s Michelin starred restaurant in New York) and The Fat Duck (Heston Blumenthal’s triple Michelin starred restaurant in England). Chefs often have a child-like curiosity, and may succeed with things because we know we can’t really do them. Just recently we were making a wide range of flavoured vinegars which I discussed with a food scientist at Copenhagen University. He said you can’t make celery vinegar, there is a component in there that will impede the fermentation bacteria. The next day I had to bring him a sample of the celery vinegar that I had made at the Nordic Food L