Ekstedt - Food from the Fire

I spent the summer of 2011 with my family, in our summer cabin on the island of Ingar in the Stockholm archipelago. My wife Katarina had just had our first child, our son Vinston, and the idea was that I should have some time away from work. But although I was meant to be a family man on holiday, my head was still in work mode. I had recently signed the contract to open a new restaurant, in Stockholms exclusive stermalm district, but I had no idea what to do with it.

I had always thought that I would be settled by the time I had children; that I would mostly oversee the fantastic restaurant empire that I had built up. It hadnt turned out that way. I was 33 years old, and in the eyes of the media and the general public I was Food Niklas, a whimsical TV chef without any proper qualifications. It was time to do something big. It was now or never.

I grew up in Jrpen, a small village in the province of Jmtland in the north of Sweden. Like most young people, before I could connect with my roots I first needed to turn my back on them. When I trained to become a chef, we were taught to believe that Scandinavia didnt produce good ingredients. I became passionate about Italian olive oil and French braised chicken. When I opened my first restaurant, at the age of 21, I went for super-trendy molecular gastronomy, serving dishes such as asparagus clouds. I could hardly have got any further away from the rustic slow cooking of the Jmtland forests. Now I wanted to reconnect with my roots.

But how should I approach this? New Nordic cuisine already had its poster boys. Magnus Nilsson, who grew up a stones throw away from me, had set up Fviken, a top-class restaurant with food inspired by the seasons and ingredients from the forest. Ren Redzepi, with whom I worked when I was a youngster, has been hugely successful with the same concept at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has been named Best Restaurant in the World several times. I wanted to add my own personal touch to the new Nordic cuisine; copying Ren or Magnus wouldnt cut it. I wandered around on the island and pondered, like a gloomy character from some black and white Ingmar Bergman film. I stood for ages, just staring at the trees. Later, I realized I hadnt seen the wood for the trees. Literally.

I thought about building a barbecue, but never got round to it. Instead I chopped down some of the birches I had stared at, so that I had some wood. Then I made a fire pit, like the ones I had made with my parents when I was young and we went to the mountains. That fire pit became our family kitchen that summer it never went out. Most of the time we grilled in the usual way, on a grill grate, but one day I didnt have enough patience to wait for the fire to burn down to embers, so I whacked a cast-iron pan into the flames. The fire sizzled and sparked around the pan; the force of the heat knocked me back; and the flavours of the food what depth! Finally I felt like I was on to something.

I started thinking about asado, the barbecuing technique from South America. Grilling over open fires was the core of the concept, just as wood-fired ovens were once the core of Swedish cooking. The first penny dropped. Before the arrival of the electric cooker, fire, wood and iron were the holy trinity of the Swedish kitchen. Aha! What if you could combine typical Nordic ingredients with the typical Nordic way of cooking? It would be the perfect way to complete the new Nordic cuisine concept.

Chance helped me along further. We were building a driveway outside our house, so I cut down a juniper bush that was in the way. When I threw the juniper branches onto the fire, the food developed another dimension. The discoveries succeeded each other and I, by this time properly excited, made excuses to go food shopping every day. Darling, I forgot to buy marmalade yesterday so Im just going down to the shops. Then I would drive the four kilometres, stopping to phone authorities, chefs, suppliers, floor staff and oven builders.

The image of an analogue fine-dining restaurant developed, a place where everything was cooked over fire, like in the old days. My biggest headache was whether it was actually possible. Thor Heyerdahl must have felt the same worry ahead of the Kon-Tiki expedition. How on earth is this raft supposed to float? Who should I take on board with me? I needed established chefs who dared risk their reputation in a stone-age kitchen. My first recruit was Gustav Otterberg, a promising young chef who shared my love for fire. We met at a party and were soon jotting down wood oven sketches on the back of cocktail napkins. Together we went to the Royal Library in Stockholm and devoured cookbooks from the 18th century. To our excitement, we found some fantastic instructional books on how Swedish food was prepared before the advent of electricity.

The idea was, then, to give these ancient techniques a renaissance in my restaurant. Logistically it was pure idiocy I realized that pretty much straight away. The premises at Humlegrdsgatan had once housed a pizzeria, so pipes for a wood-fired oven were in place, but that was the only thing in my favour. Ventilation was the biggest problem there was no natural draft, no extraction, there was smoke everywhere! The dry cleaners next door to the restaurant complained that their newly cleaned clothes smelled like a scout camp. Fan motors blew up almost every day. The chefs were pulling their hair out. The heat was far higher than in a modern restaurant kitchen with induction hobs and small copper pans. The ingredients burned up in the pans. What should a wood oven for the modern kitchen look like? We built a stone-age microwave oven: a cast-iron box with glowing embers at the bottom. By placing damp juniper branches on top, we managed to control the heat. Step by step we were getting there.

Had I made it too complicated for myself? Once the guests had been served their food, surely they wouldnt give a damn if it was cooked over an open fire or not. One day a food writer from Dagens Nyheter called me up for an interview. The next day I read the headline in the paper: Food Niklas opens new grill. Shit, I thought. If a journalist from the biggest newspaper in the country doesnt understand what Im trying to do, how will the guests get it?