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S1:E7 | Aarhus to Malmö

Sweet Sweden

By Nathan Tsai

May 28^th, 2017

CHEMICAL DIET

The morning started off with a flood of adrenaline.

The previous night, we had looked at our train tickets and decided that we needed to leave the hotel by 5:15AM to arrive at the station before our train left.

Thanks to an unfortunate series of events—someone's alarm didn't go off, the reception desk was unattended, the elevator didn't work—we ended up not even leaving the hotel till 5:40AM. During that time, we had alternately been feverishly packing, running up and down 7 flights of stairs, and standing outside in the bitter morning cold trying to find a taxi, an Uber, or a bicycle to get to the train station faster.

All was not lost. It had taken us 20 minutes to walk from the train station to the hotel the previous day—if we picked up the pace, we might get there in 10 or 15 minutes. That theoretically left us enough time for us to find and board the train. We ran through the sharply frosty streets with heavy packs on our back and tickets clutched in frigid fingers. At 5:55AM, we stumbled into the station, tumbled down the escalators, and collapsed in front of an empty set of train tracks.

We glanced again at our tickets.

The train was due to leave at 7:00AM.

Not at 6:00AM.

Oops.

We had gotten to the station so early that even the McDonalds hadn't yet opened for business.

Stomachs growling, we turned to the only other option: 7-Eleven.

Since I had planned to sleep on the train again, I didn't want to eat anything loaded with sugar or salt. Luckily, this was Denmark: land of good food. Paleo—a hip and healthy restaurant chain—produced a line of drinks aptly named "Ra smoothie" (raw smoothie). This drink went one step above the "cold-pressed" juices one might find in the supermarkets in the States. Instead of just selling the cold pressed juice extract, they blended the fibrous (and flavorful) pulp back into the juice. With the addition of avocado, the juice had a nice creamy texture while still tasting refreshingly fresh.

I also might have purchased a chocolate croissant as well.

It was tasty.

Radio

Julius Thomsens Gade 12, 1632 København V, Denmark

We switched trains in Copenhagen and hopped on a train to the airport.

At the airport, we picked up a rental car for the next leg of our journey.

Before we drove too far though, we stopped for lunch at Radio.

This was another restaurant that seems to be ever-present on foodie-lists in Copenhagen.

Just like many of the other restaurants it competes against, it ticks all the right checkboxes:

— Its head chef was a sous-chef at Noma. —

— All of its food is sustainable, locally sourced, and organic. —

— The menu just lists the ingredients used to prepare the dish; they don't like formally naming dishes. —

It's a poster child for New Nordic Cuisine.

The one and only snack of our meal.

Beets / Ginger / Cream:

Roasted beets topped with pickled ginger and served with a bit of cream to whet the appetite.

The beets were sweet, juicy, and softly crunchy. The ginger was sharply sour, a little salty, and crisp. The cream took the edge off of the ginger and gently softened the sweetness of the beets.

Combined, the flavors melded together well and the resultant was a creamy and fragrant aftertaste.

Great start to the meal.

Caramelized Onion / Butter / Buttermilk:

This butter was so good, it merited its own section.

Caramelized onions were blended with freshly churned butter and the mixture was cut with a bit of buttermilk.

Fresh butter is already an amazing thing to behold.

Sweet, caramelized onions? Probably the best tasting way to prepare an onion. It's got a bit of smokiness, a modicum of sweetness, and a lot of onion-y punch.

The genius bit?

Buttermilk.

Typically, the problem with butter—especially butter with other things inside—is that it's difficult to get the consistency right. Often, restaurants cheat by whipping the butter. That way, even if it's a bit too cold or warm, it's still spreadable. The downside is that the flavor of the butter is lighter—diluted by the air.

By adding a bit of buttermilk to the butter-onion mixture, the chef is able to precisely control the consistency of the butter without taking any of the buttery goodness out of the dish. If anything, the butter becomes even richer with the addition of a bit more creaminess.

We went through five of these beautiful buttery balls.

Sourdough Bread:

It's really difficult to accurately talk about the quality of the bread because the butter was just so good.

I could have spread that butter on anything and it would have tasted great.

The bread was warm, the crumb was gooey, and the crust was crunchy.

That butter though...

Scallops / Kohlrabi / Verbena:

Small, savory, scallops in a citrus-y broth were paired with rolled-up disks of kohlrabi.

The textures in this dish were great. Soft scallops sandwiched between crisp thin slices of sweet root.

The flavors were subtle. The scallops had a hint of brine. This was balanced by the floral and acidic notes of the verbena broth. The fruity notes were then brought back to earth by the sweet and cabbage-y flavor of the kohlrabi.

A light dish, with smooth and quiet flavors.

Quite good actually; I could eat dishes like this every day. It was healthy and easy to eat.

Salmon / Whey / Pistachio:

Grilled salmon served with roasted endives and garnished with whey foam and pistachio cream.

The salmon was criminally overcooked—a rare occurance in Denmark. In the grand scheme of things, it was only slightly well-done, but after eating such well prepared fish the entire trip, this culinary gaffe really stood out. It also wasn't very flavorful. I'm not sure exactly what that was; perhaps not enough salt was used.

The roasted endives had a nice, smokey-bitter flavor to them. It would have contrasted nicely with the sweetness of the fish—theoretically. The foam and the cream were really there for adding to the presentation of the dish.

An average fish dish at best.

Pork / Onions / More onions:

I kid you not, that's actually the name of the dish on the menu.

True to their word, this dish is pretty much a beautifully braised brisket of pork served with sweet onions, onion foam, air-popped onion crisps, and parsley oil.

The pork was fork-tender, slightly sweet, a bit savory, and full of pork-y flavor. It had some herbal notes—likely the parsley, dill, and (maybe?) rosemary in the rest of the dish.

The onions were great. Great sharp flavor to cut across the mellow pork. The textures were awesome too, ranging from the liquid sauce to the crisp bulb scales to the outright crunchy onion chips.

This dish was very Californian. I know I have had very similar dishes in my trips to Napa and in the Bay Area.

Great dish. Great composition.

Nordic Raw Milk Cheese:

Cheese really isn't my thing.

That being said, this cheese was pretty good.

Milky. Slightly salty. Vaguely chalky.

The honey mustard "jam" was pretty good too.

Sweet, fragrant, a bit spicy, a little sour.

Now that I think about it, this dish contained a huge variety of flavors.

Quite impressive for how simple it was.

Carrots / Dill / Seeds:

Wow.

Whipped yogurt foam infused with dill and fennel seed shared the limelight with twice-roasted carrots. The dish was graced with some sort of caramel sauce, sweet dill syrup, almonds, and ground up seeds.

Remember the "biodynamic cream" dish I had at Stud!o?

This dish took the same technique—take yogurt, whip it good, freeze it—but they made it into a desert that I would actually eat over, and over, and over again.

The carrots were roasted and dehydrated. Then immersed in sweetened carrot juice overnight to rehydrate them, and then roasted again to the point of warm softness. They were very carroty carrots.

The sauces were great, lightly sweet, full of flavor, and almost pungent. The flavors lingered for a while even after a swig of water. The nuts and seeds added a great, crunchy texture and earthy flavor to the whole mix.

Gosh.

Not too sweet. Not too tart.

This was a wonderful dessert.

øresund bridge

Lunch over, we piled into the car.

Our destination?

Malmö, Sweden.

To get there from Denmark, we would have to drive across the Øresund Bridge.

It's not just a bridge.

It is a half-bridge, half-tunnel contraption that spans the four and half miles of the Øresund strait and connects Copenhagen to Malmö. In the process, a 4km artificial island was created, unexploded ordinance from World War II was disarmed, and an entirely new ecological environment was created.

Each one-way trip on the bridge costs $55.

Luckily, our car was equipped with a "BroPas" which had the dual benefit of allowing us to travel through the automated toll station and reducing the price per trip to $25 each way.

Still cheaper and faster than flying I guess.

Malmo

restaurang spot

Stora Nygatan 33, 211 37 Malmö, Sweden

We had done a lot of traveling and by the time we checked in and washed up, we were pretty exhausted. A quick check of the hotel restaurant revealed shockingly expensive dinner fare and poor reviews online. So, we decided to take a stroll around town and sit down at the first decent-looking place.

We ended up at Restaurang Spot, a cozy-looking, lived-in, authentic-feeling Italian restaurant. It was packed, but, we were fortunate to have good timing and arrive just as a table opened up. Their claim-to-fame was their wood-fired pizza but, I was not in the mood for pizza after a long day. I just wanted something robust, warm, and comfortable to settle myself in for the rest of the night.

I ordered a "Pasta con Carne" which, on the menu looked promising. Oxtail, a bit of cream, onions, mushrooms, peppers, and red wine does sound like a rib-sticking, hearty dish that comforts the weary body.

Unfortunately, I chose wrongly.

Superficially, the presentation was not bad. The fettuccine looked to be served with ample sauce and chunks of beef, peppers, and cheese with a bit of arugula sprinkled for color on top. The arugula was fresh, the sauce was dark red, and there was a bit of steam coming off of the dish.

The first warning sign was that the dish really didn't smell like much. In my experience, good Italian sauce is fragrant—almost like aromatic solace.

The moment I took my first bite, I knew that this dish was going to be a disappointment.

The pasta was soggy; it was cooked way past being al dente. In fact, it was slightly mushy and a bit grainy in texture and very pasty in flavor. The sauce was almost flavorless. It just tasted of overcooked tomatoes with salt. The beef was not soft and the flavor was reminiscent of cardboard. And worst of all, the peppers were cut into chunks too large to chew comfortably with the pasta and it was uncooked.

When bell peppers are uncooked (or barely cooked), they have this nice, sharp, fresh, juicy, flavor that almost bursts from the pepper itself. This is wonderful if making a salad, but not wonderful in a hot, flavorless sauce. The juice from the pepper just bursts out and dilutes the creaminess of the sauce and thins it. It's totally the wrong type of texture and flavor one would expect to find in an Italian pasta.