Josh Evans is a Researcher with Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen. He graduated from Yale University in May 2012, where he studied literature, philosophy, and food systems, and worked with the Yale Sustainable Food Project for three years. While writing his Bachelor’s thesis on the coevolutionary issues of European legislation for Protected Designations of Origins of food products, he became intrigued by microbiota as key mediators between food, people, and the environment. He plans to work with the lab a while longer, then return to school for graduate studies in food microbiology. He also keeps a blog around food, travel, and learning, at hearthstrung.wordpress.com.

“Lab” interview and self-experiences

1Nordic Food Lab was founded in 2008 as a research and development lab with the purpose of exploring food in the Nordic region. Chef René Redzepi and gastronomic entrepreneur Claus Meyer, co-owners of the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, realised this investigation could not be undertaken in the restaurant kitchen alone. What they needed was a space where chefs, scientists, and other researchers could come together to investigate raw materials, traditional processes, and modern techniques more deeply than the pressure of daily service would allow.

2Thus the lab was born, as a non-profit self-governing institution, and since then it has grown into an interdisciplinary facility for experimental and investigative research. All of our work is open-source, for the benefit of chefs, academics, industry, and the public alike. We collaborate actively on various local and international projects and are always keen to find new and creative ways of bringing our work into the public sphere.

3We have many goals at the lab – discovering new flavours and rediscovering old ones, expanding the category of the edible, and cultivating sustainable food systems among them – but our primary driving force is ultimately the pursuit of deliciousness. Our methodology is rooted in the chef’s approach to food: if it’s not delicious yet, experiment and play with it until something interesting happens.

4In this way we work somewhere in between chefs and academic researchers. We have the space to conduct in-depth investigations, but our pace is fast and iterative, more like the rapid-prototyping of a design studio or kitchen, than that of a traditional lab. Though we are not subject to the respective pressures of daily service or constant publishing, we work to develop new ideas, products, and techniques so that we can disseminate them regularly and widely.

5We have many interests and are experts in very little. We will never know as much about vegetables as our farmer or about microbes as a microbiologist, so we collaborate with these experts to bring their different knowledges together and facilitate their cross-pollination. This blending gives rise to many interesting results.

6One project we return to continually is our search for new types of acidity. While citrus fruits are the staples of sourness in warmer climates, they don’t grow as well here in the north, so we have turned to fermentation to provide us with these necessary sour flavours. Certain fruits and vegetables – like unripe strawberries, gooseberries, redcurrants, and rhubarb – all provide exceptional sourness in the Nordic region, but lactic, acetic, and symbiotic fermentations allow us to preserve this sourness throughout the year, beyond these delicious but ephemeral seasonal flavours. Vinegars provide an especially good method for acidulating all sorts of flavours: pine and rosehip have proven particularly successful, as have rhubarb, strawberry, and celery. The quince was so delicious that we acquired old balsamic barrels to age it further. Kombucha, a type of symbiotic fermentation involving yeasts and bacteria, produces a milder acidity and is good with sweeter substrates – one of our favourites starts with fresh carrot juice.

7The flavours we use are characteristically Nordic, but the processes and techniques we employ are often much broader. Vinegars are made traditionally in many areas of the world, and Kombucha originates from Central Asia. Exploring the food of this specific region does not preclude looking beyond it for inspiration. In fact, we find that some of our most successful discoveries are the result of translating impulses from abroad into the Nordic context.

8Our yellow pea miso, which we affectionally dub “peaso”, is a prime example. The Japanese have rich and varied fermentation traditions, so it makes perfect sense to look to them for cues. We took the basic method for making miso – mixing koji, rice inoculated with the mould Aspergillus oryzae, with cooked soybeans – and developed our own Nordic version, involving barley koji and yellow split peas. The result is a smooth, golden paste with an incredible umami taste, a slight fruity sweetness, and the unmistakeable depth of cooked pea flavour.

11The distinction between ‘weeds’ and ‘vegetables’ is, of course, more evaluative than taxonomic. Yet some of the most surprising and unique flavours can be found in plants we consider inconvenient or downright insidious. Making ‘weeds’ into ‘herbs’ can be a simple but transformative process. All of a sudden the landscape, even the modern urban one, lights up with edible diversity. For instance, the empty lot just outside our lab is covered in sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis). We gather it by the bucketload, wash it, dry it to intensify the aroma, infuse it into milk and churn it into frozen sheep’s yoghurt. The herb contains high quantities of coumarin, the main aromatic compound in tonka bean; so we have found a subtropical flavour from a rare and expensive spice in the northern reaches of Europe in a common and otherwise humble herb. The same is true of woodruff, which we use with cooked cabbage for a simple and delicious staff meal. We need not go so far for the exotic when we can find it just outside our doorstep.

12The relationship between edibility and deliciousness extends far beyond just plants – it is bound up in our considerations of what is good to eat, and these implicit decisions have immense repercussions in the wider world, as modern agriculture and food production show. The conventional understanding is that something must be edible before it can be considered delicious. But that is only half the equation. At the lab, we are interested in investigating the other half: how something can come to be considered edible by first being experienced as delicious. This is our guiding paradigm for introducing (or reintroducing) certain foods into the Nordic culinary vocabulary, like wild plants, seaweeds, fermented foods, and insects.

14Of course, none of these experiments mean much unless we share them and collaborate with others to develop them further. We currently have many partnerships on the go: integrating the commercial production of fish sauce from erstwhile ‘waste’ into the business model for a new fish market opening next spring in central Copenhagen; brewing beer from novel ingredients with Mikkeller; gaining access to expert knowledge on microbial cultivation and analysis from White Labs and the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard; continuing to expand our physical Herbarium and digital database of edible wild plants with the help of professional foragers and wild plant experts from England, Sweden, and Denmark; and an ongoing and rich collaborative relationship with Momofuku Lab in New York City. It is these partnerships that give our projects meaning beyond our own little houseboat in Copenhagen harbour, and we hope to develop only more new collaborative ventures with every passing month.

15Our work is ultimately an inquiry into how we eat and why, which we try to understand and envision through developing new flavours and processes from existing, often common, ingredients and techniques. We try, with everything we make, to expand our common understanding of the delicious and the edible. It is about cultivating an edible consciousness. If some person, when they see a wild plant, or seaweed, or some novel ferment or insect, experiences not disgust but appetite, then this is worthwhile work.