Norwegian wooed

In search of culinary inspiration, few British chefs would think of Norway. But while well-known Norwegian exports may be thin on the ground - apart from the odd Premiership footballer or pop band - talent of the kitchen kind is not. Just look at their efforts in international culinary competitions such as the Bocuse d'Or for evidence, where out of eight events two winners have hailed from Norway (see below).

 

When Lee Parsons was named the UK's Norwegian Seafood Recipe Challenge winner, with a trip to Oslo and Bergen and a fjord cruise as part of his prize, he had no ideas about what to expect. Like most of us, Parsons hadn't been to Norway and wouldn't have recognised a Norwegian chef if he'd slapped him round the face with a piece of Arctic char - but he was soon to meet some of the country's finest.

 

The night before the trip Parsons and his wife, Elizabeth, were on a late shift at Wood Hall hotel in Linton, near Wetherby, West Yorkshire - where they work as head chef and deputy manager respectively - and managed to sneak in only two hours' sleep before leaving Manchester for Oslo, where the adventure began. Joining them were Mette Dalsbø Ottem, marketing executive for Norwegian Seafood in Tromsø; Lisa Chafel, director of the Food Group, which looks after its media interests in the UK; and, of course, Caterer.

 

Traditional lunch
First stop, Oslo. The group's guide for the day and night is Kjetil Gundersen, chef lecturer from the Norwegian Culinary Institute, who is also an active member of the national culinary team. He decides to take us for a traditional Norwegian lunch, and the venue he chooses is StatholderGaarden, run by Michelin-starred chef Bent Stiansen and his wife, Annette.

 

Stiansen, a former Bocuse d'Or winner, comes out front to meet Parsons. He explains that traditional Norwegian food is in part Danish, owing to the fact that Norway was under Danish rule for many years. But his wife is Danish, so her influence plays its part too. The food we are about to eat will be traditional, but Stiansen's best work is upstairs in the fine-dining restaurant, where the star is held.

 

The food served there has been influenced by his travels, says Stiansen, to Italy, France, Thailand and Denmark, and he proudly shows off his book, Stiansens Kulinairiske Koffert, which he wrote as a result.

 

"I like to combine," he says, describing the food in the fine-dining restaurant. "It's modern classic." But while Stiansen found what he describes as "the best recipes" in these countries, he's not inclined to import their respective ingredients. "I use mostly Norwegian raw products," he says, firmly. "Half the menu is made up of fish and shellfish, but I'm not interested in using Mediterranean fish - apart from, say, tuna or dorade. This ethnic trend is not made for chefs; it's made for the domestic market."

 

As the first ice-cold aquavit is poured into our glasses, we don't mention the fact that we have all missed breakfast. It's a bit heavy for our first drink of the day, but it serves a purpose, numbing our lips and warming us up in seconds (it's about 2°C outside).

 

The first three courses, all herring-based, arrive at the table. We munch our way through beautifully presented marinated herring with curry salad, eggs and macaroni; herring and apple; and smoked herring with poached quail's egg topped with mayonnaise - all using bread as a base. The ingredients are stunningly fresh, and Parsons is reminded of the smörgåsbord he used to serve during his eight years at Claridge's in London.

 

Seasoned competitor
Over lunch, Parsons tells us why he entered the Norwegian Seafood Recipe Challenge. Despite the fact that in recent years he has spent most of his time living in Canada, in Niagara-on-the-Lake (working at the Prince of Wales hotel), he's managed to work in a few competitions to be proud of. He was a semi-finalist in the 2002 Craft Guild of Chefs' Knorr National Chef of the Year, he's been in the Roux Scholarship final twice, and he won the Rioja Sous Chef Bursary in 1999. The Seafood Recipe Challenge caught his attention within weeks of returning to old Blighty at the beginning of this year, and now he's got his eye on Bocuse d'Or.

 

Course after course continues to arrive: smoked salmon and white asparagus; trout tartare on bread; Skagen toast (a classic dish of fjord-trawled shrimps with grapefruit), which Elizabeth dubs a "posh prawn cocktail"; and mussel soup with chopped apple, chives and whole mussels.

 

Slices of gâteau
We're absolutely stuffed at this point, so we do the only sensible thing - head for Oslo's best pâtisserie, Pascal. Don't ask how, but some members of the party manage to find room for enormous slices of fruit gâteau and - even more incredibly - mugs of hot chocolate.

 

A walk in the park seems the only reasonable thing to do now, in spite of the fact that the air seems so much colder. We admire the city's architecture, which provides a stunning backdrop to the cosmopolitan feel of the place. But enough sightseeing, we need to get ready for dinner - at one of Oslo's best restaurants.

 

The entrance to Oro, a glass-fronted fascia, leads you through to tiled floors, cream-covered carver chairs and a state-of-the-art open-plan kitchen complete with NKr1m (£88,000) oven.

 

Oro's chef-proprietor, Terje Ness, is apparently a bit of a culinary god. He secured the Bocuse d'Or trophy for Norway in 1999, opening his restaurant shortly afterwards, and Michelin kindly followed through with a star. He graciously meets us on arrival, but he lets his food do the talking from thereon in. The first course, served on a large, white Figgjo plate, arrives sporting a tablespoon of trout tartare with soya sauce, fennel flan, poached bacon and scrambled egg with white truffle. Already it's clear, in presentation at least, that the El Bulli phenomenon has hit Norway too.

 

Dish after dish ensues (Norwegian Bay scallops with Jerusalem artichokes, followed by white truffle risotto) while Gundersen tells us about the influence of international cuisine in Norway. While we Brits tend, in the main, to bow to France and the USA when it comes to culinary influences, the Norwegians are a little more open-minded. Each chef that we meet on the trip goes out of his way to travel, maybe to neighbouring Denmark or Sweden, or further afield to England, France, the USA or Australia.

 

A lightly smoked piece of halibut with caviar sauce is next. Stunning. Why hasn't this chef got two stars? Oven-baked cod with "lardo" garlic potato (Serrano ham and potato mashed with garlic) precedes a frozen watermelon granité with a cucumber Champagne, and wild duck with lentils and Cointreau sauce.

 

The trend to serve a cheese dish rather than a plate of cheese fits in well with Oro's food style, and as we are served Camembert ice-cream with white truffle, we discover that Ness, too, has bought himself a Pacojet. But the dish that really gets us going is a "gin and tonic" (tonic jelly served with a sorbet of juniper berries). Simple, but brilliant. A pithivier of hazelnut with chocolate mousse - topped with gold leaf - and cubed pear completes the meal.

 

Four hours after going to bed, we're up again for our flight to Bergen. Leaving behind the bright lights of Oslo, we find ourselves in a beautiful fishing village, where we're met by Fredrik Hald, chef-manager of the Neptun restaurant, which he runs with his business partner Ole Haga within the Neptun hotel. We're going fishing.

 

Rigorously regulated
Hald takes us out on Haga's small fishing boat to meet one of the local fish farmers. The aquaculture industry in Norway is impressive. It sets some of the highest international fishing standards and is envied by many a competing country. The secret of its success is that it's well policed. The government scrutinises fish production - it's worth too much to the country not to - and the farmers are rigorously regulated. As a result, other fish-farming countries regularly visit Norway to see how it's done.

 

There are several factors that contribute to its success: Norway's rivers lend themselves to raising smolt (the young fish); the temperature of the coastal waters is favourable; the water is very clean; and the country has a long, protected coastline. It has also invested heavily in scientific research into farming, resulting in the introduction in the late 1980s of vaccines that prevent disease and thereby reduce - or practically remove - the use of antibiotics.

 

We haven't eaten for at least two hours, so it must be time for lunch. We moor on an isolated rock in a fjord and a picnic is unloaded. Hald has brought scallops, crayfish marinated in fruit, vegetables and spiced bouillon, salmon tartare and a fresh loaf. While Parsons dresses the plates and the rest of us lounge about in our amply padded waterproofs, Hald fries the scallops on a camping-gas stove. As the wind drops, the heat of the sun breaks through and we find ourselves stripping off (a bit). The food is simple compared with the culinary pyrotechnics we experienced the night before - but it tastes great.

 

After lunch we head back to Bergen, but not before giving the boys a chance to do a spot of fishing.

 

Lee and Elizabeth's final meal with us that evening, before boarding their cruise ship MS Narvik, is a real education and not altogether a pleasant experience. Hald wants us to try a traditional dish from the surrounding region - fermented mountain freshwater trout. The fish is cleaned and salt and sugar are stuffed into the cavity before it's placed in a bucket and dropped into a hole in the ground for a couple of months. As Hald describes the dish before us, the blood rapidly drains from our faces. "Mmm," we're all thinking, "rotten fish - our favourite."

 

You can imagine how it smells; but when you get past the odour, the fish itself isn't too bad. Fortunately, the rest of the meal - fillet of cod pressed with salt and sugar for two days, served with a butter sauce, boiled eggs and a julienne of vegetables, and cloudberry millefeuille and ice-cream - return us quickly to the Norwegian food we'd come to appreciate.

 

Norwegian Seafood and Bocuse d'Or

 

Norwegian Seafood has had a long affiliation with the Bocuse d'Or competition, first gaining its high-profile role in 1997 when competitors were asked to cook with skrei (Arctic cod).

 

The ingredient worked well for Norway's competitor, Odd Ivar Solvold, who headed home with a third-place Bocuse de bronze. Two years later - the competition is held every other year - Terje Ness, who today runs one of the nation's most highly rated restaurants, Oro in Oslo, clinched Norway's second gold in the competition's history when the main seafood ingredients were saithe and scallops. The first Bocuse d'Or won by a Norwegian went to Bent Stiansen in 1993. And the Norwegians have high hopes for their 2003 candidate, Charles Tjessem, who works as head chef at oil company Statoil in Stavanger. But what about the British entrant, I hear you cry. Well, yes, the Norwegians are impressed with him too, having just hosted him on a "get to know fjord trout" trip.

 

Eyck Zimmer, senior sous chef at Claridge's, London, has just acquired British citizenship and will represent the UK in Lyons at the Bocuse d'Or on 28 and 29 January 2003. Zimmer will be one of 24 chefs competing from as many countries.

 

During the competition each contestant will have five hours to prepare a seafood dish and a meat dish using the official products as selected by the Bocuse d'Or organising committee. This year's official products are Norwegian fjord trout and beouf de tradition bouchère.

 

The 26-member jury includes the presidents of each delegation, a president from the international jury and an honorary president. The jury is divided into two groups (to judge meat and fish) and marks are awarded out of a total of 60 on the basis of taste and presentation. In addition to the three main awards, prizes are also given to the dishes with the best seafood and meat preparation.

 

Zimmer, who has recently returned from the Prix Pierre Taittinger competition in Paris, where he finished sensationally in second place, was selected by the Academy of Culinary Arts to represent the UK due to his extensive experience in competitions.

 

"I attended the Bocuse d'Or when John Williams was the UK candidate in 2001, so I've seen the competition in action," says Zimmer, who also finished as runner-up in this year's Norwegian Seafood Recipe Challenge.

 

During his trip to Norway, he spent time working with the national product alongside past winners Stiansen and Ness, and his rival Charles Tjessem, as well as studying the fish in its habitat. "I'm really impressed with the standards operated by the fish farmers. You can really see the pride that they have in their work. Sometimes we think fish comes out of little boxes. It comes in, and you tend to forget the hard work that people have put into a product."

 

But what's Zimmer got up his sleeve for the competition? Not wishing to give too much away, he says: "I'm at early stages with my dishes. In Norway I cooked a celery pur‚e with celery top and shellfish timbale. I may take that idea further. I may go completely off at another tangent."

 

Zimmer sees Bocuse d'Or as "the big one" in competition terms. But he laments the lack of support from the industry. So far, he's raised about £3,000 to provide silverware and cover his accommodation and travelling costs, but this compares with others who have raised 15 times that much.

 

"The financial pressure of competing is such a burden. You need support from other chefs and suppliers to relieve that pressure and let you concentrate on training and practising."

 

But he has not given up hope. "I'm going to give it my best shot. Charles [Tjessem] has been a good friend over the last couple of days, and I've had the support from former winners. Some have given me some really good advice, which you just couldn't pay for."

• www.seafood.no/bocusedor