Xploring results from Denmark - Sabrina Speiermann

Sabrina Speiermann

(Communication Researcher. Food lover. Famous for making everything from scratch. Loves Mexican and Italian food. Often throws dinner parties with delicious food and good wine. She and her husband share a passion for good food. Imports her own oil, wine and balsamic vinegar from Italy).

Sabrina
”I come from a home with no cooking tradition whatsoever. It was this place where you fried in margarine and left it on the pan for next time you cooked. I thought that was so disgusting. So the moment I moved away from home, I used the opportunity to completely change culinary style.” Sabrina is explaining to me about her food habits as we are shopping in the Danish supermarket Føtex.

Shopping Routines
“I come here every Monday and do the shopping for the whole week”, she explains. “On my way here, I decide which meals we’ll have. Generally it’s the same, like, 14 meals we alternate between. It’s like that when you have kids. It just has to work!”

Sabrina takes me through the supermarket, showing me how a Monday shopping session looks. She picks what she needs as we walk down the various aisles. Certain things are always part of her shopping. Milk, for instance. And rye bread, and oats, and minced meat. And Tex Mex ingredients, like Santa Maria taco sauce. “Oh, this is very revealing, isn’t it?”, she smiles, making an implicit excuse for her love of Mexican food. “But we just LOVE that stuff”. She only buys the Santa Maria brand, because no other brand is as tasty. We reach the dairy section, and she takes me to the parmesan cheese, holding up the classical triangular cheese. “One of these each week!”, she says. “We’re addicted!”

In the vegetable section she reaches for the organic carrots. “We eat these every day. I cut them in sticks and put them on the dinner table. The kids love them and it’s a good way to make them eat some vegetables.” Sabrina always buys organic carrots, because they taste better, she feels. The Monday shopping also involves cucumbers. “For the kids”, she says. “But here I just go for the Danish ones – not the organic ones. Really, I only buy organic if I feel that it makes a difference in taste. Taste is the number one”.

Good food is food prepared from scratch
“You’re talking to a woman who used to make her own peeled tomatoes!”, she says. “None of that canned stuff”. She smiles and winks. ”I truly believe that the best food is the one prepared from scratch. Although my motto is: Prepare it yourself, unless the alternative is better”. She shows me a small pack of flour and seasoning for Danish meat balls. “I buy this instead of adding the flour and seasoning myself. Because they always turn out great and get the perfect consistency. It’s simply better than my own homemade meat balls.”

“I also bake my own bread. I’m proud of my bread”, she smiles.

And then the kids arrived…
“Well, the homemade peeled tomatoes are history”, she sighs. “That was before I had kids. Now it just has to work. Everyday food is practical food. Food Loving is when we have guests. There’s a big difference between our daily meals and our dinner party meals.”, she explains. Before they had children, they would often cook elaborate meals for each other and peruse the special shops for the best ingredients. Now she shop in a place where she can get everything she needs at once. “Previously, we might decide some Thursday evening that we wanted blinis with lumpfish roe, and then we’d go to the shops and find the ingredients. Today it’s spaghetti Bolognese, meat balls, tex mex, and pita bread with falafel.”

A miminum standard maintained
“Even though times are pretty pathetic for food loving after we got kids, we try to keep a minimum standard. I bake my own bread, and we have our own olive oil, balsamico and wine imported from Italy. Plus we always use “Læsø Salt” – that’s kind of our trade mark.” Læsø Salt is a high quality sea salt produced on the Danish island of Bornholm.
“Whenever we have guests, I serve my homemade bread and our Italian olive oil. That’s just a mandatory part of the meal.”
Sabrina also insists on taking the time to buy good coffee and grind the beans herself. “This is just something you have to find the time for!”, she says. Another of her trademarks is to always serve the very expensive chocolate made by the exclusive Danish chocolatier Peter Beier. “His chocolate is just divine”, she says with a half dreamy, half guilt-ridden smile.

Butter
“I ALWAYS buy Lurpak”, she says with a firm voice. ”It just tastes the best.” There is obviously no discussion about Sabrina’s preferences in butter. She is even famous among her friends for being such a die-hard Lurpak consumer. She doesn’t buy the organic version, because it grows stale too quickly, she feels. It takes a long time for her family to consume a pack of butter, and she finds that the organic butter tastes bad after one week in the fridge. “Look, you can tell how it has this yellow color.” She gently flips open a pack and shows me the color.
She would never buy garlic butter or parsley butter. The idea of putting a giant lump of butter into your baked potato grosses her out. She only uses butter for baking and for putting on bread in the weekend. During the week days no butter is allowed on bread out of a concern with calories and weight. For cooking she uses olive oil exclusively.
“On special occasions, I buy the Lurpak butter with Læsø Salt. I told you that Læsø Salt is kind of our trade mark”, she smiles. On a daily basis she doesn’t buy the Læsø Salt version because it’s too salty.

She would never dream of buying spreadable butter. “It’s not butter!”, she exclaims. Once, she tried the Lurpak version, and she was very disappointed. “I guess I thought it was still real butter. I mean, I guess I didn’t think that Lurpak would sink to deep as to sell spreadable butter. They also put that product on the market very late compared to the other producers. It tasted horrible. It wasn’t butter. It didn’t have that Lurpak taste. I like the fact that it comes in this hard box, because the paper easily tears and is difficult to handle. But I can live with that.”
Sabrina also vehemently objects to the use of margarine. “It’s simply disgusting”, she says, and reminds me of the frying pan with old, stale margarine in her family home. “I just swore to get away from that”, she says.
As we pay at the counter, she tells me that tonight’s menu is Spaghetti Bolognese. It’s one of my favorite meals – given that I’ve prepared it myself”, she smiles a little apologetically. “Don’t you know how sometimes a meal just has to taste a very specific way to be right?” I nod. “Well, I make a mean SpagBol”, she grins.

This is Sabrina’s recipe for her other favorite meal: Young cock on root vegetables
The cock is rubbed with olive oil, salt and pepper. Placed on a bottom of roughly chopped root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, parsnips, parsley roots, Jerusalem artichokes). Roasted for 45 minutes in the oven at 200 degree celcius. Add ¼ litre of cream (13%). Let it roast for another 10 minutes, then take it out.Serve with beet salad (fresh grated red beets with pine nuts) and green salad with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, avocado, pine nuts and parmesan. Plus (obviously) homemade bread and Italian oli

Xploring results from Denmark - Rasmus Johnsen

Rasmus Johnsen

(Philosopher and teacher. Former chef. Food lover. Spends on average 2 hours every day cooking. Cooks often food for larger events).

Rasmus
We meet in front of Irma, one of Denmark’s fairly expensive and exclusive supermarkets. “I shop here because of the atmosphere”, Rasmus explains. “I dislike being treated like garbage down in Netto”, he says, referring to the very popular discount supermarket. In the fruit section he goes straight to the citrus shelves and picks a number of large grapefruits. “Not ecological?”, I ask. Rasmus takes me to the ecological shelves and shows me the grapefruits there. They are small, wrinkly and with brown marks. “That’s just not appetizing”, he says.

Taste, Smell and Freshness
When Rasmus shops he goes after taste, smell and freshness. Organic is not vital unless it makes a difference for the taste. In dairy products and in certain vegetables he can really taste the difference, but otherwise he gives priority to freshness and fragrance.

We continue in the vegetable department. In front of a shelf with tomatoes, Rasmus stops short. He has already picked a pack of tomatoes, but on this shelf the plum tomatoes are on sale. He returns the other pack and takes the plum tomatoes instead. “They’re cheaper, and they smell better”, he explains. Price matters to him. “Buying stuff on sale in Irma is the perfect package: cheap and good quality in one go!”.

Making other people happy
He peruses through the supermarket, allowing himself to be inspired. “When I shop, I like to think about what would make others happy. I live with two friends, and I know that Martin loves peanut butter – the organic crunchy one. So I should remember to buy that”. The social aspect of cooking is at least half the pleasure, according to Rasmus. When Rasmus cooks, he likes to cook for others.

Dropping meat
Recently, he decided to quit meat. He felt that his cooking had simply become too boring, because it always revolved around the meat. As a challenge to himself and his cooking dedication, he decided to become a vegetarian. It brought back the slow, focused cooking in his life. Obviously, there were other aspects of this choice too, e.g. animal welfare and health. “I just feel so much better after I dropped the meat”, he says. Dropping meat also spared him the eternal conflicts at the supermarket when he had to decide whether to buy the ecological and politically correct eco-chicken at an exorbitant price or just go for the cheap regular chicken. “I’m free from these conscience issues now as a vegetarian”, he says.

Making yourself happy
Usually Rasmus will spend 3-4 hours on preparing a meal. He loves that feeling of entering a meditative mode in the kitchen. It’s a way of showing care for yourself. Of feeling life. Of being in the moment. That’s also part of the reason why he stopped eating meat. “I just felt like the lost bird on capitalism’s big tree – being force-fed industrial meet produced under gruelling circumstances. This whole machinery surrounding the industrial production of meat is just too far out. I didn’t feel good about myself being part of that.”

Simple food is good food
Rasmus likes to make good simple food. He used to work as a cook for several years, so it is not out of lacking skills that he does not make fine French cooking. He just prefers simple food which focuses on fresh ingredients from the season. “Asian food is great, because it’s simple and in small portions. Really yummie.”

Inspiration
Rasmus likes to spend time flipping through his cookbooks or surfing food blogs on the net to find inspiration. Often, he can just sit around fantasizing about different combinations of taste or ingredients for some future meal. Tonight, he is making Vietnamese fresh spring rolls. They are great for when you have many guests, and they will be 15 this evening.

Butter
“I like butter!”, Rasmus says. “I always have it in the fridge.” He has stopped using it under cold cuts and spreads out of concern for his weight. Instead he uses it as a spread of its own occasionally. “It has to be salted and organic – that’s definitively the tastiest choice!”, he explains. Otherwise, he uses it for baking and cooking. Generally he fries with oil, but he likes to add butter to stuff he prepares in the oven. Rasmus’ roommate enters as we’re discussing butter. “Do you ever fry meat with butter?”, he asks her. “Sure – I prefer frying it with butter!”, she responds, a little surprised. Rasmus is bemused. “That’s so weird. I’d never fry meat with butter. Oil is much better suited for that.”

Dietitian
Rasmus attends a dietitian once in a while. Originally it was a weight issue, but now it’s more a desire to know what is actually healthy and what isn’t. “You’re just filled with so much messy information that it’s hard to figure out what’s actually good for you and what isn’t”, he says. Since becoming a vegetarian, the need to know about proteins and vitamins has become bigger for him. And in general he would just like to get out of the dark when it comes to knowledge about health and food. So currently the dietitian has put him on a fairly restrictive regime which means that he gets to eat much less cheese than he’d prefer.

Always in stock
There are certain things which just have to be available at home at all times. Lots of fruit for instance. Apples, pears, oranges, grapes and kiwis. And basic vegetables like carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes. “We also have to have some candy in the cabinet. Everybody always says that they don’t eat it. But whenever there’s something in the house, it’s eaten pronto. So I just make sure that we have some, because really – it makes everybody happy.” When we were shopping in Irma, Rasmus picked a high-quality dark chocolate and a bag of mixed candy on sale. 50% reduction. “We cannot resist that, now can we?”, he smiles.

Xploring results from Denmark - Philip Thomsen

Philip Thomsen
(Works as a journalist. Food lover. Has been cooking for 20 years. Major consumer of cookbooks, food programs and food blogs online. Often includes large dinners with haute cuisine).

Philip
Originally, the plan had been to make roast pork for himself and his friend Gustav tonight. But Gustav got sick, so now Philip is just doing his regular shopping. Whenever he and Gustav are together, Gustav requests the roast pork which is Philip’s piece de la resistance. “We make sure to eat it whenever the girlfriends are not around, because they have this weird reluctance to eat pork”, Philip explains. “They think pork is unclean meat, which is pretty irrational. In fact, pork is very healthy.”
The pork for this dish must be bought at the organic butcher downtown, Philip explains. It’s the best place for good organic meat, even if it’s harrowingly expensive. It’s a half hour drive from Philip’s house to the butcher, but he would never dream of buying the meat elsewhere.

The cookbook
We’re meeting to shop together at the mall. It has a very well-assorted high quality supermarket which Philip uses for shopping. When I meet him, he looks extraordinarily pleased. He pulls a book out of his plastic bag. “Check this out!”, he exclaims. “I’ve been trying to get my hands on this cookbook for years!” He shows me a thick cookbook called “The Silver Spoon”. It contains recipes from some of the famous Michelin cooks in Denmark, and the book has recently been reprinted after being sold out for ages. I display befitting admiration of the book, and then we enter the supermarket.

Shopping at the supermarket
When in the supermarket, Philip peruses through the aisles. There are a number of specific products he wants to buy, but otherwise he lets himself be inspired as we move along. He doesn’t have a shopping list. “I love this supermarket because it has an amazing selection. It’s really well-stocked”, he explains. He takes me to the aisle with the wines. “Look at this!”, he points to the small posters hanging above the wines. “They give you lots of information about the wine, and then they display the reviews which the wine received. I think that’s really cool”, he says. Philip drinks wine frequently, and at weekends he’s happy to spend 15-20 £ on a good bottle of wine. “When I shop food, I really don’t think about the price”, he says, “I go for the good stuff”.

















Organic
We arrive at the vegetables. Philip shows me the onions, carrots, cabbage and leeks he’ll buy. He always goes for organic if it’s available. To him organic equals quality and health. In the fruit department he picks only organic too, even though it is very pricy compared to the regular fruit. He tells me that the same thing goes for meat. Not only is it healthier, but it also puts his mind at ease about possible animal welfare issues. His eggs are from free range hens too.
Philip loves fruit. He always has a large batch of apples, oranges, bananas, pears and kiwis lying around at home. Organic and fresh.
When buying vegetables, he goes for the ones in season. “Freshness is really important in good food”, he explains.

Taste above health
We arrive at the cold cuts and spreads. He shows me his favorite liver pate – an organic brand. I notice that he doesn’t pick the low fat one from the same brand. “It doesn’t taste as good”, he says. “I don’t care about the fat percentage, I care about the taste. And fat tastes good!”
The same thing goes for his choice of cheese. The low fat cheese is not his style. He has a favorite cheese from the brand Thise, which he spends a long time trying to find on the dairy shelves. It’s not there. “We have to go to the cheese shop then”, he says. “I have to get that cheese.” Philip learned about this cheese in a restaurant review which mentioned it. Since then he always has it in the house – along with 4-5 other cheeses of different types and tastes. He’s a bit of a cheese fiend.














Where to shop
Philip has two favorite supermarkets where he gets his basic shopping items. Apart from that he uses a number of special shops: the organic butcher downtown, his local butcher, his local vegetable shop, his local cheese shop, his local fish shop, his local bakery, and a number of ethnic shops for special ingredients. He would never just buy everything in the supermarket. He goes to the place where he can get the best, and he is happy to spend that extra time and money. For steaks he always uses his local butcher. One steak costs 10£ which is pretty exorbitant. But he never buys it anywhere else. “You wouldn’t believe how fantastic that meat is!”, he says.

Butter
Philip grins when I ask him about butter. “Don’t you know that they call me the King of Butter? I LOVE butter. I use butter in everything: baking, frying, roasting, cooking and on bread.” He loves to eat a good piece of bread with a thick layer of butter and nothing else. That’s a truly divine taste, he claims. His favorite brand is Thise, but he’ll go for the Lurpak too. He always buys ecological salted butter except for when he makes gravy. Then he uses unsalted butter. Generally, he buys one pack of butter a week, but occasionally he buys two. “I eat a lot of butter!”, he grins.

















“Butter should be kept in the fridge”, he explains. He just keeps it in the paper wrapping even if it’s not very practical and easily tears. Every once in a while he might buy a spreadable butter for some bread, but as a rule he feels that butter should be real butter – not some substitute product. Obviously, butter is also a component in Philip’s specialty, roast pork. It’s a pretty elaborate meal:

Philip’s Recipe for Roast Pork
Roast pork:
Start by boiling the cracklings, facing downwards in a roasting-pan for 20 minutes (put boiling water in the pan). After this, rub a large amount of salt on the cracklings and stick laurel leaves in between them. After this the roast goes into the oven. The time depends on the size of the roast. Most importantly, the cracklings must be placed completely horizontally; otherwise they will not get crunchy.

Red cabbage:
You need 2 kg of red cabbage, finely chopped; butter, 2 ½ dl of sweet red currant juice; 1 dl red wine vinegar; 4 tablespoons of muscovado; 2 red food apples.
Lightly fry the red cabbage in butter for approximately five minutes. Add the red currant juice, the red wine vinegar and the muscovado and thoroughly stir. Put on lid an let boil lightly for approximately 20 minutes. Finely dice the apples. Add them to the cabbage after 20 minutes of boiling and then let boil lightly for another 10-15 minutes under a lid.

Sauce:
Use a good veal stock made with onions and carrots plus juice from the pork roast and 3-4 dl water. After a while, add a tablespoon of Blue Castello cheese and a tablespoon of red currant gel. Then add ¼ liter heavy cream plus salt, pepper and sauce color. End up by adding some corn flour to reach the right consistency.

Serve all this with boiled potatoes and chips

Xporing results from Denmark - Jesper Stein Larsen

Jesper Stein Larsen

(Journalist and food reviewer Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Food lover. Cooks much of his food himself. Holds all of the cookbooks published. Reviews restaurants twice a month).

Jesper
I meet Jesper at the organic butcher downtown. The place is pretty spectacular: Not only are the prices shockingly high, but the butchers behind the counter are dressed in black and wear bowler hats. This is not your regular butcher around the corner! “I buy all my cold cuts here”, Jesper explains. “When it comes to cold cuts, they’re simply the best place in the country”, he says. After making his request, he whispers to me: “Never buy poultry in here. The cheapest chicken breast you can find in here – and I mean ONE chicken breast – costs 5£!”

Ecology and animal welfare
Jesper used to eat chicken breasts several times a week. They’re so cheap at the supermarket, and the kids love them. But after reading about the industrial production of poultry, he just can’t put his teeth in a regular chicken breast anymore. “They’re stuffed with chemicals and pumped with water and live under the most terrifying conditions”, he says. Recently, he watched a documentary which explained that modern chicks are a result of carefully calculating the precise balance between maximizing weight at a minimum of time while still maintaining enough leg strength that they do not simply collapse under their own body. For some chicks this calculation doesn’t quite fit, so a certain number of them simply break their legs and are trampled to death by their thousands of fellow chicken. “Normally I’m not hysterical about animals – I mean, in my worlds animals are here to be eaten. But that’s just going a bit too far, even for me!” he concludes. “And what’s more”, he continues, “ animals which have been treated that way don’t taste good!” Now he buys organic chicken at the supermarket once in a while, but in general he has simply reduced the frequency of chicken meals dramatically.
Jesper buys organic products whenever it’s possible. Previously he was too mean to buy organic fruit, which is a great deal more expensive than the regular fruit. But for a few years now he has started buying that organic too. His youngest daughter is four years old, and he’s concerned about how the chemicals and meds in the non-organic products might affect her health.

Shopping habits
Jesper divides his shopping between two kinds of supermarkets – a discount and a high-end – and a number of special shops. He knows which things he’ll look for in which places, so the regular stock vegetables like carrots, onions and potatoes, he buys in Netto, which has a good selection of organic products. Here, he also buys his dairy products, his organic muesli and a number of other basic products. Then there are things which he would never buy in a supermarket: fish, for instance. Generally, he’ll go to the butcher for meat, to the organic shop for flour, pasta, dried beans etc., to the Chinese or Thai supermarket for Asian ingredients, and to the tea shop for tea. He bakes his own bread – both dark and white. His wife has dropped white bread, so he’s on his own with that pleasure – except for the kids obviously.

Health and Taste
“I don’t care about the price, when I buy food. I go for taste and freshness, and after that for health”, Jesper says. We’re at the fish shop, and I notice how expensive the salmon is compared to the one in the supermarket. “I’m sorry, but you’d never get me to buy the salmon in the supermarket. It has a completely different texture. It looks kinda grey and dry compared to this one.” He points to a fleshy piece of pink salmon in the window counter.
For tonight, Jesper is buying lumpfish roe. I find the price pretty awesome, but he reminds me that it’s still a lot cheaper than the chicken breast you could buy across the street in the organic butcher.

I ask him about calories. He scoffs. “Well, it’s pretty common knowledge that enjoying food and avoiding fat don’t go well together. I’m not on that low-fat-no-sugar trip. I grew up in a family which truly celebrated good food. I do the same thing. Calories are not a concern!”

Asian food
We continue to the Chinese supermarket where he gets his usual bottle of oyster sauce, and his usual bag of frozen edame beans. “I just love these”, he says. “They have the nutty flavor – or a bit like almonds..” Jesper contemplates the fact that the organic principle hasn’t really reached the products for Asian cooking. He expects that this will happen in the future. He loves Asian food. He has travelled a lot in Vietnam, and he’s a great fan of their cooking. But Indian food is also a great treat, he says.

The trend in Danish cooking
“The big deal among big Danish chefs right now is to reinvent traditional Danish meals in a funky version.”, he explains. “You have to buy locally produced ingredients from the season and go completely natural. If you can pick the stuff in your own backyard it’s the best. For instance, the Danish chef Camilla Plum has made a range of salads with leaves and berries growing wild in her garden.” He reflects for a moment. “I bet they’ll start growing edame beens here in Denmark – and if they don’t, then people will stop eating them.”
Jesper is always in touch with the trends in cooking. He works as a restaurant reviewer on a large newspaper, and he receives a copy of every published cookbook. “I’ve gotta admit it”, he says. “I have a fetish for cookbooks.” He can spend hours going through them, and he rarely cooks for a dinner party without consulting one. Obviously, there are things he knows by heart, but he likes to challenge himself and try new things. He also finds inspiration in the two monthly visits to restaurants which he has to review. For instance, if he notices how several restaurants start using wild onions, then he starts to introduce that ingredient in his own cooking.

Butter
Jesper uses butter for frying fish, meat balls or breaded things. Otherwise, he fries with oil. He likes to add a big lump of butter when he roasts meat in the oven. For instance a leg of lamb – it gets a wonderful caramel-like flavor when the butter reaches a high temperature. Jesper also uses butter for gravy and for baking cakes. His bread is baked with oil.
“I always buy organic butter – preferably Løgismose, sometimes Osted. They have the best taste”, he explains. He thinks that regular butter tastes just like spreadable butter: flavorless and vapid. The organic butter, on the other hand, has a strong flavor. It seems more ‘crunchy’ and more yellow. “You can just tell that it’s been churned differently – it’s got that gritty texture which is real butter for me”, he says.
Sometimes for special occasions, Jesper buys French butter. They add more salt which gives it a slightly different taste. For his oldest daughter he buys spreadable butter. “She thinks that spreadable butter is the real butter. She won’t touch a non-spreadable butter. When I offer her some, she tells me to go get the butter – as if spreadable butter is more butter than the non-spreadable one.” Jesper shakes his head. Obviously, spreadable butter is not a favorite of his. “What can you do? They’re kids. I’ve caught my youngest saying the same thing now.” He groans.
A dog persistently sniffs at Jesper’s leg as we’re talking. He has shooed it three times already. “It’s the lumpfish roe”, he smiles. “I better head home while it’s still intact.” He waves goodbye and sets the course towards Northern Copenhagen and tonight’s dinner party.

Xploring results from Denmark - Gustav Hammerick

Gustav Hammerich

(Café-owner and freelance chef. Has been cooking for 25 years. Often acts as cook at major corporations. Spends a lot of money and many hours each month cooking. Major consumer of cookbooks, food programs and food blogs. Frequently dining out on the town at exclusive restaurants).

Gustav
Today, Gustav is just shopping for himself. Easy food for a night alone. Gustav loves food. It’s his biggest monthly expense, and whenever he has some extra money, he goes out and buys a new cooking gadget: Like a cupper pan worth 200 £, or a Japanese vegetable knife to a similar price. I ask him what matters to him when he buys his ingredients. “Freshness, season, taste, and organic”, he explains.

Organic and local
We start in the greens section. There are no organic cabbages, so he has to settle for a regular one. “I’m not fanatic about the ecological part. Just within reason. But in the ideal world, all the veggies would be ecological, fresh, from the season, local, and cheap”. “Why local?”, I ask. Gustav explains that local is fresh, and local is low CO2 outlet.
There are certain things which have to be organic, Gustav continues. These things taste much better than their non-organic counterparts. A cucumber, for instance. Or pork. And it has to be free range! When it comes to dairy he’s also die-hard organic: “Take an organic sour cream! It’s a completely different universe from a regular one. So much tastier.”

Freshness
In the meat section, Gustav checks everything for freshness. He will not buy three day old meat, even if it’s still good. “Freshness!!”, he repeats. For today’s meal he chooses non-organic scraped raw beef over organic 8% minced beef. “This meal doesn’t need a lot of fat, because I use very spicy seasoning for taste”, he explains. “And it doesn’t need lots of meat because it has a ton of cabbage. So it’s worthwhile to buy a small portion of expensive low-fat meat rather than a larger portion of cheaper meat.” But this does not mean that Gustav avoids fat in food. “Fat gives taste!”, he says with emphasis. After picking the low-fat scraped raw beef, he goes straight to the section for bacon and pork crackling. “I love this stuff!, he says. “You don’t mind the fat?”, I ask. “Fat gives taste”, he repeats to the dim-witted interviewer.

Butter
“What about butter, then?”, I ask. It turns out Gustav uses a lot of butter for cooking. Never for his rye bread. “Yuck, that’s disgusting. Why would I put butter under my fatty liver pate which has lots of taste already?” But when he cooks in the oven, he’ll often put a big fat lump of butter on top of the meat or the vegetables. When he fries food, he uses butter too. “This thing about tefal pans allowing you to dry fry – that’s nonsense. You need the butter for proper contact. Otherwise you just boil the meat on the pan.” Only when he has to fry hard, he’ll add oil, because butter does not cope well with very high temperatures. He muses about the fact that he usually buys spreadable butter. “Organic, of course”, he specifies, “for the taste”. But he considers it a bit of a failure that he buys spreadable butter. Regular butter is simply better quality. It’s the real deal without a lot of air and water to make it spreadable. But he’s simply too lazy to remember taking the butter out of the fridge to make it soft.

Metropolitan cooking
Describing himself as a cook, he uses the term “metropolitan”. Metropolitan means that he is founded in his own national food culture with seasonal vegetables, lots of dairy products and pork and beef. But he is inspired by international food, because the ingredients are available in a metropolitan city. When he experiments with food, he uses inspiration from cooking programs on TV – preferably BBC – and from great restaurants he has visited. “I only spend money on restaurants which cook something which I would not be able to cook myself, or which I would not bother to cook myself because it’s too time consuming”, he says. Then he offers me some of the potato chips we bought in the supermarket. “Always wavy, so you can really scoop up the dip!”, he smiles and winks.

Xploring results from Denmark - Bergitte Gorm

Bergitte Gorm

(Leadership Researcher and yoga teacher. Food lover. Grew up in a strong food culture from home. Very concerned about health in relation to her yoga practice. Cooks often food and throw larger dinner parties for firends. Avid viewer of food programs on TV. Sees cooking as a way to care for herself and others).

I meet Birgitte at home while she is preparing for her dinner party tonight. Her friend Rasmus is coming over to help her cook, but she is responsible for the shopping. She is going over her cookbooks with Vietnamese recipes. Fresh spring rolls with dips, home made parsnip chips, ecological chicken, tiger prawns, and then ginger marinated oranges with macaroon whipped cream for dessert. Everybody brings their own champagne. It’s a champagne party.

Organic and Fresh
As a single mom, Birgitte is not particularly well off. She by no means considers this an impediment to being a Food Lover. “Good food doesn’t have to be expensive”, she says. “Good food is about buying fresh ingredients from the season and about giving it lots of taste.” Despite her limited financial means, she consistently buys organic products. In connection with her masters thesis she conducted field work in the meat industry, and since then she has never eaten an industrial chicken. “They fill these creatures with so much crap you wouldn’t believe it. And it stays in your system for a whole life time.” Birgitte would rather put less meat in her meal and keep it ecological than buy industrial meat. “You just add more vegetables”, she explains

Traditional cooking in new versions
Birgitte is fascinated with the current trend in Scandinavian cooking which resurrects traditional recipes in slightly altered or moderated form. “I’m a great fan of Camilla Plum”, she says, with reference to a famous Danish cook who specializes in traditional Danish cooking and organic home grown products. “There’s just so much TASTE in her meals.” Although she is a great fan, she finds that Camilla Plum’s “scams”, selling home made pancakes with “blueberries picked by my own children” at 6 £ a piece are too far out. “That’s just pulling people’s leg”, she scoffs.

The Shopping Trajectory
When Birgitte shops, she has a fixed trajectory: She starts in in the discount supermarket Netto to see which of the necessary ingredients you can get there cheap. “They don’t have a big selection, but their organic vegetables are often fresh, because they have so many customers that the circulation is big”. After Netto, she continues to the special shops. Today it’s the Thai shop, because she is making spring rolls. Here she buys the rice paper for the rolls, the fish sauce, the sesame oil, the special fresh herbs and the tiger prawns. “Sometimes I’m a little hesitant to buy fish in here, because they don’t have the same restrictions on chemicals etc.”. After the Thai shop comes the local green shop. And as the final destination she goes to the regular supermarket to buy the remaining ingredients. “This is my usual round”, she smiles.

Sensuality and Care for the Self
Just after her divorce, Birgitte had a period where she neglected her cooking. “Then the other day I picked up my Camilla Plum cookbook again, and I realized that I had stopped thinking about which vegetables and fruits were in season. I used to always look forward to September because it was pumpkin season, for example.” She continues: “That just brought tears to my eyes. It was so sad that I had not showed this care for myself and taken the time for this sensual joy in my life!” So now Birgitte is determined to take the time for slow cooking and enjoying the seasonal specialities. Although cooking for kids often becomes very practical, she wants to introduce the love of food to them too.

Guests
“I come from a family of five, and we always had at least one or two dinner guests every night. So for me cooking is associated with big meals. Somehow I just can’t cook small meals. Either I just don’t make real food at all or I end up making giant portions. I want to learn to make real food for us at home.” Birgitte loves cooking for other people and having guests. When she was married, she and her husband used to cook elaborate meals for each other. After the divorce, her cooking sort of went into hibernation. Somehow, recovering from the divorce and resuming cooking feels connected. Cooking for guests just makes it even better. She walks around the Thai shop thinking about tonight’s spring rolls. “I’m always terrified there’s too little food for the guests. I’m wondering if we should buy some more meat? Nah... we should be ok.”, she concludes

Butter and Oil
“I love butter!”, Birgitte exclaims. “You’re not worried about the calories?”, I ask her. Birgitte explains that she considers butter and oil to be the truly healthy sources of fat. “Fat is something your body stores for decades. If it’s filled with medical or chemical crap, you just carry it around forever, and you pass it on to your children. But oil and butter are pure, so I’m happy to eat it. Usually I buy really expensive organic oil. I’m happy to spend 10£ on a bottle of sesame oil rather than buying some cheap alternative.”

Birgitte uses butter for cooking and baking and for putting on bread. For frying she usually uses half butter, half oil. When frying something in the oven, she likes to add a slab of butter for extra taste. She never uses butter under cold cuts or spreads. When she uses butter on bread, the butter is the only spread she needs. “And I’m happy to put on a thick fat layer. Yumm! That’s just so tasty!”
She always buys organic butter. The taste is much better, she explains. For special occasions she might buy the luxury butter with “Læsø” salt – a sea salt produced on the Danish island of Bornholm.

Margarine or spreadable butter is a total no-go. It’s simply poor quality, Birgitte thinks. “When you eat butter, you have to eat the real deal!”, she asserts. “Don’t pump water and air into it, just so it’s easier to spread. Forget it!”

In fact, for Birgitte good food is about the ‘real deal’. It’s about providing sensuality for yourself and allowing yourself to taste and smell the fullness of good, fresh products. Worrying about fat is like denying yourself authentic love of food.