Niklas Ekstedt, flame master of the Great North

Festivals and books dedicated to the emebers, an asador in the second place of the 50Best, flames blazing everywhere, even at Osteria Francescana in Modena. There is no doubt that, when it comes to cooking, the years around the turn of the Covid will be remembered as those of the live fire boom. The reappraisal of a primordial gesture, it is said, perhaps 2 million years old, when homo erectus realised that it made sense to stand even if only to check the degree of cooking of the meat roasted by fire, finally tamed.

"Setting the flame to cook", Ferran Adrià pointed out to our microphones at the time, "is a gesture as old as mankind, but don't think that all cooking over a direct flame is tradition; in technical terms, what Bittor Arguinzoniz or Aitor Arregui are doing is innovation to the highest degree". The same can be said of Errico Recanati's work in Italy. And now we have discovered a chef who applies the same work of ingenuity at much higher latitudes.

Niklas Ekstedt, born in 1978, opened his restaurant in Stockholm 13 years ago, but he spent his early years between the Arctic expanses of Jämtland and southern Helsingborg, right next to the bridge that links Sweden and Denmark. At the age of 18, he is already learning from Charlie Trotter, at that time a fundamental temple of creative fine dining in the States: "I was doing badly at school. My uncle [the well-known artist Peter Tillberg, ed.] knew Yoko Ono well: she got me my apprenticeship in Chicago. I was lost and felt like I was on the moon. Then I went to L'Orangerie in Los Angeles. I wanted to return to Europe, but between Gagnaire, Robuchon and Ducasse, the only one who took me was elBulli of the Adrià brothers, whom I did not know. Human relations in the fine dining brigades of the time were not exactly idyllic, so at some point I decided to open my own restaurant.”

Two establishments in and around his native Helsingborg, namely: Niklas and then Niklas i Viken. In the early 2000s, the chef became a TV star, and in the meantime started a family and developed an important friendship, with Rene Redzepi, at the time co-author of the New Nordic Cuisine manifesto, the fuse that made the tables of the Great North take off: “While I was driving around in two cars, he held tight to his humble origins. We worked six months together at Pierre Andre in Copenhagen, he helped me a lot in the beginning and is still a great friend.” The good fortune of having had such masters begins to assemble the mosaic of a personal and identity-based cuisine.

In 2011, he opened restaurant Ekstedt restaurant in the heart of the elegant and central Östermalm, on one of the 24,000 islands that make up the Stockholm archipelago. Inside, the sacred fire begins to burn: “I have always been fascinated by the cooking techniques of the Vikings: in their raids, they used embers a lot out of necessity. In the Oslo Museum there are pots and pans from that time, but we know little about how they actually used them. After the Middle Ages, on the other hand, there is abundant and fascinating cookery literature: in modern times Sweden was never at war and so everything has come down to us in its entirety.”

It was in the cookbooks of the 18th century that Niklas became interested, for example, in the techniques for cooking oysters, “a historical, not traditional cooking,” he points out. This is how Ekstedt's signature dish was born, a bivalve mollusc on which drops of melted beef fat are dropped from the flambadou, a cast-iron cone with a handle that has been red-hot for a long time over a fire, a trick that is nowadays rather imitated elsewhere. The delicious oyster is completed with the acid notes of a smoked apple and a touch of beurre blanc (see photo below).

Butter, indeed. It is an essential component of the tasting menu: “It is very likely,” explains Niklas with understandable pride for his origins, "that it was the Vikings who explained to the French how to make butter, as milk that was fermented to extend the timeline of its edibility. It is no coincidence that Normandy, the cradle of quality butter, bears in its name the roots of the northern people.” Butter, butter, butter, also served as a single course at the end of the menu and almost omnipresent in the condiments of many dishes that come out of the impressive array of braziers, cast-iron stoves, smokers and grills at the fire station, run by the talented Argentinean chef Florencia Abella in the back of the restaurant, the place where the journey starts.

It is only birch wood, birch, the heritage of Sweden's boundless expanses, that becomes ash. "One of the things that hurts me most about today's fire fashion," the chef points out, "is the use of charcoal produced with horrendous chemical additives that are often harmful to health. We need to be more careful.” Which is not so much needed in cooks' fire management: “The temperature reaches up to 600 degrees, but personally I get burnt more at the cooker of classic orthodox haute cuisine.”

The flame chisels out unsuspectedly delicate flavours, which stop a moment before the smoke prevails. Dairy and acid notes settle on raw materials in an expanded localism of land, garden and sea: reindeer, lamb, mushrooms, langoustines, char, potatoes, seaweed, hay, embellished by the exceptional array of berries, the great berries of Scandinavia, collected by Niklas himself on his frequent outdoor excursions. Logi, the Viking god personification of fire, would be proud of him.

EKSTEDT, dishes from June 2024

Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso