NOMA, the famed Copenhagen restaurant created by superstar chef Rene Redzepi, has been ranked the #1 restaurant in the world 4 times in the past 10 years. Reservations are booked years in advance, and one sitting can cost upwards of $800 a person. But there’s a very good reason for all this global demand. Redzepi’s creations are the stuff of legend — he only cooks with ingredients he finds in the small area around his restaurant: from ant-covered ice cream, to two-year-old carrots that are boiled for hours until they turn into a magical purée known the world over, to, well, anything else he can find. Now his team is out with their most exciting cookbook to date. It’s inspired by the restaurant’s most ingenious addition in its 15-year history — NOMA’s custom fermentation lab.
“At NOMA, every dish includes some form of fermentation, whether it’s a bright hit of vinegar, a deeply savory miso, an electrifying drop of garum, or the sweet intensity of black garlic. Fermentation is one of the foundations behind NOMA’s extraordinary flavor profiles,” according to the book’s description. “Now René Redzepi, chef and co-owner of NOMA, and David Zilber, the chef who runs the restaurant’s acclaimed fermentation lab, share never-before-revealed techniques to creating NOMA’s extensive pantry of ferments. And they do so with a book conceived specifically to share their knowledge and techniques with home cooks. With more than 500 step-by-step photographs and illustrations, and with every recipe approachably written and meticulously tested, The NOMA Guide to Fermentation takes readers far beyond the typical kimchi and sauerkraut to include koji, kombuchas, shoyus, misos, lacto-ferments, vinegars, garums, and black fruits and vegetables. And — perhaps even more important — it shows how to use these game-changing pantry ingredients in more than 100 original recipes. Fermentation is already building as the most significant new direction in food (and health). With The NOMA Guide to Fermentation, it’s about to be taken to a whole new level.”
To learn more, I strongly encourage you to listen to this KCRW interview below. I was listening to this in the car last weekend and was so immersed in their passion fermentation that I missed my exit. I cannot recommend it enough. You can buy your own copy of The NOMA Guide to Fermentation on Amazon.
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