Book Review: Noma 2.0: Vegetable, Forest, Ocean
The Noma team says that while its new book is ostensibly a cookbook, it’s not necessarily to be cooked from. This is very much the case. Though Noma 2.0 - so called because it is concerned with the work of Noma’s test kitchen since the world-famous Copenhagen moved to its new location in 2018 - does give chefs a good insight into the makeup of its dishes it only gives limited instructions as to how to actually replicate them.
Following surprisingly little in the way of preamble, the middle (and largest) part of the book partners a photo of a dish with a detailed description of what’s on the plate and some information about how it’s put together as well as a list of its constituent parts. Even simple looking and sounding dishes are made up of a multitude of different preparations. For example, Noma’s sheep’s yoghurt mousse with salted berries has no less than seven different elements that all need to be prepared prior to plating the dish, including semi-dried Danish kiwis, lacto Mirabelle plums, white currant sauce and compressed noble fir cone scales.
At the end of the book are around 200 actual recipes for many - but by no means all - the components that make up the dishes ranging from the achievable - dried cucumber, pumpkin seed oil - to preparations that most would shy away from, including squirrel garum. It would therefore be nearly impossible to accurately replicate the recipes, and that’s before taking into account the extreme difficulty that UK chefs would have obtaining some of Noma’s more exotic ingredients.
The publication of the cookbook roughly coincided with the news that the restaurant will close in 2024, with chef-patron René Redzepi planning to relaunch the relaunch for a third time the following year as a ‘giant test kitchen and food laboratory’. That project will be called Noma 3.0, which does rather limit the shelf life of the team's most recent book. The decision to call time on Noma the restaurant is down in part to it no longer being a viable business due to the intensity of its food development process. Noma 2.0 gives an insight into the extraordinary lengths the team goes to create some of the the world's most creative cuisine, and is well worth a look even if most will never cook from it.
Noma 2.0: Vegetable, Forest, Ocean
Authors: René Redzepi, Mette Søberg
Number of pages: 352
Must try dish: Mouldy asparagus (asparagus spears that are cooked and dried slightly before being dusted with rice flour and inoculated with aspergillus oryzae spores and left for two days until bright white mould covers the vegetable)
Publisher and price: Artisan Publishers, £60
Image excerpted from Noma 2.0 by René Redzepi and Mette Søberg (Artisan Books). Copyright ©2022. Photographs by Ditte Isager.
