>> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following... >> Up Norway, curates Norwegian travel experiences in the footsteps of "New Scandinavian Cooking."

>> ♪ No, take me home ♪ Take me home where I belong >> Vgan, the full taste of chocolate.

>> Grieg Suites.

Chocolate with apples from Norway.

♪♪ Havila Voyages.

Pure Northern.

>> Viestad: Yes, they are a wee bit charred on the outside but are still quite firm.

Think it's underdone.

♪♪ ♪♪ Hi, and welcome to "New Scandinavian Cooking" from Geilo in the Norwegian mountains.

I'm Andreas Viestad.

One fact is that Norway is a country far north in the world and that the climate can be terrible.

It can be cold and inhospitable.

Another fact is that Norwegians love it.

Whenever we have the chance, we go outdoors, hiking, skiing, fishing, playing, whether it be summer or winter, and this does something to our culture.

We're sporty.

It also does something to our food culture.

Much of the food we eat we eat out of our homes.

We even have a word for it: !niste.

And in today's program, we'll look at niste, the food we eat when we're out hiking, when we're on the run, our packed school lunches and the complicated secret behind our everyday food.

I'll start off on a frozen lake fishing for trout, and I'll bake and smoke the fish on the fire and serve it as an open-face sandwich with cucumber salad, dill and sour cream.

Then I'll make boiled ham, a laborious process but one that makes food that will last for several days and be a part of our packed lunch, and I'll bring my packed lunch to a local school and find out how we can make it healthier and more tasty, and finally I'll go indoors for a proper dinner cooked in a most unusual place, a knife factory.

I'll cook trout and root vegetables in the same flaming-hot oven that's normally used to weld the steel for the knives, sharp and hot.

♪♪ In winter, the inland lakes are completely frozen.

There's about a foot and a half of ice underneath me now, and it looks like nature has gone into total hibernation, but it has not.

The fish are still here, and late winter is a great time to go ice fishing, and Bodil and her son, Ola, have been fishing all day.

!Hei.

>> Hei.

>> Viestad: Hei.

>> Viestad: It looks like they've caught a wonderful Arctic char, and they're going to let me use it in my cooking.

The Arctic char is a fish in the salmon family and a little bit dependent on the food, it gets this lovely sort of orange-red belly.

It's a beautiful fish.

Many people say that they find it difficult to know how to cook a fish, but it's not really difficult.

It's very simple.

You just add a little bit of heat, not too much.

That's the secret, so here I'm going to rub this beautiful fish with a combination of salt and dill, and I'm going to bake and smoke it on the fire, so I need a few juniper branches.

Now the fish bakes and smokes at the same time, and when the flame starts flaring up, I'll put on one of these smoke blankets to sort of douse the fire.

Not only is the fish smoked, I'm being smoked as well.

I bet I can smell this on my anorak for months to come.

Okay.

I'll just check the fish.

And it looks like a very chaotic way to cook, but look here.

The fish is beautiful.

It has been protected by the branches, but of course if you want a somewhat more controlled way of doing this, use a kettle grill, and just throw a few juniper berries onto the burning embers, and you'll get a nice smoky flavor as well.

I'm going to serve the fish as an open-face sandwich with cucumber salad, so just halve the cucumber and scrape out the seeds, and then I mix the cucumber seeds with sour cream.

Some just discard it, but that's where a lot of the good flavor is.

Then I mix the rest of the cucumber with a little bit of vinegar, so either white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar, then just a sprinkle of salt, and this is a really nice and fresh-tasting cucumber salad.

It goes really well together with the smoked char and really all kinds of smoked fish.

♪♪ You can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ !Hei.

>> [ Speaking Norwegian ] >> Viestad: [ Speaking Norwegian ] ♪♪ [ Speaking Norwegian ] It's got a really nice hint of smokiness.

Even though there was a lot of smoke and it looks brutal, it wasn't on the fire for more than a few minutes.

Then it's very nice with that fresh-tasting sour cream and the cucumber with the fish.

♪♪ Mm.

♪♪ ♪♪ It is said that being outside in nature is like a national religion to most Norwegians, but how true is that really in a time when most Norwegians are highly educated, very busy people?

Most of them live in urban areas.

Well, if you look at statistics, this myth turns out to be, well, true.

Last year, 80 percent of all Norwegians went hiking in the forest or in the mountains.

More than 40 percent went skiing.

This does something to our culture and, not least, our food culture.

It strengthens our tradition of packed lunch.

They're often spectacularly unglamorous affairs more about giving you energy for the ride than about enjoyment, but it doesn't really have to be that way.

I'm going to make my own boiled ham and my own spectacular packed lunch.

♪♪ ♪♪ One of the most popular components in niste, or packed lunch, is boiled ham, and most of the time, I must admit, we just buy it in the store, but I think it's fascinating also to make it from scratch, and that is a pretty time-consuming process.

It takes me a full week.

Most of it is just waiting, but still, it takes me a full week, and it starts like this with a beautiful piece of raw ham deboned.

This one weighs around 3 kilos, a little more than 6 pounds.

I'm going to cover it with water, in this case, 2 liters or 2 quarts of water, then spices, 10 black peppercorns, 10 juniper berries, 10 whole allspice and one, two, three, four, 147 mustard seeds, no, just kidding, around 2 teaspoons of mustard seed and five or six bay leaves.

And now comes the fun part, trying to brush off a little dust of that high-school math because we are going to add salt, two percent as per the combined weight of the meat and the water.

We've got 3 kilos, 6 pounds of meat and 2 liters, 2 quarts of water.

So do you want me to stop while you do the math, or should I just give you the right answer?

It's 100 grams.

It's 3.5 ounces of salt, and I'm also going to add 1 teaspoon of pink salt, a curing salt, which helps it keep its color.

And now comes the boring part.

Put it in the fridge and let it stay there for a full week.

And during that week, almost nothing happens or almost nothing that you can see.

The meat is a little bit paler.

If you feel it, it's a little bit firmer.

You can see the spices have swelled up, but what has happened inside the meat is incredibly important.

The salt and the flavors have penetrated.

That takes time.

It takes that much time.

So now I'm going to cook it.

I'm using a meat thermometer, which I think is a great thing to use, and I'm just placing the pot with the meat and the water inside a very hot oven, 400 Fahrenheit, 200 centigrade, and then I'm immediately reducing the temperature to 175 Fahrenheit or 80 Celsius, and I'm leaving it there for a long, long time until the core temperature is around 175 Fahrenheit or 80 centigrade.

And after a week and then some hours, it's all done.

It's not worse than that.

And I'm excited to taste.

I've allowed the meat to cool off in the cooking liquid.

That way, it becomes moist too because it actually draws back some of the moisture it has lost.

Ah, look at that.

Mm, and it tastes delicious.

It tastes just like classic boiled ham but with a little hint of spiciness from all the spices, and I'm going to use this in my niste today.

You can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

This is a coarse semisweet mustard, which I think is really nice together with the salty boiled ham.

Now this is very much how I normally have my !niste, my packed lunch, but I'm going to team up with some kids and see how we can take it up one notch, make it a little more exciting.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Speaking Norwegian ] >> Hei.

>> Viestad: Any one of you who have niste?

Uh-huh-huh.

And any one of you who have bread?

>> [ Indistinct conversation ] >> Viestad: Some have, and some don't.

Anyone who sometimes think that it's a little bit boring?

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: So we're going to try and make it a little more exciting now.

Do you want to try and taste something new?

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: [ Speaking Norwegian ] Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

>> [ Speaking Norwegian ] >> [ Speaking Norwegian ] >> Viestad: This was the clover, and that was quite mild and sweet, but these were the radishes, and they were very strong, huh?

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: Ah, and then we have the peas, and they tasted like peas, but they were quite sweet, right?

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: And then we had the fenugreek, and that smelled funny, didn't it?

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: It smelled a little bit like curry.

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: So the reason why we do this is that every day we eat packed lunch, but maybe we should just put a little more green food in it because then it becomes more exciting and much more healthy.

It tastes like nature.

It tastes like curry and radishes and clover, and it's like eating a green forest on my little slice of bread.

Mm.

So, kids, wasn't this fun?

>> Yes.

>> Viestad: And the best of all is that it's really healthy as well.

[ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Geilo is a station along the main railway line between Oslo and Norway's second city, Bergen.

It's about 220 kilometers or 135 miles out of Oslo, and if you go back in time, that was about as far as you could travel in a day.

That's why Geilo was established as the first ski-resort town in the country, and for more than a century, wealthy citizens from the capital have come here to enjoy sports.

First, it was cross-country, and these last few decades, there's also become alpine sports, slalom and snowboarding, and because so many people came from the cities to this rather rural area, something interesting happened.

It became a meeting point, a point for cultural exchange and a hub for local food.

Many of the local food traditions have survived here because they found a market with the city-dwellers.

One of the things that I find really delicious is this, a reindeer sausage.

We're not far away from the southernmost reindeer herd.

Reindeer meat is delicious, really quite sweet, gamy meat, and here is a white goat cheese made at a small local dairy.

Mm.

It's really, really quite a powerful cheese even though it just looks pale and mild, and this here is also one of the real Norwegian specialties, the fudge cheese, and it's made not from the milk but from the whey that has been boiled and boiled and boiled until it caramelizes, so it's kind of like a dulce de leche but with a little goat-y tang to it.

It's very good.

There's also salted and smoked venison, interesting baking traditions like this almost pancake-like flatbread.

This here small dry cake is really quite delicious... and traditional flatbread.

And I think that all of these traditions survive because they are truly delicious but also because they're quite convenient.

Most of them are very suitable to bringing along when you're out hiking as a part of your niste.

♪♪ ♪♪ Apart from skiing and hiking, one of the most important activities here in Geilo is hunting and fishing, and it has been for a long, long time.

There are also handicrafts related to hunting and fishing.

This is Brusletto, a knife maker that has been in production since 1896, and they still make their knives in the old-fashioned way, and I think that it's fascinating to see all these machines and how much manual labor goes into each knife, how much knowledge and how much love.

And I like all the machines, but I particularly like these here.

These are the ovens, and I think that you can make use of them in different ways, not just making knives.

You can make food in them.

Well, most people say that it can't be done.

The ovens are simply too hot.

This oven over there is now more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit so around 800 degrees Celsius, but I'm sure we can make something, and I'm going to try and bake these beautiful Arctic char and serve them with some baked root vegetables, and I'll start off with the root vegetables and see if it is at all possible or if it will just catch fire.

So I start with three parsnips, three carrots and some lovely beets, one onion and one leek.

I'll just cut off most of the green stuff.

Man, it's hot in there.

Now it's been in the oven at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, 800 Celsius, for 2 minutes, and I'll see how that has gone.

Okay.

[ Laughs ] Look there.

You can see the water sort of sizzling out of the leek, and it smells amazing.

Yes, it does smell a little bit charred, a little bit burnt, but you can also smell those sweet aromas of the baked vegetables.

I'm going to let them just rest and continue to bake in their own residual heat.

Anyway, they're too hot to handle now.

Now I'm going to see if it works with the fish as well, if we can bake it at that high temperature.

It's been a minute and a half, and I don't dare to let it be in there any longer.

It doesn't look too bad.

It's a little bit charred on the outside, but I think that goes with the territory, and if I just check the temperature by inserting a knife, it actually comes out quite cool, so that means that the fish is still raw in the middle, but I'm hoping that it will cook with the residual heat so that it will be quite perfect after a few minutes.

And now the vegetables are just cooling off to touch, so I'm going to peel them.

There are various ways to do this.

I'm going to just do it with these metal gloves.

These are actually butchers' gloves that butchers wear in order not to cut their hands, but they are also quite good if you want to just remove the burnt parts on your vegetables.

So if you want to do this at home, you should either purchase one of these ovens or use your normal oven.

Set it at maximum, which is probably 450 degrees Fahrenheit, 225 Celsius, and then bake the fish for 5 to 6 minutes.

Let it char a little bit on the outside.

Leave it to cool while the heat disseminates inside the fish and bake the vegetables for 12 to 15 minutes.

Let them char a little as well.

That should do the trick, but you can always just test whether the vegetables are done afterwards.

And then I'll just cut the vegetables into smaller pieces and mix them in a bowl.

And look at the leek.

It's perfectly baked all the way through, and then it becomes wonderful, soft and creamy and quite sweet, and there's nothing left of the burnt part.

This is really the optimal way.

It's incredibly sweet, a little bit overcooked at the outer layers, and then it still has quite a bite and a crunch in the middle.

That's delicious.

And it's smart not to mix the red beet root with all the other vegetables because they'll just go pink or red.

I'm going to flavor the vegetables very simply with salt and a little bit of beer vinegar.

You can also use malt vinegar or sherry vinegar, but don't use balsamic.

It's just too sweet.

And then just a little bit of oil, a neutral oil, and some of the shoots.

You can use any shoots that you like.

And some parsley, and I'll just chop them using pair of scissors and then some rye-bread croutons to give it a bit of crunch but also a bit of starch since there's no other starch here.

Then I just mix it up.

Remember that you can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

Despite the treatment in this oven, the fish is perfectly cooked just as I said.

Apply heat, not too much.

[ Speaking Norwegian ] ♪♪ >> Ah!

>> Viestad: Now so this fish has been in the oven at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit or 800 centigrade just for a minute and a half.

>> Amazing.

>> Viestad: It's interesting how something that has been made with such force can be so mild and gentle when you eat it just minutes after.

Did you like it?

>> Tasty.

>> Viestad: Mm.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> For more of the "New Scandinavian Cooking" experience, visit our website or Facebook page.

♪♪ >> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following... >> Up Norway, curates Norwegian travel experiences in the footsteps of "New Scandinavian Cooking."

>> ♪ No, take me home ♪ Take me home where I belong >> Vgan, the full taste of chocolate.

>> Grieg Suites.

Chocolate with apples from Norway.

♪♪ Havila Voyages.

Pure Northern.

♪♪