In March/April issue of Viking, Andreas Viestad talked with Fraternal Manager Jana Velo about heritage foods as year-round sustenance and encouraged people to practice their culinary heritage on a regular basis. Here is a little more from that conversation.
The groundbreaking tv show New Scandinavian Cooking featured Andreas Viestad cheerfully grilling on a mountainside or chopping seaweed along a coastal vista. Like a skilled improv artist, Viestad is relaxed enough to know when to follow the script and when to go off-book and let a moment unfold.
One of the bonuses of your show was seeing the breathtaking Norwegian landscapes.
Were there any outdoor locations that were a challenge to cook in?
"Oh, so many! I was constantly suffering for the art. [laughs]
The main shtick —although not revolutionary—was to say that we didn't take the ingredient into the kitchen, we took the kitchen out to where the ingredients were.
Once we were in northern Norway and we were doing a segment with a fisherman who had been fishing with me earlier in the day, and I thought that he was a pretty tough guy because he was out in the elements every day.
And then he was to be the guest at the main cooking event where the guests would eat the food towards the end. I thought it was really cold because the wind was picking up.
But when the fishermen started complaining, I thought, maybe I'm pretty tough as well. I was freezing my fingers off. [On a tv show], you can't just decide to put on another coat or whatever, because of continuity.
As we were eating towards the end, the wind picked up so much that the plate, when we were doing the close-up, blew right out of my hand and crashed on some rocks. I can't remember whether we ended up using that clip."
Can you think of an unusual ingredient that you've gotten to work with?
"I found out that ramps or wild garlic grew on the outskirts of Oslo, the city where I've lived most of my life. I thought that was super exotic, that nature is not just somewhere else, but it's close to home. That was an important way of seeing the world around me."
Are there any episodes of New Scandinavian Cooking that stick out as pushing the boundaries for a cooking show?
"When we traveled around, it was such a great way to experience the world. People are so incredibly friendly. I've been into so many kitchens and inconvenienced many people who have seen it as being fun to be a part of our show.
Right now, the relationship to Russia is a little rougher than it used to be.
At one point we were in Spitsbergen, Svalbard in the Arctic archipelago, far north. And we asked the Russian navy if we could borrow a warship. So, they drove us to the former Russian settlement there.
I just thought about this the other day. Those were times when you could just borrow a warship.
We did that on the show. And now, that's totally impossible."
Your show locations were off the beaten path.
Tell us about a time that you used some creative cooking techniques.
"We once visited a knife workshop, and you could either stay there for like, you know, 40 seconds and say, 'What great knives you have- they are sharp.' But we wanted to make it our home for part of the episode.
So, I asked, 'Can we use the oven?'
'No, you can't use the oven.'
'Why not?'
They said, 'It's almost 1000 degrees Celsius, which would be, 1800 degrees Fahrenheit or something.'
So I said, 'Let's try!' And we cooked at over 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fish-I remember we did a trout, and I tested it. It came out after 2 minutes.
And then I let it rest for about 5 minutes.
Opening it up, it was perfectly pink around the bone.
I did a similar thing with a carrot.
It was completely black on the outside, and it still had that little snap towards the middle.
That was one of the most fun things [about the show]: things that just happened because we were putting it together in the moment.
Sometimes we would be scripted and planned, but sometimes it was important for us to say, 'How can we make this come together in a way where it's not just a guy cooking next to another thing?'
Some of these crazy experiments were pretty fun, like traveling far up north in one of the rivers where they still have wild salmon.
We had to travel from one place to another, so we just took a packet of fish and hid it in the outboard engine. And by the time we arrived, it was cooked!
It was possible both to do these grand scenarios and to experiment a lot as well.
That's unique in a TV setting, for sure."