Hungry by Jeff Gordinier

Author:Jeff Gordinier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

In all of these ways Holland lived up to the ideals of the Noma cult. The enterprise known as Noma Australia was never meant to be easy. It wasn’t easy to organize, it wasn’t easy to get into (thirty thousand names were huddled together on the waiting list), and it wasn’t necessarily easy to eat. Even for someone familiar with the Noma ethos, some of the dishes on the menu were almost willfully strange. A pie, of sorts, made of dried scallops with lantana flowers scattered on top. Clams, served at room temperature instead of being chilled, underneath a crispy amber scrim of dried crocodile fat. Porridge of wattleseed with saltbush. The wattleseeds, out in the wild, could only be pried open by a brushfire: heat and smoke unlocked them so that the meat inside could be eaten. Having no brushfire at their fingertips in downtown Sydney, the Noma team had turned to dropping the wattleseeds into boiling water that had been infused with smoke and letting them bob around for hours until they relented. It seemed like a lot of work for a porridge.

Perhaps the weirdest ingredient in the Noma Australia larder was a rare fruit that could only be secured through Holland’s reconnaissance. Monstera deliciosa, it was called. Delicious monster. Make of that name what you will. It looked like a large scaly phallus (why beat around the flowering bush?) and, when plucked unripe, it contained enough poison to kill you. It grew beneath low-lying palm fronds around Sydney, although it had originated far away in Mexico, and to reach a point of being both succulent and survivable, it had to be aged, in a sense, like cheese. Holland and Larsen would stack the delicious monsters in a box and bring them back to the Noma kitchen at Barangaroo Wharf. There the shafts would be individually wrapped in loose pages of newspaper and left to ripen on a shelf. Along the way the scales on the fruit would protrude and then begin to fall off. Ripening required two to three weeks. “René told me it’s the most exotic-tasting fruit he’s ever had in his life,” Holland said. “I don’t think anyone has ever put it on a menu in Australia.”

Saturday Night Projects back in Copenhagen should have served as a clue. Redzepi viewed creativity as the by-product of constant pushing and pressure. It wasn’t enough to fly your entire team to Australia and raise the funds to subsidize their housing for weeks. It wasn’t enough to transplant Noma’s signature dishes to Sydney and give them a few locavore tweaks. Radical wholesale reinvention—nothing else would suffice. The objective was to start with nothing, to explode all preconceptions, and to conjure a multitude of courses from there. If Saturday Night Projects resembled Shark Tank crossed with Chopped, this was an altogether different kind of game show, one in which the easy route automatically qualified as failure.

Success meant this: a meal that had never been eaten on earth, one that tasted simultaneously contemporary and ancient.

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