A pale oak table in soft northern light with a bottle of Mushroom Garum, a bottle of sparkling tea, a black licorice tin, a Danish tin of smoked trout, a sprig of pine, a few dried mushrooms and a small ceramic cup

New Nordic in a Bottle: A Danish Pantry Guide

Published 9 Sep 20265 min read

Filed under Other Cooking Sauces Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company Fangst Lakrids by Bülow Noma Projects Denmark

In 2004, twelve chefs from across the Nordic region met in Copenhagen and signed a document. The Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen had ten points, and read together they amounted to a dare: cook with what the north actually grows, in the season it grows, with purity, simplicity and ethics, with care for animal welfare and sustainable production, and see whether that produces a cuisine worth the name. Then noma, a restaurant on the Copenhagen waterfront opened the year before by René Redzepi, one of the signatories, and Claus Meyer, who organized the symposium, spent the next two decades putting the manifesto into practice.

What happened next is the pantry's part of the story. A manifesto about restaurants turned into a set of products.

What it believed

Three ideas from the manifesto did most of the work. The first was terroir applied to the north: that the region's own ingredients and the fish of its cold waters were worth building a cuisine on. The second was tradition put to new use. The manifesto called for new applications of traditional Nordic food products and the best of Nordic cooking methods, and the movement treated old ways of keeping food, fermentation among them, as serious craft. The restaurant runs a fermentation lab alongside its test kitchen. The third was purity and simplicity, which in practice read as restraint: fewer elements on the plate, each one clear.

The principles traveled because they were portable: cook what is near you, preserve it with skill, put less on the plate. Applied to products rather than plates, those three ideas describe most of what follows.

Garum: fermentation leaves the lab

The restaurant's fermentation lab makes garums, deeply savory seasonings built on the old idea of the Roman fish sauce. In Rome, garum was fish fermented with salt, its flesh broken down by enzymes into a powerful savory liquid; the lab took the idea to other raw materials, using koji in place of the fish's own enzymes. When noma launched Noma Projects in 2022 to share ingredients from the restaurant beyond its dining room, its first release was Smoked Mushroom Garum, a brew of mushrooms from the fermentation lab. The current Mushroom Garum is its successor, made from mushrooms, rice koji and an oat garum built on oat byproducts from a Swedish oat-milk producer. Read against the manifesto, it puts tradition to new use in a bottle, kept by fermentation and used for one savory note (the Noma Projects Mushroom Garum guide; shop Mushroom Garum).

The guide to using Mushroom Garum and the brothy beans with mushroom garum recipe are where to start. The corn yuzu hot sauce (shop Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce) is another Noma Projects bottle, this one with mild heat, and the hot sauce guide sets it among the wider family of chile sauces.

Sparkling tea: the sommelier's problem

A Copenhagen sommelier, Jacob Kocemba, couldn't find a wine to match a dessert, despite a cellar of more than 1,700 wines. His answer, after hundreds of trials, was a sparkling drink built on a blend of fine teas, and in 2017 he and Bo Sten Hansen founded Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company from it. Read beside the manifesto, it fits New Nordic thinking: a drink made to sit at the table beside the food. The Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company guide covers the bottles, and the non-alcoholic drinks guide puts them in the wider zero-proof category.

Licorice: a Nordic flavor in a new tin

Licorice runs deep in the Nordic sweet tooth. Lakrids by Bülow, which Johan Bülow started in 2007, in the years the manifesto was taking hold, later gave it a new look: licorice coated in chocolate, each recipe marked by a single letter on the tin. B, for instance, is passion fruit: sweet licorice in white chocolate and passion fruit, finished with a crunchy sugar shell. It is not a manifesto product, but it comes out of the same Danish moment, and the Lakrids by Bülow producer guide and the licorice guide tell the story.

Tins: the northern catch

Old ways of keeping food reach their most literal form in Fangst, the Danish conservas house (fangst is Danish for 'catch') that tins Nordic fish. Its rainbow trout is farmed in Danish freshwater, smoked, and packed in cold-pressed rapeseed oil with juniper and lemon thyme. The range also runs to Baltic sprats and smoked Limfjord blue mussels, all made to taste of the north, in a different register from the Iberian tins. Read against the manifesto, it is a tin of the idea: Danish fish, kept by smoke and oil. The Fangst and Ramón Peña conservas guide puts the Danish tin beside the Galician one, and the guide to hosting a tinned fish tasting suggests it for slot seven, the smoked fish.

Three ideas, four products

Set side by side, the four products show how each one carries a different part of the manifesto. The table below is the Dispatch's own reading, built from each producer's account.

Product	What it starts from	How it is made or kept	Manifesto idea it carries
Noma Projects Mushroom Garum	Mushrooms, rice koji and oat garum from noma's fermentation lab and test kitchen	Fermented with koji, a garum made without fish	Tradition put to new use
Fangst Regnbue Ørred	Rainbow trout farmed in Danish freshwater	Smoked, packed in cold-pressed rapeseed oil with juniper and lemon thyme	Northern terroir and old ways of keeping
Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Blå	Tea, in the house's sparkling style	From the range a sommelier developed over hundreds of trials	Restraint: a drink built for the table
Lakrids by Bülow B	Sweet licorice in white chocolate and passion fruit	A lettered recipe in a series that runs from A onward	The Danish moment around the movement

The Nordic table at home

Rye bread, good butter and a tin of smoked trout. A pot of beans or a bowl of mushrooms finished with a spoon of garum. Pickled cucumber. A sparkling tea in a wine glass. Dark chocolate and a piece of licorice from a lettered tin to end. It is a table built on restraint and old ways of keeping, and four Danish products set most of it: Fangst smoked trout (shop Fangst Regnbue Ørred), Mushroom Garum (shop Mushroom Garum), Blå sparkling tea (shop Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Blå) and Lakrids by Bülow (shop Lakrids by Bülow B Passion Fruit). The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver. Products ship across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com.

Set it out on a cold evening, and leave space between the plates.