Noma Projects and Mushroom Garum
Of the Noma Projects bottles on our shelves, Mushroom Garum has recently become the one people seem to arrive looking for. Orders show up from well outside Denver with a bottle or two in the cart and little to suggest someone happened across it while browsing. They knew the name before they reached us.
Mushroom Garum is otherwise a fairly unlikely thing to go looking for. Garum disappeared from most Western kitchens centuries ago, and mushrooms were never part of the old recipe anyway. The bottle itself offers only a short ingredient list: water, mushrooms, oats, rice koji and salt.
The history goes back to the Mediterranean, where garum was made by fermenting fish with salt. Enzymes present in the fish broke down its proteins and produced a powerful, savory liquid that was once an ordinary part of cooking across much of the Roman world.
Noma began pulling at that thread years ago in its fermentation lab. The important change was koji.
Koji is involved in the making of miso, sake and soy sauce, among other foods. It produces enzymes that are very good at breaking down proteins. Noma found that using it in garum allowed the kitchen to move well beyond fish. Over the years they tried meat, peas, mushrooms, spirulina, grasshoppers and plenty of less successful candidates. One Noma Projects account of the experiments mentions croissant garum and concedes that many of the trials were simply not tasty.
Mushrooms were a different story.
Noma Projects launched in 2022 with Smoked Mushroom Garum as its first product. The version sold today has changed considerably. Mushrooms account for 34 percent of the bottle, and the recipe now incorporates another fermentation the team had been working on: oat garum.
The oats have a good story of their own. A Swedish oat-milk producer offered Noma the solids left from production. The fermentation team added rice koji and found that the resulting garum had an unexpected amount of body and savory flavor. That work eventually became part of the Mushroom Garum recipe.
None of this is necessary knowledge for using it.
We tend to treat Mushroom Garum as a seasoning rather than a sauce. Add some to mushrooms while they are cooking. Stir a little into beans, broth, risotto or a pan sauce. Mix it into butter. Noma Projects has recipes using it with roast chicken, ravioli, potato rösti, mayonnaise and plenty of vegetables. Their mushroom cream sauce uses garum right in the pan with browned mushrooms before the cream goes in.
On its own, the mushroom is obvious. Once it is mixed into food, the garum is more useful for the depth it leaves behind.
Most cooks already use something for that job. It might be fish sauce in one kitchen, Worcestershire in another, soy sauce, miso, anchovy, Parmesan rind or concentrated stock. Mushroom Garum occupies similar territory without tasting quite like any of them. It is also vegan, gluten-free and soy-free.
This is where the recent online orders make more sense to us. Mushroom Garum sounds like the sort of bottle one buys once out of curiosity. In practice, it is remarkably easy to finish.
It also provides a useful introduction to Noma Projects itself.
The company was founded in 2022 and makes its products in a workshop beside noma in Copenhagen. Some of what it bottles has a long history inside the restaurant. Some comes from the test kitchen without ever appearing on a noma menu. Occasionally a product begins with something that would otherwise have been left behind during the making of something else.
The other Noma Projects bottles we already carry came about in very different ways.
Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce began with a two-day exercise in the noma test kitchen. Five cooks were asked to develop two hot sauces apiece, and the corn-yuzu version won out. More than half of the finished sauce is sweet corn. Yuzu zest and yellow habanero are joined by celery juice and an oil infused with young blackcurrant branches. When Noma Projects released it, the sauce had never been served as part of a noma menu. It had gone directly from the test kitchen into production.
We carry both that version and the Extra Spicy Corn Yuzu, which raises the yellow habanero from one percent of the recipe to three.
Wild Rose Vinegar has been around the restaurant in a more roundabout way.
The rose is Rosa rugosa, the intensely fragrant beach rose found along the Danish coast. It was brought to Denmark from Japan in the twentieth century and is now invasive there. Noma has used the flowers for years in pickles, misos, kombuchas, oils and spice mixtures, stretching a season that lasts only a few weeks.
The vinegar was originally a byproduct of making pickled roses.
That is perhaps the most Noma Projects detail in the whole bottle. Someone tasted what was left from preserving something else and decided it was worth keeping.
The current vinegar combines apple cider vinegar and apple juice with an infusion containing 20 percent wild beach rose petals. It is unmistakably floral, but still very much a vinegar. We like it with tomatoes and vinaigrettes; Noma Projects has used it with watermelon, shrimp, pickled eggs and shrubs.
We have three more Noma Projects products joining these.
Cep Oil is made with cep mushrooms, better known here as porcini, confited in rapeseed oil. The mushrooms infuse for 24 hours before the oil is filtered and bottled. It was one of the earliest oils developed in the noma test kitchen, and it is meant primarily for finishing; too much heat dulls the porcini aroma. Noma Projects itself pairs it with Mushroom Garum in several recipes, which is probably where we will begin with it too.
Noma's Staff Chili Sauce took a much longer route to the jar. The starting point was noma's 2017 season in Mexico and the team's affection for salsa macha. Back in Copenhagen, a version became a regular part of staff meals, particularly with rice. The bottled sauce uses ancho and morita chiles, toasted sunflower seeds, pea miso and sediment from Noma's fava-based Nordic “Soy” Sauce.
Pumpkin Seed Praline came from noma's 2022 Game and Forest season. The restaurant had been using pumpkin seed oil in a chestnut dessert and was left with sediment from the seeds. The test kitchen turned it into praline. Half of the jar is pumpkin seeds; muscovado sugar provides the sweetness, with fir and parsley oils taking it somewhere less familiar. It became the first sweet product released by Noma Projects.
Those origin stories are fun to know, but they only carry a product so far. Once something is in the shop, the more interesting question is whether people actually find a place for it at home.
Mushroom Garum has answered that one for us already. People buy it, come back looking for it, and increasingly find us because they were searching for the bottle in the first place.
If Noma Projects is new to you, that is where we would start.
We currently carry Noma Projects Mushroom Garum, Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce, Extra Spicy Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce and Wild Rose Vinegar, with Cep Oil, Noma's Staff Chili Sauce and Pumpkin Seed Praline joining the collection.
Explore Noma Projects at The Ambrosian Pantry →
Available from The Ambrosian Pantry in Denver and online for nationwide shipping.
