Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the chef Renee Red Zeppi. His restaurant, Noma in Copenhagen, has just been

named the best in the world for a fourth time and has garlanded with

Michelin stars. His cooking captures not just the essence of his homeland using ingredients like

reindeer tongue, sea buckthorn or fish scales, but also a strong

flavor of now. He believes traditional notions of luxury are outdated. A sense of time and place

are his kitchen's guiding principles. His childhood was

split between Denmark and Macedonia where he spent his summers foraging in the

woods and catching fireflies for fun. He is good as stumbled into catering just

before it was fashionable because he couldn't think of anything better to do but pretty quickly

realized that cooking, creating, allowed him to dream.

He says, the day when there is no more to do is the day when you're burned out.

There are endless possibilities.

It's just whether you can see them or not and right now I can see plenty.

You say that cooking allowed you to dream then.

Now any chef that I speak to tells me that working in a kitchen is a sort of hellhole really. It's's pressurized it's blisteringly hot that are

constant demands for service I'm wondering when you dream well that happens

constantly all the time you know when it's winter I dream of spring for instance and when

it's spring I dream of summer and when it's summer I dream of the berries season.

And I think dreaming using your imagination is something that's splendid to do in cooking

...