René Redzepi – Fermentation, Inspiration and the Balance of Life

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

American Public Media

Food, Arts

4.3 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Francis Lam spends a fascinating hour with René Redzepi, the groundbreaking chef of Copenhagen’s Noma. His book, The Noma Guide to Fermentation, is a master tome on the technique that he believes is the future of the way we cook. Francis and René talk about Noma’s influence on the global palate, where Redzepi finds inspiration, and how he achieves an enjoyable work/life balance. America’s Test Kitchen’s Dan Souza (no slouch in the fermentation world either!) brings us an amazingly simple recipe for cultured butter to make at home. We also have clips from a video interview with René Redzepi and David Zilber, the director of Noma's fermentation lab, in which they two do more in-depth on the role of fermentation at the restaurant and suggest a few projects for beginners.

Broadcast dates for this episode:

November 2, 2018 (originally aired)
October 25, 2019 (rebroadcast)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this
0:07.0	complicated country.
0:08.7	We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories,
0:14.4	their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature and get closer to the things we're missing.
0:24.4	Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts.
0:34.6	I'm Frances Lamb, and this is The Splendid Table from APM American Public Media, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
0:42.3	We are so excited to bring you this episode after we spent a long, thoughtful, and
1:03.0	delicious sounding time with Renee Rizepi, a chef of the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen.
1:09.3	It's a place that's been ranked four times as the best restaurant in the world.
1:13.6	Now, okay, I know it's sort of inherently goofy to say,
1:17.6	yes, this place is objectively the best restaurant in the world.
1:21.6	So what's impressive about them isn't the title exactly,
1:25.6	but the fact that while you may have never eaten their food,
1:30.0	thousands of other chefs and cooks have taken cues from what they do, and you may well have
1:35.2	tasted some of Noma's ideas in action wherever you are. So here's an example.
1:41.4	Plenty of people grew up foraging for wild foods, but if you've ever
1:45.0	heard a high-end chef talking about that sometime in the last 15 years, it might have been
1:51.0	because of Noma. Or if you know a restaurant that recently started filling up its dry storage
1:56.0	room with jars of fermentation products, it might have been because of Noma. Or if you suddenly heard that
2:02.9	the Nordic countries were amazing places to eat, it was almost certainly because of Noma.
2:09.1	And leading Noma since the beginning, when he was just 24 years old, was Rene Rizepi.
2:15.2	He's a son of a Danish mother and an Albanian Muslim father, and he started cooking because
	...

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