Bentley Extraordinary Journey Scandinavia | Niklas Ekstedt Forest Cooking

Cooking with fire, for me, is just limit myself to one heating source. It's like a musician that limits himself with a guitar or a piano. If I have just one heating source, I'll have to be more creative. It originates from 2011. I bought a house on one of the islands outside Stockholm. It was a very small house and there was no electricity. So I started researching about open fire, fire cooking and cast iron stoves. I came across all these recipes that we had in Scandinavian culture that were forgotten. I thought it would be cool to bring them alive. So this tool was a tool that was used to collect fat from the rotisserie. The cone and then you have the little hole in the bottom. And you cook the oysters with the fat. But it took me a while to figure out that it needed to be on fire, the whole thing. And then you can cook and sear with it. Just delicious. Sometimes you need two types of smoke. It's almost like salt and pepper. So having only oak smoke gives it a strong oak flavour. But if you add a little bit of juniper, a little bit of birch in it, something happens. It's like two ingredients that go together. It changes and gives it more dynamic and more flavourful. Just sitting around us here I can see three or four things that are edible. You have blueberries over there, lingonberries, some sorrel over there. There's the blueberry. And even some of the moss here is edible. So it's great fun. The Michelin star meant a lot to me because people were like, what do you mean open fire? Is it a grill? No, it's not a grill. Is it a tandoori? No, it's not a tandoori. What is it? I'm like, it's an open Swedish fire restaurant. They were like, what is that? I was like, you have to come and try it. I was struggling to get guests to pay for a meal. And the Michelin star, of course, changed that and made people realise that this is probably great food. It makes me proud that I was so bold and so brave when I was younger. I would never do this again. It makes me proud that I took such difficult decisions.