The chef at Copenhagen’s Noma, a four-time winner of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, is launching an app to help us identify what is edible in our everyday surroundings, so that everyone can pick food in the wild in the same way that they do at the supermarket.
A strange shell, fish that tastes like chicken, a giant mussel, an ink cap mushroom—Danish chef Rene Redzepi’s Instagram celebrates the natural diversity of the places he visits, particularly when he sets up a pop-up restaurant on the other side of the world. Whether he’s in Japan, Australia or, most recently, Mexico, Noma’s chef seeks out local wild produce to incorporate in his dishes.
As a result, he has become famous for his “wild” cuisine. The reopening of his flagship Copenhagen restaurant is creating a lot of buzz as he’s moving it to an urban farm. The opening day was initially planned for the summer of 2017, but has now been postponed to the fall.
In the meantime, Redzepi is continuing his quest to spread the word about wild food by launching an app entitled Vild Mad (meaning Wild Food in Danish). The aim is to help food lovers look more closely at the natural world that surrounds them and learn about how it can offer a whole host of edible ingredients. Recipes are being added to help the app users cook the ingredients found outdoors.
When the app was officially launched on June 27, at a symposium in Barcelona to mark the 15th anniversary of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Rene Redzepi commented that some people think that milk chocolate comes from a brown cow. His plan is to help give consumers a better understanding of where food comes from. His app is part of a wider consideration of this issue which concerns the young generation most of all. This type of learning, says the chef, is as important as reading and writing skills.
The Vild Mad app is available in English and Danish on Google Play and the App Store. JB
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