Lead up to Mads Refslund
Posted by Matt Wilkinson on March 3rd, 2010
The lyrics of the final song on Daft Punk’s Homework album name the best house music DJ’s in the world and crazy as this seems, I catch myself far too frequently singing along the same tune but replacing the DJ’s with top chefs of the world. So when the opportunity arose to host Mads Refslund of MR Restaurant, Copenhagen for the Melbourne Food and Wine festival 2010, let’s just say I got a little excited and started to sing that song.
So what goes into hosting an international chef that has one Michelin star, has demonstrated at other world renowned food festivals and whose food is cutting edge? I have since discovered, a lot of work!
To get the ball rolling, mid-way through last year I sent Mads a list explaining the types of meat, seafood, vegetables and fruit available in Australia in Autumn. Then, through researching the MR website I gained a rough idea of some of his dishes and the produce he may need.
I received a first draft menu just after Christmas and without spoiling it for those who are attending the dinner, wanted to share two of his dishes with you and the changes that we have made. The first dish from his repertoire is Rapeseed oil, black lobster with radishes and wood sorrel. The black lobster (Northern hemisphere crayfish) is poached in rapeseed oil then garnished with sliced raw radish and an emulsion made from radishes, wood sorrel and a cheese that sounds a bit like… Veschavost!!!. Interestingly, Ben Shewry from Attica restaurant found we had wood sorrel here in Australia when Rene Redzepi was here for MFWF 2009. Now for the problems, generally in Australia our rapeseed/canola oil is from GM crops so I have changed that to Powlett Hill’s bio-dynamic sunflower oil and the blacklobster will be replaced with W.A marron. Now the cheese, well unless it magically arrives, I have no idea what we will use. One thing I do know about this cheese is that it is produced from cows that graze on beaches and has a slightly natural salt taste to it. When I’m next in Denmark this will be on the top of my list of things to try.
Dish number two (pictured above): Burning field; perfumes & texture from late summer scorched fields, what the ….! Even to me this seemed, well, a wee bit out there. However after Mads’s explanation I cannot tell you how excited I am to try this dish. The basic gist of it is, smoke infused earth grown vegetables (which I will be sourcing from Glenora Heritage Produce and Daylesford Organics), purees, powders and herbs of this and that, a fresh peanut paste (again can’t wait to see) and preserved truffle, which I luckily got in fresh from Piedmont last week and have now preserved. Mads did ask to set Hay alight in the restaurant when this dish goes out, but for some reason I declined…
Now I am waiting in great anticipation on his final menu and recipes but with only two weeks to go we have an enormous amount of work to do. There are wines to match, mep lists to be written, suppliers and producers to be briefed and I need to scrub up on my Danish.
