>> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following... >> Up Norway, curates Norwegian travel experiences in the footsteps of "New Scandinavian Cooking."

>> ♪ No, take me home ♪ Take me home where I belong >> Vgan, the full taste of chocolate.

>> Grieg Suites.

Chocolate with apples from Norway.

♪♪ Havila Voyages.

Pure Northern.

>> Viestad: This is an old hand mill.

It's not quite as old as the building, but this is the kind of mill they used in the Viking Age.

♪♪ ♪♪ Hi, and welcome to "New Scandinavian Cooking."

From Sokna in eastern Norway, I'm Andreas Viestad.

We're about an hour outside the capital, Oslo.

This is the breadbasket of the country, one of the few areas where it's possible to grow cereals this far north.

And today's program is about cereals, about barley, oat, and wheat, what they've meant for us and what they still mean to our food culture.

I'll start off with flour, water and salt and a sourdough starter made just with flour and water, and I'll mix them together, and then I'll do nothing with this mixture for quite a while.

I'm baking bread, and perhaps the most underappreciated part of baking is time, leaving the dough by itself to grow and develop.

But before we have our bread, let's rewind to a time when cereals were essential but before bread was something you had every day.

For most people in Scandinavia, cereals were used to make porridge, and I'm going to use it to make a kind of porridge but one that's a lot more like a risotto with vegetable stock and duck breast.

And when people ate bread in the old times, it wasn't always leavened and soft.

Flatbread is one of the original breads, and I'll make a wonderful crispy, coarse flatbread with whole grains and linseed and serve it with local charcuterie.

!Skol.

>> Skol.

>> Viestad: And then, finally, I'll bake my bread in an old bread oven and serve it with homemade butter and some baked pigeon, where I'll use the bread to sop up the juices.

Mmm.

[ Chuckles ] Bread and butter, that's not the kind of food we talk about.

It's not the kind of food we blog about or feature in food magazines, but it is incredibly delicious, and it is incredibly important at least here in Scandinavia.

It is flour, water, and salt.

Wait.

Is there no yeast?

Well, it doesn't have to be yeast.

If you mix a good whole-grain flour with water, good organic flour, there's enough yeast on the grain itself that this mixture begins to live, and you get a sourdough.

This is a sourdough made by my friend Erik, and it has been alive for several years.

You just keep feeding it, and it tastes delicious.

You know, it is rather sour.

It's a funky flavor, I must admit, but it has this almost sort of wine-like quality, and it has the capacity to make the bread come alive.

My bread recipe is really very simple.

It's 3 cups, 7 1/2 deciliters, of normal all-purpose flour, 2 1/2 deciliters, or 1 cup, of whole-grain flour coarsely ground, a good pinch of salt.

It's about a teaspoon, and 2 cups, or 5 deciliters, of water, 2 1/2 deciliters, or 1 cup, of a quite runny sourdough mixture.

If you don't have sourdough and just using commercial yeast, you've got to use a little bit more water.

So I'm just mixing the ingredients together until I have a good, smooth dough without too many lumps.

And then there are two different schools when it comes to bread making.

There are those who are obsessed with kneading, saying that you should knead for a long time and wait in between, and there are those who don't bother with it and just use another ingredient, namely time.

If you use a lot of time, you don't really need to knead the dough.

It will make itself, so I'm just pouring it into a container, and I'll just bring the dough with me as I do lots of other things, and then it will be ready.

And now the dough reaches about here, and it will be interesting to see how much it will rise in about 24 hours.

You can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

When we see wheat growing, it is like this, almost endless fields of nothing but wheat, but it is worth remembering that what we today know as wheat is really nothing but a grass, and it used to be a grass just growing among other grasses in what is called the Fertile Crescent in what's today the Middle East.

And the people who lived there were nomadic.

They traveled around with their herds, and they started noticing that there was one particular type of grass that was preferred by birds and goats, and they started eating it themselves, and it was quite delicious.

It was also quite filling, so they started gathering it, but after a while, they also started planting it.

They had fields with nothing but wheat, but then they couldn't travel around.

They had to guard their fields.

They started building houses and villages and towns.

They even started trading with this, and they had to note how much they'd sold and bought.

They developed written language.

So, in a way, you could say that we domesticated wheat, but you could also say that wheat domesticated us.

It is really the foundation of civilization in Europe and much of the world, and that's worth remembering the next time you eat bread or porridge or pasta or anything that's made out of wheat.

Cultivating crops is time-consuming work.

The farmer has many duties to fulfill, especially during harvest, and that's a farmer's life.

Apart from cereal, this part of Norway offers all kinds of crops.

My favorite is a special, little, awkward-looking potato, the Ringerike potato.

In addition, you'll find many apple orchards in this fertile part of the country.

♪♪ ♪♪ I meet up with my friend Gry Aalde.

She's got a great kitchen garden with a great variety of vegetables that I'm going to use in my cooking, like carrots.

♪♪ This is one big turnip.

>> Yeah.

>> Viestad: Looks fantastic.

And some fennel.

[ Grunts ] It's so incredibly fertile here.

This, this fennel is amazing.

What do you use?

You use... >> Well, we feed the soil with manure from horse, from chicken and my compost.

>> Viestad: And that makes these wonderful vegetables and celery and celeriac.

>> Yeah.

>> Viestad: Ah!

Look at these roots, the poor thing.

>> Yeah.

>> Viestad: We could have left it in for a couple of more months.

>> Yeah, probably.

>> Viestad: So the bulb would have been bigger, but I'm going to use both the green part and the bulbous part.

>> Yeah.

Yeah, this is wonderful.

>> Viestad: Mm, smells amazing.

♪♪ ♪♪ If I had asked one of my ancestors 150 or 200 years ago, "What did you have for your last meal?"

the answer, I'm quite sure, would have been porridge, and that wasn't awfully exciting food.

It was pretty boring.

And as we grew more affluent as a nation, porridge was moved into the outskirts of our food culture.

But right now there's a porridge renaissance going on.

People are rediscovering the potential of porridge not by remaking the porridge of old times, but reinventing it.

And right now, I'm going to make a porridge that wouldn't really have been recognized by my ancestors, but it's pretty close to an Italian risotto, only it's made with grains.

Here, I've got oat.

I'm actually in the outskirts of an oat field, and here I've got wheat, slightly crushed.

On the other side here is wheat.

I'm actually at the boundary between oat and wheat, and I'm also going to use a little bit of barley.

And the grains need to be soaked.

Normally, we would just soak them in water, but I'm going to add flavor by soaking them in vegetable juice, juice from the magnificent vegetables I got from Erik and Gry's garden.

This is a great way to smuggle in lots of vegetables in the food, especially if you have kids who say they don't like vegetables.

And you can use any vegetables as long as you like the taste.

You could also use things that you normally don't use, like the green part on top of the fennel or the green leaves on a cauliflower and the top of a celeriac.

Oh, that is one amazing, powerful vegetable juice.

But nothing here goes to waste.

This pressed-out part that looks really boring, that can be used to make a fantastic vegetable stock.

Just put it in a pot, add a liter of water, bring it to a boil.

It's the most beautiful vegetable stock that I know.

But in total, about 450 grams, about a pound, of various grains.

I just keep a little bit of the fresh juice, so I'll add that last minute to keep some of the fresh, uncooked flavor, as well.

Now, I let the grains stand and soak for a little while, at least half an hour but preferably a couple of hours.

Now they've soaked for a couple of hours, almost doubled in size, and that means that the cereals have actually soaked up the vegetable juice, and they taste of vegetables.

Making this "grainotto," the porridge that's more like a risotto, means also using more or less the same technique as when you're making a risotto.

That means standing over the pot all the time, making sure that it simmers but doesn't boil too energetically, and then adding a little bit of stock as you go when it starts to get dry in the pan.

This is the stock made from the pressed-out vegetables.

We're nearly there, and I'm going to serve with a duck breast, where I just score the fat side, just cut thin crisscross pattern.

What I always do with duck breast is I put it in a dry pan, cook it skin side down for 7 to 8 minutes, and that will release a lot of the fat, and then I just flip it over and cook it for a couple of minutes on the other side.

Now the cereals are cooked.

They are soft, but they offer a little bit of resistance to the tooth when you bite them, and that's perfect, and I'm going to finish it much the same way as you do when you make a risotto by stirring in butter and a hard Parmesan-style cheese.

And it is a little bit dry, and that is on purpose because now I want to stir in some of the fresh vegetable juice, as well.

And here it is.

This is porridge reinvented.

It's also a dish that is so packed with vegetables, even though you can't actually see them.

You just see the green color.

It's fantastic.

You can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

♪♪ This is a replica of a longhouse from the early Iron Age at Veien Cultural Heritage Park.

So here is the lake system.

>> Yes, it goes down to the Oslofjord area, so it's very important because of trade along the river systems.

>> Viestad: It connects to the sea there and to the mountain up here.

>> Yeah.

>> Viestad: When the original house was here, it was 47 meters long.

That's more than 150 feet.

It was the biggest building anyone in the area had seen by far.

The community living here must have been fabulously rich for its time.

Imagine the size of this house.

It must have been like a castle, at least if you compare it to the other houses in this part of the world 2,000 years ago.

And this was a community that built much of its wealth on growing of grains, of cereals.

They would eat porridge, and they would eat bread, but the kind of bread they ate wasn't very similar to the bread that I'm going to bake and the dough that I have here in my bag.

It was a much harder bread because of the types of cereal that was used.

One is oats that have been really, really important in this part of the world, incredibly healthy and also willing to grow in this climate.

And the other one, perhaps the most important one, is barley.

Barley is what most Norwegians lived on for thousands of years.

This is an old hand mill.

It's not quite as old as the building, but this is the kind of mill they used in the Viking Age.

Some of the grains are too coarse.

You just throw them in for another round.

I'm going to use it to make a flatbread, and flatbread was probably the original bread.

You find them in almost any culture, and that is because once you've milled your flour, you have a fantastic resource, but you also have a problem.

The flour is much more susceptible to mold.

It can be eaten by insects, so you got to find a way to preserve it, and one great way is to make flatbread, or as they did in Italy with slightly finer flour, they dried it and made pasta.

It's basically the same thing.

It's the solution to a problem, and in addition to the flour, I'm adding linseed.

Fabulously healthy, grows willingly in the north, and it also helps bind the flatbread together.

Making flatbreads like this is fabulous.

It gives you different flavors, different textures, and it allows you to use different types of flour that are not really useful in normal baking, and it also gives us an alternative to the plain white bread that we frankly eat too much of.

But it seems like such a difficult thing to do, and I have been afraid to start making my own flatbread because these are traditions, and there are always these custodians of traditions who tell you that it must be done this way and that way.

But I tell you, you can make a really good flatbread just by mixing good flour with water until you have a sort of gooey texture like this, and then you dry it on a griddle, in a frying pan, or in the oven.

Basically what you have to do is just smear it over the griddle and wait until it's dry and slightly browned.

But if you're not totally dependent on 2,000-year-old technology only, and if you have a piece of equipment from the last century, namely a stove, you might as well smear it over a baking paper, put it on a baking sheet in the oven at relatively low temperature, 125 Celsius or 250 Fahrenheit, and just bake it until it's completely dry and slightly browned.

When you have good flatbread like this, it goes well with basically anything.

You can have it with cheese, with jam, with charcuterie, but in the old times, this was also your plate.

You ate your other food out of the bread.

So you'd finish your meal, and there'd be nothing left, no dishes to do, fantastic.

I'm going to serve it with sour cream and smoked, dried fish.

This here is perch, a fine freshwater fish.

You can also use saltwater fish like mackerel or eel.

You can even use smoked salmon.

I'm just going to decorate and add a little bit of extra flavor with some wild herbs.

This here is yarrow, which has a nice sort of spiciness to it, and this beautiful flower here is willow weed, and then there's just ordinary clover, which also tastes very nice.

It has a sort of sour taste to it, as well as a bit of sweetness.

Hello, again.

>> Hello.

>> Viestad: Do you want to have a taste?

>> Oh, that looks delicious.

>> Viestad: Okay.

Let's break bread and drink mead.

>> Oh, yes, please.

>> Viestad: Skol.

>> Skol.

>> Viestad: Wild herbs have always been used quite a lot, and I think that... >> Absolutely.

>> Viestad: Today, it's sort of associated with really modern Nordic restaurants, but it's really a tradition that goes back millennia.

The earliest grains that have been found in Norway date back over 4,000 years, and today almost 750,000 acres are cultivated with wheat, rye, barley, and oat.

The large yield is nutritious both for humans and animals alike, and it is a precondition for our daily bread.

I can't wait to see what has become of my dough.

Ah, look at that, amazing.

This is the level we started at, and now, well, it isn't really higher than this, but it's more than doubled in size, and that's perfect, and it smells amazing.

So now what I do is I fold the dough to get a better structure on the bread, and to all those gluten haters out there, gluten is a protein that does all the hard work in making a bread rise.

So now I'm just leaving it to rise for 20 to 30 minutes, covering it with a cloth, and this is a baker's cloth.

It looks incredibly dirty, but it actually is sort of impregnated with flour, so it won't stick to the bread.

And what's the perfect thing to go together with freshly baked bread?

Well, it's butter, isn't it?

And I'm going to make my own butter, and my favorite butter, it's made with a combination of cream and sour cream, so it's got a little bit of a bite to it.

Here I'm using only full-fat cream and sour cream.

This has a fat content of 39%, which is perfect, and sour cream, full-fat sour cream.

If you can't find sour cream, you can also use crème fraîche.

You can make your own butter using a food processor or a mixer, but I think the easiest thing is just to mix it in a jar, and it's hard work, but it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes, and then it starts to feel funny, like there's a ball down there, and in a way it is because now the water and the fat has separated, and we actually have the miracle of butter.

This is really what you need, but it's unsalted, so I'm adding a bit of salt.

Look at that.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

Just slash it a little so that it can rise in the oven.

Now, this oven is quite hot.

It's about 450 degrees Fahrenheit, 225 centigrade, so it should bake for about 35 minutes or so, maybe 40 minutes.

That's maybe too hot, but, then again, that is what gives the bread a bit of temperament, so it's not like store-bought bread.

Look at that beautiful bread.

You can almost see the "A" I slashed into it.

I'm going to serve my guests bread and butter as a main course today, and I also have something a little on the side, four small birds.

When you see the fields are being harvested, you always see crows and pigeons coming in to eat whatever they can find.

This is kind of like the farmer's revenge, four small pigeons or squab, and they're utterly delicious, and I'm going to use the bread to sop up the cooking juices.

Remember that you can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

Hi.

>> Hi!

♪♪ >> Viestad: [ Speaking Norwegian ] >> Mmm.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Viestad: Mmm.

[ Chuckles ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> For more of the "New Scandinavian Cooking" experience, visit our website or Facebook page.

♪♪ >> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following... >> Up Norway, curates Norwegian travel experiences in the footsteps of "New Scandinavian Cooking."

>> ♪ No, take me home ♪ Take me home where I belong >> Vgan, the full taste of chocolate.

>> Grieg Suites.

Chocolate with apples from Norway.

♪♪ Havila Voyages.

Pure Northern.

♪♪