I first heard about Rene Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant Noma when I attended the 2008 edition of the Omnivore Food Festival in Deauville, a gastronomic event during which high-profile chefs from France and beyond are invited to cook live on stage.

He has since received many more accolades as the herald of a refreshing and talented new wave of Scandinavian chefs. His forager’s approach seems to celebrate nature at its most generous, yes, but also at its roughest, revealing its beauty even when rocks and roots and wind are all it has to offer*.

Among the dishes Redzepi presented that day was a trompe l’oeil vegetable field: served on a warmed slab of stone, baby root vegetables were planted in a layer of mashed potatoes, then topped with a soil-like layer of malt and hazelnut flour crumbs.

Radishes in soil have become a signature amuse-bouche at Noma: radishes with their leaves on are served in a terracotta pot that contains a creamy herbed dip at the bottom, and malt and hazelnut crumbs on top.

I later heard about a variation on this idea that’s become a signature amuse-bouche at Noma: radiser, jord og urteemulsion (radishes, soil and herb emulsion) involves radishes with their leaves on, served in a terracotta pot that contains a creamy herbed dip at the bottom, and the same crumbs on top.

I located an Observer article in which Redzepi gave a recipe for his vegetable field, including directions to make his dehydrated “maltsoil.” But then I also found a few blog references to a recipe that was published in the Figaro Madame late last year and drawn from Trish Deseine’s book Comme au resto, wherein the soil is made, more simply, from slices of dark bread.

It is the route I opted for, grinding dried-up slices of my sourdough chocolate bread, which is not sweetened at all, and using a mix of fresh cheese and yogurt for the herbed layer.

I’m always looking for novel ways to serve radishes** beyond the classic radish/butter/salt trio, and these radishes in soil are a whimsical and tasty one. I had fun assembling the containers — two small bowls and one square little dish like a gardening box — and served them at apéritif time, as a light companion to pre-dinner drinks. Once all the radishes had been consumed, there was some herbed cheese leftover in the bowls, so I cut thin slices of fresh baguette to scoop it up.

I dream of organizing a Danish getaway around a Noma reservation — Copenhaguen is just a two-hour flight from Paris after all — and some day I will, but in the meantime I’ll just munch on my radishes in soil, and dive into the book Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine.

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* Learn more about new Scandinavian cuisine by reading the Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen. And if you’re curious about Redzepi’s cuisine, a few bloggers have posted pictures of their meals at Noma: see the appetite-whetting reports on Chuckeats, A Life Worth Eating, Gourmet Traveller and Food Snob.

** For more radish inspiration, take a look at these avocado and radish canapés with smoked salt, this chicken and radish salad with avocado green goddess dressing, my radish leaf pesto, or Sonia Ezgulian’s tarte aux radis.

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In the late eighties, my aunt took a trip to Japan and got me a pair of round-toed flats with a red flower pattern, and a little buckle to the side. I was nine, and these were the prettiest shoes I had ever owned. This, and the captivating tales she also brought back were likely the sparks that ignited my interest in all things Japanese: it seemed like she had visited another, mysterious planet, and I burned to go there myself some day.

It has taken me a little over twenty years to act upon that desire, twenty years during which I seized every opportunity to learn more about the culture and the people and the food, so I think it’s fair to say this is the single most anticipated trip I’ve ever taken. Part of me worried this might lead to some form of disappointment, but I’m thrilled to report that our trip managed to surpass even my sky-high expectations.

In broad strokes, what we did was this: fly from Paris to Tokyo; stay almost a week in Tokyo, where we swapped apartments with a friend of a friend who lives in the Omotesandō area; go to an onsen a little way north from Tokyo, where we stayed at a ryokan (a traditional inn) and bathed outdoors in the hot springs; spend a day in Osaka; go south to Kōya-san, a small mountain town that is a major holy site for Shingon Buddhism, where we stayed overnight at a temple-inn; stay in Kyoto for a few days, where we rented a little machiya in the Higashiyama area; fly home from Kyoto.

I seem to have spent the entirety of our vacation in a state of permanent elation, excited beyond words to just be there, observing everything and everyone, taking in street and nature and temple scenes, browsing shelves in stores big and small, walking, walking, and walking some more, riding gleaming trains, and eating like I gladly would for the rest of my days.

The one drawback is that it’s a little hard to come down from such a high, and already I am trying to find ways to plot another trip. But in the meantime, I would like to revisit a few highlights with you if you’re keen. Not a day-by-day, bore-you-to-sobs, comprehensive report but rather, as is my preference, a pointillist account of what delighted me most:

Edokko Sushi in Kanda (Tokyo)

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I generally steer clear of ready-made preparations and other “helpers” sold at the grocery store: not out of snobism, but I love to cook, I devote time and thought to selecting good ingredients, and I welcome the opportunity to practice and experiment, so I am reluctant to give up the driver’s seat and let some industrial product take over.

But my friend Estérelle recently told me that she keeps ready-made béchamel sauce in her pantry for impromptu gratins, and more specifically, she mentioned an organic vegan béchamel called Soja Gratin (soja = soy), manufactured by the French brand Bjorg.

This successful attempt made me curious about a homemade vegan béchamel: the classic béchamel sauce is made with butter, flour, and milk, so why not just make it with oil, flour, and some sort of non-dairy milk?

I don’t think I would ever have thought to buy anything of the sort, but Estérelle is one of the handful of people I would trust with my life in the kitchen, so I purchased some of this sauce, sold in tiny cartons in the organic aisle of the supermarket.

I gave it a try a couple of weeks ago in a Swiss chard gratin — my produce seller at the greenmarket has flamboyant bunches of it these days — and was favorably impressed: despite the not-so-appetizing, cement gray color of the sauce when I poured it in, it baked to a creamy consistency, and its pronounced nutmeg flavor played along with the chard quite well.

But what this successful attempt really did was make me curious about a homemade vegan béchamel: the classic béchamel sauce is made with butter, flour, and milk, so why not just make it with oil, flour, and some sort of non-dairy milk?

The next weekend, armed with a fresh bunch of Swiss chard, I set out to make my first batch, using sunflower oil, wheat flour, and oat milk, with which I’ve been experimenting of late*. It worked flawlessly and took all of twelve minutes to make. I may buy more of that ready-made soy béchamel for convenience, to use when I don’t have milk on hand, but when I can, I’ll just as quickly make my own.

Note that, because I am not a vegan (my interest in non-dairy milks is just for the sake of variety), I add an egg to the Swiss chard gratin to make it richer, but you can hold the egg if you prefer — the béchamel alone is enough to produce a lovely texture — or you can substitute silken tofu. I also top my gratins with oat bran and a little Comté cheese because I like the flavor, but you can use nutritional yeast if you wish to (or must) avoid dairy ingredients altogether.

I’ve already adapted this Swiss chard gratin recipe to make an excellent leek gratin using young, pencil-thin leeks, and I am confident that my mother’s cauliflower gratin will take just as well to this oat milk béchamel.

* As tweeted, I used oat milk to replace the milk and water in my basic crêpe recipe, to delicious results.

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Among the many things I learned during that memorable conference on molecular gastronomy, one idea has been whirling around my brain with particular insistence since then, and it is that of farine torréfiée*, or roasted flour.

It was introduced to us by way of a truism: raw flour is bland, browned flour isn’t. This is why we bother to make roux, and why the crust of bread is tastier than the crumb. With this simple fact in mind, why not bake with roasted flour? The finished product would no doubt benefit from the heightened flavor.

Of course, exposing flour to direct heat cooks it. This changes the structure of its starch and gluten molecules, and therefore it behaves differently from raw flour; one notable change is that it loses some of its elasticity. Consequently, the primary use Hervé This suggested for roasted flour is in sablés, i.e. cookies with a crumbly, sandy consistency, for which a weak gluten network is desirable.

I found a recipe for sablés à la farine torréfiée on Pierre Gagnaire’s website** and it looked exciting (it uses cooked egg yolks! exciting!) but for my first roasted flour experiment, I was more curious to alter my — or, should I say, my mother’s — basic recipe for sablés.

I did follow Gagnaire’s instructions to roast the flour, and after just a few minutes I could tell that this was going very well: already my kitchen smelled like the bakery around the corner***. When the flour had cooled and I used it to make the sablé dough, however, I realized it would not come together as obligingly as it normally does, but seemed rather to wish to remain a mound of sand.

I sensed that adding more butter would do the trick, but I like the moderate butter content of my mother’s recipe (most call for equal weights of butter and flour) so I proceeded as planned, and tried to form the dough into lumps however I could. The easiest (and most fun) way was to just squeeze it by the handful, a technique that resulted in these odd-shaped cookies I naturally decided to call squeeze cookies.

I find their funky look endearing, but if you’re worried that someone in your household (and I’m not naming names) might liken them to slugs or caterpillars, you can also shape them into balls, or pucks, or pack the dough in an even layer in a pan, following the instructions in this shortbread recipe.

More important than the shape, you’ll agree, is the flavor: I deliberately omitted any sort of flavor booster (vanilla, spices, citrus zest…) the better to judge the effect of the roasted flour, and I’m not afraid to say the effect is absolutely wowing. In fact, the same person who was so full of gastropod metaphors declared them the best sablés I’d ever made.

Grilled notes of chocolate and hazelnut come through in every bite, the consistency is a fine crumbliness unlike that of any sablé I know, and all that comes from a simple twenty-minute roasting step. See how the baking horizon has suddenly broadened? Don’t you have a favorite baking recipe you should be experimenting with, right this minute?

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* The French term torréfier (to torrefy) has a slightly different meaning from rôtir (to roast) but has, to my knowledge, no exact equivalent in English. Torréfier is defined as “exposing to intense heat until the early stage of carbonization.” The most frequent use of the term — and the process — is the roasting of green, raw coffee beans, which turns them into a browned, intensely fragrant version of themselves.

** Pierre Gagnaire and Hervé This engage in a monthly conversation (in French, of course) wherein the scientist explores a chemical or physical phenomenon and the chef offers a recipe to illustrate it.

*** They say you should bake a loaf of bread before people come to visit the house you’re trying to sell, but, as it turns out, just roasting some flour should do the trick.

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