Books: Norbert Niederkofler’s Cook the Mountain
Books
The Imperative of Terroir
By Edward Behr
“Cook the Mountain”: The Nature Around You by Norbert Niederkofler, 396-page hardcover photo album together with 160-page softcover recipe book, Prestel, $150/€98 — also published in Italian (2020).
St. Hubertus, the three-Michelin-star restaurant of the chef Norbert Niederkofler, lies in the resort village of San Cassiano di Badia at 1,500 meters in the Dolomite Mountains, which are known for winter sports and summer visitors. The title of Niederkofler’s book, “Cook the Mountain,” which comes in quotes, is an imperative addressed above all by the chef to himself. The Dolomites are dramatically crenellated, beautiful, unspoiled. (Curiously, they appear somewhat inhospitable, though gorgeous, in the book’s photos.) The area is largely protected within national parks, and the economy is 90 percent tourism. Niederkofler’s path to earning a third star was to turn away from his previous, more conventionally inventive food and focus intently on his location, which meant a big exploration and relearning. Efforts to avoid waste and be sustainable were important. The resulting cooking is rarefied both in its luxury and its use of local materials.
The production values and price of this book are appropriately high. The sumptuous hefty main volume, largely devoted to photographs, presents the point of view, while 60 seasonally arranged recipes appear in a separate black-and-white book. The recipes are, as they should be, for things as cooked in the restaurant, no compromises for home cooks. The books form a compelling picture of Niederkofler’s mountain point of view, underlined by the very material of the pages: they’re subtly flecked apple paper. The broad region is the Südtirol, or Alto Adige, known for its apples.
Strict reliance on mountain ingredients may seem at first extremely limited. But from the wild come the shoots of Good-King-Henry, wild horseradish, birch sap, wild garlic and other herbs, wildflowers, wild asparagus, carrageenan from beard lichen (for gelling), larch cones (to be fermented), chestnuts, morels and other fungi, wild strawberries and other berries, trout, crayfish, eel, and game. “The buds and leaves of hawthorn also taste exquisite in a salad,” Niederkofler says. A two-page photo depicts 43 different wild plants so clearly that you could use the images to identify them. From gardens and pastures come, among much else, jerusalem artichoke, skirret, knotroot, helianthi, celeriac, leeks, the tuber oca (a native of the mountains of Peru), the sweet tuber yachten (from South Africa), buckwheat, blackcurrants, buttermilk, aged cheeses, rabbit, veal, and lamb (from Tscheggan sheep). Even the grain for flour appears to be grown somewhere in the mountains.
The book gives generous space and voice to the farmers and foragers, the butcher and others who supply the restaurant. There is a clear collaboration.
A lot wasn’t easy to figure out. Lemons and limes for acidity were out. “Vinegar? Sure, that would be an option. But not for everything. Vinegar is too aggressive,” Niederkofler writes. “Fruit? Yet most fruit has a sweet, unmistakable flavor.” Then, he says, “I remembered visiting a famous distillery. I remembered their rowanberry schnapps. Also I cast my mind back to dinners of game in my homeland in fall. All game dishes were accompanied by rowanberry jam. Its tart, fresh acidity and attractive color had stayed in my mind.” He worried that raw rowanberry might be toxic, “but frozen or boiled down it was and is the sour savior of my cuisine.” A shocking realization, for Italy, is that the restaurant uses no olive oil; its place is taken by grapeseed oil, which competes less with mountain flavors. Wine, fortunately, though from a lower altitude, is an important product of the region, and the restaurant offers all the region’s and the world’s wine that one would expect of a three-star place.
A few of the dishes are carrots cooked in hot coals, with burnt leek oil and blueberry miso; wild asparagus canned and aged in a complex aromatic liquid and then sealed in beeswax; orzotto (barley risotto) with nine herbs and lemon verbena–lemon balm jelly; grilled venison with salsa verde (juniper, fermented gooseberries, white currants, pine needles, alpine thyme, chives, and more); and spruce-sorrel-elderflower granita.
If you want to survive on mountain food, you have to preserve for winter — summer is work, lots of fermenting, pickling, drying, curing, freezing, smoking. A photo shows highly disparate-looking hams, as if to say that, compared with industrial hams, the natural kind is inherently uneven. The fresh vegetables in winter are especially roots. That leads to a comment about spring: “Listening to the birds chirping — no more peeling.”
As a contemporary way of cooking, chefs have been headed toward concentrating on local materials for a long time. Reading “Cook the Mountain,” I thought of a 2003 chef book, Purer, from De Librije in Holland, a local farm-woods-water-to-table restaurant from a time before we commonly talked like that. The winter vegetables were only chicory, carrots, onions, shallots, potatoes, and, from a greenhouse, lettuces.
Twice I hesitated in my embrace of the book. The immediate area around the restaurant is one of the rare places where the Ladino language survives, and there must be some sort of culinary culture there. Although Niederkofler mentions “local traditions” in passing, there’s nothing in the book that appears to be a local dish or recipe. And maybe that’s fair in the kind of innovative cooking he does.
My other hesitation concerned the environment. Bringing in well-paying customers from outside is an effective way to support rural producers who might otherwise struggle — bravo! But Niederkofler doesn’t address the importance of that head on, and there’s no word on whether other restaurants are involved or how widespread the positive effect may be. Is his mountain cooking only about customers arriving to eat a one-off grand dinner, or can visitors eat sustainable mountain food throughout their stay? And, maybe more important, as mass-tourism only grows more intense, how can tourism itself be made sustainable? Not that a chef should be an economist or sociologist, but when the environment is the selling point, a chef should acknowledge the issues.
At St. Hubertus the local materials are seen through the lens of the inventive, labor-intensive, rigorous approach to cooking that Niederkofler has always pursued. That’s his strength and as it should be. “Cook the Mountain” presents a chef relying fearlessly on his surroundings and doing good at the same time. It’s hard to imagine any higher standard for engaging with where you are. ●
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