Making Ice Cream & Cook-at-Home Kits. Østerberg + Iluka. Support Local Restaurants – Episode 4.

Directly I sell ice cream, but indirectly I sell joyful moments. You can't be sad when you're eating ice cream. That's why for our fourth episode of our Support Local Restaurant series we're headed to Osterburg Ice Cream, one of our favorite ice cream shops in Copenhagen. And in this series we've met with so many chefs and owners of restaurants who are doing really creative things right now to survive through this crisis, and today is no different. So we're gonna go in, get some ice cream, try some of the local and exotic flavors that they use from jackfruit and dragon fruit to local sea buckthorn and licorice. We're gonna try them all, we're gonna see how the ice cream is made, and we're gonna find a little bit of sunshine and happiness despite this crazy time. My name is Catherine Osterburg. I'm the scientific ice cream girl behind Osterburg Ice Cream. Currently we have a location in Østervol, and we have one in Ho Chi Minh City, and we have one in Vestavol, which opened in that order. Like any other little kid, I loved ice cream. I've also really liked math, physics and chemistry, so at a point in my study time I found out there's a degree called food science, and I just knew that that's where I have to go, because you can learn the chemistry of the foods that we eat and what happens when they go inside our body. I did my master thesis on ice cream structure. I found out there's one of the best ice cream professors. He's located in Canada, so I went there and I just wanted to study everything I could about the molecules of how an ice cream is composed, so I really understand it in depth before I actually start, well, trying to make a living of it. My father started a fruit business in a small place in Fy, called Rønkeby, and that was 30-35 years ago. So there we have a production where we process fruit, but 20 years ago or so he opened up a department in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, because what he found quite early on was that all these fruits from all over the world, their quality is best if they're processed in a place very close to where they grow, because it doesn't really make sense to take them at its peak and then send them across the world. Before I opened the ice cream shop, I had to think long and hard on how to stand out in the ice cream business. I knew that I have a background and I have a network which makes these exotic fruits very accessible, and my initial idea was to bring something new which not everyone had tasted, so I was quite lucky to have tried jackfruit and dragon fruit when I've been traveling abroad, but I hadn't seen anyone present a dragon fruit ice cream or jackfruit ice cream here in Denmark for sure, and so that was a really big part of the whole concept of Österberg Ice Cream. We call it Taste the World. Here in Copenhagen or in Denmark, we have elderflower and sea buckthorn and licorice and rhubarb. That's a very Nordic ingredient. When we take that and present it in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, that's the exotic. We opened up in Vietnam, it's what, three and a half years ago now. I love Vietnam, so that's a pretty good start. We're located in an area with a lot of expats, so to begin with, we had a lot of expats as our primary customers. It started changing over now, because we can all see that Vietnam is a country with a big financial growth, so that also means that the average Vietnamese gets a higher income, and that gets used on, for instance, ice cream. We are open all year round. It's not a seasonal shop like it is here in Denmark, because it gets really cold here. It was just about the time where the society got closed down, that usually I would be opening up, and I was like sitting, and I was thinking on should I do it, shouldn't I do it, and what actually made me think we have to open up, is that some of our customers, I was just going down here cleaning a little bit, and some customers were like, when are you opening up, we really just need a little bit of joy, like please don't take away our ice cream. I was like, that's actually quite an important aspect, because you can say that directly I sell ice cream, but indirectly I sell joyful moments, because that's one of the things that really keep me going, is that I can see these beautiful moments that families create together, and it's sort of like you go into a little bubble, and you forget all the bad things that can happen around you, so I just decided that we can still open, because takeaway is an option. We have to do some precautions inside our shop. We have used a lot of sanitizer obviously, and we have to keep distance. It is quite a different time, because obviously we are less people in the shop, and we are not as many people scooping, because we also need to keep the distance, so we cannot turn over in the same way as we normally can, but it really helps me to get creative, because I know that it's the limiting factor for us here, is how fast a person can scoop the ice creams. I also have to think a little bit outside the box, and think of other channels that I can maybe try to get the ice creams out. We have an ice cream bike. Usually we've had it out for events, like weddings, birthdays, all of these. Well, that's not really a thing these days, so instead we're looking into just biking around in the city. We just need the approval for this, so once we've gotten that, then we are more than ready to go. We try to like challenge people with flavors we have in the display case. Right now we're not doing taste samples, because it gets too close with the hands, and we really want to emphasize, but keep your distance. So one of the big challenges I have right now, is that when people can't taste sample it, they're a little bit more instant, so I'm not going completely crazy with the flavors. So for now, or for the first couple weeks we've been open, they've been sort of I've really thought about how, or what to ask people for, and I think with regards to us, I would actually just say like, thank you, because there's been so much support around our business when we opened up. We've actually been overwhelmed, but it means so much to, now I can talk as a little local chef, that people are still supporting us. What's better than one scoop of ice cream? Six! That's why at Osterberg, the best deal is the Around the World, which is six scoops of ice cream in one homemade waffle bowl. So we are trying everything from local Danish flavors, to exotic tropical fruits like sea buckthorn here, raspberry, rhubarb, walnut, and maple syrup, and underneath you can barely see them, but we have mangosteen and soursop. I bet you can't find these flavors anywhere else in Copenhagen. Sea buckthorn is so Scandinavian for me. It's so tart and citrusy. Rhubarb is in season right now. It is sugary, so sweet, but still like creamy and delicious. Wow, that raspberry is vibrant. I'm not sharing any of this with Anders. Now we're here at Restaurant Iluka to meet with Chef Bo, who is doing a different style of takeaway in these corona times. Bo has prepared meal kits for you to cook at home, so we're gonna meet with Bo and watch how to make a flatfish, and then we're gonna go home and try to cook it ourselves. My name is Bo Clugston. I am a chef owner of a restaurant here in Copenhagen called Iluka, and Iluka is a seafood bistro, and it means, it's an Australian name actually, I'm Australian, it means by the sea or near the sea, and it's quite important to me because it's also a place, it's a town not far from where I grew up, where I had my first food memory, and where I still go fishing and surfing and camping, and yeah, so it's sort of very close to my heart. So I left Australia in a small fishing village on the east coast of Australia to go to London, you know, the grass is always greener and you have these great restaurants in London, so I went there and I spent a lot of my years, I think it was seven, eight years at Gordon Ramsay's, from maize to clarriages to Royal Hospital Road, and he sort of taught me the whole, the building blocks, the whole foundation of cooking, and then I was about to return to Australia and then I had lunch at Noma, because it was so close, across the water apparently, and it changed everything for me, it changed, it went from using fats at Ramsay, like butter and cream, to using herb fats or oils at Noma, and it sort of really, I felt like a kid again, I knew nothing, so I made it a goal of mine to work there, and I knew no one here, and didn't speak the language, and just turned up at the back door and tried every day for a week until he gave in, and back then it was easy, they weren't number one in the world, and they had eight chefs, so it was Rene on the pass, and yeah, he took me in for a trial, and like he said, there was no positions, but he created one, and then I ended up spending almost 10 years there, and it taught me everything, it taught me how to treat ingredients the same or equal, like a langoustine, or a mushroom, or the ramson, and just opened my eyes to a whole different world, a whole different universe, and that the plant kingdoms as important as the ocean, or the meat, really put Aluka to where it is today as well, so I would love to be thankful for. We've started this new initiative called Aluka at Home, so we start these meal kits where it's in a way, it's to also just keep supplier come in, or keep making orders to our suppliers, because when we reopen, we need them, we need them to survive as well, so they're very small suppliers, so we get to place an order every week, which is super cool, the Danes, they get to learn and be educated a little bit differently, even without them knowing. The first dish we ever did had a little bit more cooking than the second one, but the first one was this seafood chowder, so we just made this base with a lot of seafood, a lot of stock, and potatoes, and made this incredible base, and we just served all the raw, good quality products that we have in the restaurant, and they just had to heat up the broth, they had to steam up to some mussels, learn how to clean it, because something so simple as taking a beard out of a mussel, some people may have never tried that, and putting raw fish into the soup, and simmering until it's cooked, and then we had these little house-made milk buns, so just yeast, and milk, and flour, and it's very delicious, very hearty, it's comfort food. Yeah, so that's where Aluka at Home is, we do one new dish a week only, because it's just me, so I don't want too much on the menu. Friday, Saturday, that's it. Okay, this week's meal kit from Aluka at Home is the flatfish with a potato salad, the potatoes have just been steamed, cut, and then just put into a potato and vegetable stock with mustard and vinegar, so it sort of just absorbs, and let it sit, and then we just stir it gently, and it just makes its own emulsion, so it's almost like, feels like mayonnaise, but without the fat. Fresh lettuce, and then we have a sauce of all the preserves from last season, so the ransom capers, the leek blossoms, the unripe mirabelle plum, it tastes like, almost like a fruity green olive, we have some breadcrumbs, and some ransom leaves with some brown butter. So the fish comes in the parchment paper, so keep the paper, straight onto a tray, olive oil, or it doesn't have to be olive oil, any any oil that you have can be neutral, great. Salt, okay, it's very important, you're actually quite generous on the salt, because the skin, or underneath the skin is clean flesh, okay, so the only salt on the fish is what's on the skin. So 210 degrees, with a little bit of fan, straight in the oven, it's going to be between 10 and 12 minutes. So while the fish is in the oven, you take your your brown butter, that has bergamot juice in it, of course it sets because it's butter, so take a spoon or a spatula, scoop it, now you have your preserves, or your capers, and your breadcrumbs, okay, straight in. Now we're just going to heat it up gently, okay, this is brown butter, so you're on a stage before it turns black, okay, it has all the nuttiness, all the sweetness, so you want to just gently heat up the sauce to temperature, you don't want to boil it. Okay, so the fish has just come out of the oven, of course, because you're going straight into a hot oven, so don't be afraid of the skin just expanding and splitting, but with the fish, you can see see these clear juices, just rising to the surface, that's just a very clear sign that the fish is cooked. When it starts to be really milky, then it's over, but this fish is so thin and so delicious, that it's hard to, there's no wrong here. Okay, so the sauce, you can see it, I mean, it's quite hot, I mean, it is butter, it's simmering, but it's not boiling like vigorously, okay, stir it, just get the capers everywhere, this is your natural salt, butter, no one's afraid of butter, so you have four fillets, you have two on the top and you have two on the bottom, comes off the bone so easy, you can just almost slide the whole thing, once you eat the top two, you just hold the tail, you just pull the whole frame up and then the bottom two fillets are left on the bottom of the plate, super easy, it's so simple, but so good. Hello from our kitchen, usually Anders is the one cooking at home, but I think I can handle this meal kit, I've seen the pro do it and I have some handy instructions here, so I think I can handle it, see what we have, we have our fish, star of the show here,