>> 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: Hi, and welcome to "New Scandinavian Cooking" from Savalen in the valleys of eastern Norway.

I'm Andreas Viestad.

This is a winter wonderland and the perfect place for Christmas celebrations.

♪♪ ♪♪ In today's program, I'll make some of the best holiday and winter food, and I'll start off with one of the most traditional dishes, porridge.

This was food that was not just served to everyone in the family and in the community but also to mythological creatures that were believed to live among us, including the nisse, which is kind of like a pre-Christian forerunner to Santa.

The vast expanses of the landscape here is great for grazing in summer, and there's a strong tradition for sheep and goat farming.

I'll prepare Pinnekjott, a dish made with salted and dried lamb or goat ribs that I'll serve with caramelized cream, garlic and pruned puree and sweet almond potatoes.

And the most common holiday food typically eaten on Christmas Eve is pork ribs.

I'll make mine by cooking the ribs twice, first boiled, then baked to make it crispy.

I'm also going to make crispy waffles, a great way to reuse whatever is left of your oats after breakfast.

♪♪ In Savalen, you can experience Christmas all year around.

There's a house dedicated to !Julenissen, or Santa Claus, complete with a postal office and all kinds of fun activities, but of course, the main season is December, when Santa Claus himself invites for great seasonal activities for both young and old.

[ Bells ringing ] If you look at the long historical perspective, the most popular food in Norway has been porridge, or at least that's the food we've eaten the most of, and porridge could basically be anything.

If you just had a handful of flour and mixed it with water and boiled it, you'd call it porridge.

It could also be more elaborate dishes, and of course, around Christmas, you would make the best porridge you could afford.

One thing that has been quite popular in Norway up until recently is barley porridge made with barley, but up here in the mountains, there's been a tradition of growing barley and oat together because they demand slightly different conditions.

So one summer, you'd have a little more rain, and you'd have a little more oat, and the next summer, you'd have a little more sun, have a little more barley, but you'd be ensured that you would have food to put on the table every year.

So here I've got 3 deciliters, a little more than a cup, of barley, and the same amount of oat.

This is whole oat, not rolled oats, and the thing is you've got to remember that you're making this dish a little ahead of time, so you got to soak it in water for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.

So here I've soaked the grains in water overnight.

I've just removed the water, and now I'm boiling it in quite a lot of milk, 3 liters, 3 quarts of milk.

Then you just bring it to a boil and let it simmer gently for an hour, an hour and a half, until the grains are cooked, and the porridge has thickened.

And if you don't want to stand around, stirring all the time, you can also just bring it to a boil and put it in an oven that's between 250 and 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's between 125 and 150 Celsius.

It will take a little bit longer, but then again, you don't have to do anything.

I'm going to serve the porridge with a sort of cream caramel, and that is simply made by reducing cream.

So I've got a liter, a quart, of cream, and I'm just bringing it to a boil and then reducing, reducing, reducing.

In the beginning, everything is happening, oh, so slowly, but then it speeds up, and as it starts to caramelize, you've got to pay attention.

You've got to stir all the time, and this is actually what is left of 1 quart, 1 liter of cream.

These are the caramelized milk solids, and this is the fat, and I keep skimming off the fat as it separates.

♪♪ ♪♪ And here it is, oat and barley porridge with caramelized cream.

You could add a little bit of sugar as well, but I don't really think you need it.

The milk is sweet, and the caramelized cream is certainly sweet.

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

It's interesting to note that, while we refer to the holiday as Christmas, it's not an altogether Christian holiday.

The roots go back much further.

The word that we use in Norwegian is !Jul, which goes back much, much further.

It refers to a celebration that was held around winter solstice.

The nisse, it's kind of hard to explain what it is.

It was thought to be a small creature, very often dressed kind of like this, and they were living in the barn.

They served a purpose in the household.

They protected the animals, but they were not altogether benign.

They could be super annoyed if they felt that they were not treated well.

Then they could poison the animals or set fire to the barn, so you had to be careful around them, and today's Santa Claus is a combination of the Catholic saint, Saint Claus, and the nisse, plus some concoction made up by the advertising industry in the early 20th century.

Christmastime is the time when food is very, very important.

It's such an important part of our identity, so in the north of Norway, people used to eat reindeer.

Some people ate cod or halibut.

On the northwest coast, many people ate bacalao, and some people even eat !lutefisk, which is... Well, I'm not going to go into that even, but the two biggest traditions are either dried and salted lamb or goat ribs or pork ribs.

And I'm going to cook both of them today.

This is such a lively place.

It's full of goats, but you only have small goats.

You only have kids.

Yes, no mothers.

We have small kids, the male kids, and we raise them until they are 9 months old, and then we can...

They are this size.

>> Viestad: Mm-hmm.

>> So we can make different products.

All of farmers can't have them because they don't have the space to raise them, but we found that so few make that kind of meat in Norway, so we wanted to try it.

And people like it very much.

>> Viestad: It's a cool thing with goat meat.

People think of goat meat as, like, being very tough and very strong-tasting, but it's really quite mild.

>> Yeah.

It's mild and sweet and less fat than other meat.

It's really very healthy, also.

>> Viestad: The animals that we eat, we must make sure that they've had a good life, and I think that these animals have an incredibly... not just a good life.

They have fun every day, huh?

>> Yes.

They do.

♪♪ [ Conversing in Norwegian ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Viestad: One of the two most popular traditional Christmas foods in Norway is Pinnekjott.

It literally means stick meat because it's typically made out of ribs that are a little bit like sticks, lamb ribs or goat ribs that have been salted, so they're quite dry when you buy them.

They could also be a little bit difficult to find outside of Scandinavia, but if you live in the U.S., you can buy them from Scandinavian specialty stores.

You can order them by mail.

They will need to be reconstituted, soaked in water, for 24 hours.

If you can't find real Pinnekjott, you can also use salted lamb meat.

And the thing is, what I do is I boil or steam the meat for a couple of hours, just a little bit of water, and the result is nice and tender, but I also like it to be a little bit crispy and to have a little bit of sweetness as well.

So what I'm doing is I'm just marinating it briefly in beer and then finishing it off either in a very hot oven or on a grill.

And since the meat is quite salty, I think it's nice to serve with something a little bit sweet on the side.

And a recipe I got from Norwegian chef Even Ramsvik calls for baked garlic and prunes, and I think that's really nice.

So this is just garlic that I've baked in the oven for about an hour at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 175 Celsius, and then it becomes really sweet and not all that garlicky.

You can eat a whole lot of this without getting the famous garlic breath.

So I've got two whole heads of garlic and just a handful of prunes, 2 or 3 tablespoons of vinegar.

In this case, a good malt vinegar.

You can also use apple cider vinegar.

It is really an unexpected combination of ingredients.

Baked garlic, prunes and vinegar, but once you blend them together, they become one, intensely sweet and acidic at the same time.

So just a little dollop of this together with the salted meat.

It's really, really nice.

And I'm going to serve also with potatoes, not as the sort of boring side, but these are small mountain potatoes.

We call them almond potatoes because of this almond shape, and they are really incredibly sweet.

If you grow them in the south, in the lowlands, they're okay, but here, up in the mountains where the soil is thin and the weather is really on the margins of where you can grow potatoes at all, they are incredibly flavorful.

So I've just made a mash out of them.

A little bit of the garlic and prune puree, and I've got a little bit of the caramelized cream left from the porridge, so I'm adding that as well, and it is really nice with the sweetness together with the salty meat.

And you need a bit of that acidity as well to cut through the saltiness and the fat.

And it does seem to many like a strange thing to eat goat meat.

Well, traditionally, it has been eaten a lot in Norway.

Not so much these days, I think that hopefully we're having a goat renaissance, but look at it on a larger scale.

Goat meat is still the most eaten meat in the world today.

You should try it.

Otherwise, you can use the same way of thinking about combining saltiness, sweetness and acidity if you're preparing other salty meats as well.

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

Winter comes early here, and it stays for a long time.

In fact, between November and April, the temperature rarely rises above freezing, and the year average here is minus 0.03 degrees.

That's around 32 Fahrenheit, and the record cold that has been registered here is minus 46 Celsius.

That's minus 50.

You could say that that is too cold, but the fact that it is generally cold here makes it a reliable Christmas destination even in times of rising temperatures.

You know you'll meet snow here, and this is an increasingly popular holiday destination, mostly for people who want to go skiing, but also for people who want to go ice fishing on the lakes.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ You might be interested in knowing what sets Tynset apart from all the other places in the world.

As you know, many small places are strikingly similar to each other, but what really sets Tynset apart from all the other places in the world is that for a long time, it could boast of the world's largest kick-sled.

This one measures 5.4 meters or 18 feet.

Another words, only practical if you're more than 40 feet tall.

One of the things that annoys me in my own household is that if we make porridge or just oats for breakfast, there are always some leftovers, and those leftovers, they're no fun in the evening of the day after, but they're actually great starting point if you want to make really crispy and quite healthy waffles.

There I got 1 cup, 2.5 deciliters, of leftover oats and about the same amount of cultured milk.

You can use buttermilk or just regular milk.

And 4 whole eggs.

So be aware, if you're going this in your deep freezer, some small lumps might appear.

Just whisk energetically, and they will disappear, and you will get a little bit warmer.

Two teaspoons of baking powder, 1 cup of flour.

This is barley flour.

You can also use normal all-purpose flour.

That's 2.5 deciliters.

And sugar, you can just as much sugar as you want but don't make it too sweet, so maybe 3 to 4 tablespoons.

Melted butter, about 100 grams.

That's a little less than a stick, about a quarter of a pound.

Finally, a little bit of cardamom.

Many Scandinavian pastries contain a little touch of cardamom.

It's strange in that cardamom grows in the tropics, but it has become the flavor of sweet pastries in Scandinavia.

♪♪ Super nice waffles, and you can really taste the oats in here as well that make the waffles a little bit more interesting than normal.

♪♪ The most important Christmas dish and certainly the most popular one is pork ribs, typically served on Christmas Eve, and that's when we celebrate Christmas in Norway.

And it consists of the part of the pig just above the belly, so there's still some of the ribs in, and today, I'm going to cook it twice.

First, I'm going to boil it then bake it in the oven to make it crispy.

The point here is to make a crisscross pattern, cutting through the fat but not through the flesh.

[ Bells ringing ] >> [ Speaking Norwegian ] >> Viestad: So once the crisscross pattern is complete, just rub it with salt, about one scant tablespoon of salt per pound.

That's about 20 grams per kilo of meat, and try to get most of it in between the fatty side here and just a little bit on the other side, and if you have time, it's best to do this 24 hours in advance and just leave it in the fridge with the salt for 24 hours.

That way, it's easier to get a really good crackling, but now I'll just put it in a pot, and then I add water, about 1 quart or 1 liter of water, and it is great if you have a pot that just snugly fits the meat, so you don't have to use too much water.

And then I'm adding three bay leafs and a few black peppercorns.

Then I bring it to a boil and let it simmer for about 2 hours.

You won't believe the smell that's coming out of this pot as the meat is boiling.

Now, it is cooked, but it is wobbly.

It's not at all crispy, so in order to crisp it up, I'm going to cook it once more in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 175 Celsius, for about an hour and 15 minutes.

But do remember, every oven is different so pay attention.

You want the crackling to start popping and become really crisp, but you don't want it to burn, so do pay attention.

But meanwhile, I'm going to make a kind of soup out of the stock, and with that stock, I'm going to serve some Savoy cabbage and some carrot, some rutabaga or swede, or if you prefer, you can use another root vegetable like parsnip or parsley root.

Then I'm adding the stock that I've just sieved through a kitchen towel to remove most lumps and impurities, and these kind of clear soups were typically served with flatbread, and the flatbread was not served as a side like it is today, but it was actually served inside the soup.

You could actually say the flatbread is the pasta of Scandinavia.

The reason why we made flatbread was to find a way to keep the flour after it had been milled because once you have flour, it is easily susceptible to mildew or to bugs, so if you mix it with water and dry it, you manage to preserve it for a long, long time.

That's why the Italians made pasta.

We made flatbread, and it was served much the same way, soaked in hot liquid, but it's actually much better with stock.

I'm going to serve the meat with boiled potatoes and a fresh-tasting cabbage salad.

I'm using red cabbage mostly because of how it looks because we do eat with our eyes as well, and it is fantastic with that color.

If you've got a mandolin somewhere in your kitchen hidden away, far behind that cupboard, this might be the time to bring it out because you want it to be thinly, thinly sliced.

Sprinkle with a little bit of salt and a little bit of sugar, and I want it to be fresh-tasting, so I need a little acidity, and in a typical recipe, you'd use a little bit of vinegar.

I think that it's much nicer and much fruitier to use an orange, and orange is something that is very often eaten around Christmastime in Norway, and it has for a long time.

And it is really much more difficult when the orange is half frozen, and the cook is fully frozen.

[ Grunts ] And in addition, I'm adding some finely sliced prunes and some walnuts that I'm just crushing a bit with my frozen hands.

Oh, it's so painful.

And some orange, just some orange that I've cut into wedges, and that's it.

It's really a very nice fresh-tasting salad that goes very well together with the relatively fatty meat.

Look at that.

It smells amazing, and you can actually hear it.

[ Crunching ] Mm.

And when the crackling is superb like this, you can really hear it.

It makes a lot of noise inside your head when you eat it, and at the same time, you can see that the meat is still juicy.

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

♪♪ Hi!

[ Speaking Norwegian ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> 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.

♪♪