Where to stay

Frederiksminde A château hotel, overlooking the sea, in a pretty town on the way to Lolland. The food is up-front new Nordic but in a classic dining room setting. Doubles from £159. Klosternakken 8, Præstø, 00 45 55 90 90 30, frederiksminde.com

Ilse Made Stylish restaurant with rooms. Doubles from £110. Vesterløkken 16, Samsø, 00 45 86 59 16 59, ilsemade.dk

Stammershalle Badehotel Overlooking the sea on a quiet stretch of road. Retro-Scandinavian rooms in soft pastel colours. In my top five breakfasts ever and chef Daniel Kruse’s cuisine is none too shabby either. Doubles from £99. Sdr. Strandvej 128, Stammershalle, Gudhjem, Bornholm, 00 45 56 48 42 10, stammershalle-badehotel.dk

Strandlyst Boutique hotel tucked away on Samsø. Doubles from £94. Strandvejen 12, Samsø, 00 45 86 59 19 36, strandvejen12.dk

Vejrø Privately owned island that is organic and self-sustaining in food and has a real away-from-it-all feel. You can rent cottages as well as rooms here. Doubles from £198. 00 45 20 27 23 60, vejroe.dk

Travel Information

GETTING THERE
SAS (flysas.com) flies from London Heathrow to Copenhagen daily.
Norwegian (norwegian.com) flies from Gatwick to Copenhagen daily.

RESOURCES
For more information on planning your trip, try these handy websites: Visit East Denmark (visiteastdenmark.com), Destination Bornholm (bornholm.info), Visit Aarhus (visitaarhus.com), Visit Samsø (visitsamsoe.dk) and Visit Denmark (visitdenmark.co.uk).

FURTHER READING
A Work in Progress by René Redzepi (Phaidon, £39.95). Three books in one: a journal, recipe book and flick book. Nordic food icon Redzepi recounts daily life at Copenhagen’s renowned Noma.

CARBON COUNTING
Conscious about your carbon footprint when flying to Copenhagen? Then visit ClimateCare (climatecare.org), where you can make a donation to support environmental projects around the world. Return flights from London produce 0.23 tonnes CO2, meaning a cost to offset of £1.74.

Where to eat

Æblehaven A cook with a great palate, married to one of Denmark’s top sommeliers, has resulted in a must-visit bistrot. From £77, including wine pairing. Hovedgade 15, Snogebæk, Nexø, Bornholm, 00 45 56 48 88 85, aeblehaven.com

Kadeau Only open 90 days a year on the island but the original version of the acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant is a hot ticket. From £85, including paired juices. Baunevej 18, Vestre Sømark, Pedersker, Åkirkeby, Bornholm, 00 45 56 97 82 50, kadeau.dk

Lassen’s Chef Daniel Cruse has cooked for Denmark at the Culinary Olympics and his takes on new Nordic are elegance personified. Stammershalle Badehotel, Sdr. Strandvej 128, Stammershalle, Gudhjem, Bornholm, 00 45 56 48 42 10, stammershalle-badehotel.dk

Skipperly In Ballen harbour, this is a special place to sample herring in all its guises. Menu from £35, but order herrings à la carte. Havnevej 9, Ballen, Samsø, 00 45 86 59 10 18, skipperly.dk

Strandlyst Scandinavian-French bistro that relies on farm-fresh produce. Strandvejen 12, Samsø, 00 45 86 59 19 36, strandvejen12.dk

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Denmark isn’t a landlocked country. It’s a crazy jigsaw puzzle of islands hanging on by a flap to Europe. They connect by bridges, ferries and by air. Sometimes they all but touch – part of Copenhagen is on Zealand, another on Amager. Bornholm, a large one, is the far side of Sweden. Several are in private hands.

Good hands too. For instance, Claus Meyer, co-founder of Noma, owns tiny Lilleø and has a vineyard and orchard there.

What they have in common is their topography. They are flat-ish. A Norwegian author, Roger Pihl, tongue in cheek, wrote a Guide to the Mountains of Denmark. The highest point is a whopping 170m above sea level. On a calm day and from the coast of Fejø, itself an island, Vejrø on the horizon looks like a lily floating on a pond.

It belongs to the director of a Danish bank. You know you are going to a Bond-worthy spot when the water taxi taking you there is a 600hp power boat driven by a rugged male model called Alex.
‘Jante Law’ is a Ten Commandments code of Danish social conduct that frowns on ostentation. Top of the list is ‘Don’t be too big for your boots’. It’s why the royal family cycles rather than polo-ponies. Vejrø doesn’t have a gym, a spa or a heated infinity pool, but it is a resort and it is exclusive. It’s a kind of eco-luxury, underlined when we visit by a 36-strong group of team-building bank executives simmering freshly slaughtered organic chickens over open fires.

If sustainable development underpins new Nordic cuisine, even more so than foraging, Vejrø is it. The island has its own Såne sheep, Dexter cattle and Duroc pigs. It grows all its own vegetables and crops. Roe deer and hares peek from the stubble almost unfazed by human presence. The general manager says the island is unique in leaving a negative carbon footprint.

Dinner underscores his point. Michael and Johannes, the cooks, have a larder on their doorstep. Heritage tomatoes and melons come from greenhouses that wouldn’t look out of place at Kew. The beef tartare was chewing cud before it was dispatched and hung for a few weeks. Roast chicken leg, the skin crisp and dry, comes from poultry left free to roam.

The organic movement is more than a woolly aspiration in Denmark. Three-quarters of all food and drink served in Copenhagen’s institutions (hospitals, prisons, schools and City Hall) is green. Almost a quarter of the retail market in the capital is too.

According to Rasmus Kofoed and Nicolai Nørregaard, owners of Kadeau – which Danes voted Copenhagen’s 2013 Best Gourmet Restaurant – the country is aiming to be two-thirds organic in the next 20 years. ‘We may or may not achieve this,’ says Nicolai, the chef, ‘but the important thing is that we’ve decided to go there’. They have the same aspiration for Bornholm where they both grew up. The Baltic island boasts one ‘mountain’, Rytterknægten (162m), empty roads with an 80km/h speed limit, bright yellow and ochre cottages, here a whitewashed church there a restored windmill and open fields of rapeseed, linseed and cereals. Rasmus and Nicolai opened their original Kadeau in a beach cabin on a stretch of deserted coastline. It’s where they stay and cook for 90 days during the summer. ‘Almost everyone who has tried both our places prefers eating here,’ says Nicolai.

Rather than new Nordic, both men describe their approach as Bornholm-inspired. ‘We went to school together here,’ says Rasmus. ‘It’s in our DNA.’ Their list of local suppliers runs into dozens. ‘Strawberries are by far the best I’ve ever tasted. One day we forgot to collect them from the grower and now he delivers them

to us every afternoon.’ They took them to a fruit specialist to be identified and the expert was flummoxed. Nicolai admits to preserving 170kg of green ones the previous summer – salting, fermenting, pickling and making vinegars is central to his style of cooking. Both say the island has changed since they were young.

Then there was a big fishing industry. That’s vanished, although they can still find enough turbot, salmon, cod and herring. The slaughterhouse has closed. It has little effect on their menus that may include one meat dish.

Like Noma, they offer a juice pairing. In Rønne (pop. 13,730), the largest town, ex-social worker Morten Hansen experiments with wild cranberries, pears, currants, mono-varietal apples and delicious rhubarb juices. He started the business to help those with learning difficulties. ‘We don’t talk about it, but we see people getting better.’ Mosteriet, the business he set up, has grown into a national brand without compromising quality. Master brewer, Jan Paul, at Svaneke Bryghus, supplies Kadeau with beer. He wanted to study winemaking until his father advised against it. There are very few Danish vineyards and he had no contacts to push his career. So he took up home-brewing when he worked as a crewman aboard a three-master and built his career from there. ‘On Bornholm I do my own thing, because there’s no background noise,’ he says.

Recipes for his bottled ales, ‘slow beers’, may include whacky ingredients like bladder-wrack. One of his stouts contains local Lakrids liquorice. Made from anise oil, sugar, rice flour, Sicilian or Afghan liquorice and glucose, this is the Rolls-Royce in its class. Son of a Svaneke art-glass designer, Johan Bülow devised the recipe for the sweet stuff in his mother’s kitchen. His shop, next to her studio, still makes hand-rolled sticks.

Jan Paul believes that many Danes think outside the box just like Morten, Johan or himself. To live on Fejø, reached by ferry from the larger island of Lolland, it’s a must. It has two villages connected by road. Thatched summer houses here sell for the price of a few Kadeau dinners. Step off the boat and someone will wave a greeting. Stop to look at a roadside tray of herbs for sale and you can end up in a permaculture garden sharing a picnic of seed- bread, nettle pesto, almonds and pumpkin washed down with blackberry, apple mint and honey cordial. A hundred metres away behind a low hedge, Michael Gundersen is driving his vintage Massey Ferguson tractor down a row of vines. ‘I love my red tractor – more than the next man’s tractor,’ he jokes. ‘If it goes wrong my neighbour can fix it and if he can’t, I can borrow his.’

To show the island’s microclimate isn’t too northerly, he grows peaches and outdoor tomatoes tasting as though they were plucked from a Tuscan garden. Ripe figs pulled off a tree beside his back door, served with a slice of home-cured lardo produced from a hairy mangalitza pig he had reared and a glass of his Den Roden Traktor wine, tasting something like Chianti, make for a surreal experience. Susanne Hovmand-Simonsen’s farmhouse on Lolland could pass as a stately home. Jante Law – or is it permaculture principles – kicks in when she claims, ‘Everybody on the farm is equally important’. She would say the same of her flock of sheep and herd of goats. She would say the same of the bats on the estate (‘one will eat 3,000 insects a night’) and the frogs.

At Knuthenlund, she has taken a conventional farm, large by Danish standards, and turned it organic in five years. ‘Farming neighbours,’ she says, ‘have told me they hoped we wouldn’t succeed.’ She has. Her soft cheeses have won gold medals three years running at the World Cheese Awards. She can also claim that she is returning to her roots. Her great-grandfather who bought the property in 1903 made soft cheese too, decades before Danish Blue became a recognised cheese.

By comparison, the six Jersey cows Bent Degn milks at Samsø Mælk barely counts as a cottage industry, but he’s the only artisan cheese maker on an island about the size of, well, Jersey and his lightly fermented butter is a cut above Lurpak.

Samsø, like the Channel Island, is famed for potatoes. The kidney-shaped Linzer is firm and waxy too. Ilse Made hotel serves them in small ceramic bowls tossed in Susanne’s sheep’s milk butter and lovage. Rasmus Kjellerup, chef at Strandlyst, a small country house hotel, boils them in their skins and offers them as a lunch dish with three kinds of onion, mayo, radishes and rye bread. The Michelin Guide, lavish with its stars in Copenhagen – Kadeau received one within a year of opening there – doesn’t give any outside it. This gives a warped impression that the places to eat away from it don’t match up. It’s not true. Nor is new Nordic the only kind of cooking worth eating. Buckthorn, samphire and sea holly are fine, especially when Nicolai practises his alchemy on them. The islands can offer more than this.

At Stammershalle Badehotel on Bornholm, between Allinge and Gudhjem, the breakfast blends tradition and cutting edge without favour to either. At 5am, Emma Lassen, the owner’s daughter, is up to bake the sourdough bread that has proved overnight. She makes rye bread and carrot bread too. Neat brown labels tied round the necks of Kilner jars describe the contents: gooseberry, rosehip and blackberry preserves or vanilla and lemon marmalade. Fresh-cooked liver pâté is topped with rashers of brittle-crisp bacon.

Sopha Nerst cooking alone and her husband Henrik, out front, own a bistro, Æblehaven (Applegarden) on Bornholm. She doesn’t offer so much as a nod to fashion, but her fresh pea soup with plaice or a Thai salad with hake or a silky panna cotta with blueberries from an honesty box fruit stall are mouth watering.

Nicolai and Rasmus both love her food.

Skipperly, by the harbour at Ballen on Samsø, provides a retro herring feast: fried and pickled herring, pickled with Angostura, in a curry sauce with mussels, smoked with horseradish and leeks, as rollmops or with red onion and capers. Washed down with drams of angelica or thyme snaps it’s soul food Danish style.

Five chimneys stand in a line above Røgeriet i Svaneke. Fishermen in the village pooled resources to build the ‘Svaneke Smokehouse’ a century ago. Today a single puff of smoke rises from one. When the vast Baltic herring shoals vanished, the co-op had to sell. There are still enough fish to keep one kiln burning. Cold smoked wild salmon sweat for days in a birch sauna. Hot smoked eels and halibut simmer until tender. The gold skinned herring though are what dazzle.

Danish chefs have reinvented a cuisine for Scandinavia. They have helped their country lead the world in its pursuit of green food. Deep down they are preservers, conservators who learnt how to survive the long dark winter, as their forebears once did.