Dirty Work: Making Creamy Potatoes and Crispy Salt Cod With Christian Puglisi

Welcome back to Dirty Work, our series of dispatches from the MUNCHIES Garden. We're inviting chefs, bartenders, and personalities in the world of food and drink to explore our edible playground and make whatever the hell inspires them with our rooftop produce. The results: MUNCHIES Garden recipes for you, dear reader. In this installment, we hang with noma and elBulli alum Christian Puglisi and get to the finer points of establishing a new Nordic cuisine, making sense of his Sicilian-Norwegian background, and cooking for the World's 50 Best Restaurants after-party.

Just a few days before he was set to attend the much-awaited ceremony for the 2016 World's 50 Best Restaurants, Danish culinary titan Christian Puglisi was digging through the MUNCHIES Garden for turnips and mustard greens. "I prefer the purple mustard greens," he said.

Then he explained what he's looking for: "We're cooking for the after-party of the 50 Best Restaurants ceremony, and the Norwegian Fish Council is sponsoring it. They said, 'You can do king crab, mackerel, scallops, or salt cod'—and I said, 'Salt cod!' I may cook the same dish there that I make today—we'll see how successful it is."

Puglisi runs Relae—number 40 on this year's world's best list—along with the more rustic Manfred's and his pizzeria, Bæst. He also sells baked goods out of a coffee bar called Mirabelle. All are located in Copenhagen, a city he has helped put on the culinary map. Needless to say, he is a pretty massive figure in the Scandinavian food scene.

How do you get to be one of the chief architects and proponents for the most visible culinary movement in the last decade? A multicultural background probably doesn't hurt: Puglisi is the child of a Sicilian father and a Norwegian mother; he lived in Italy until he was seven, when the family moved to Denmark. Nor does working for some of the greatest chefs anywhere. Puglisi is an alum of elBulli, Taillevent, and noma kitchens.

After we poked around the garden and selected some ridiculously spicy mustard greens and turnips, we returned to the kitchen where Puglisi had been boiling salt cod. There, he explained that his multicultural upbringing plays a a foundational part in his cooking, making him both a traditionalist and an iconoclast all at once. His successful effort to make great buffalo mozzarella in Denmark is but one example of his aim to do away with notions of authenticity while nodding to his Italian heritage.

"I'm an Italian immigrant but my mom is Norwegian and I've lived in Denmark for 25 years, so at one point when I was growing up, I thought this whole thing of being truly Italian doesn't really work for me anymore, because I've been abroad for 25 years," he explained. Does he feel Italian? Norwegian? Danish? "I'm not one or the other," he said. "I'm me."

His background explains why, in developing Bæst, he sought to tip his hat to tradition while trying to just make the best pizza he could. "I said I want to make an authentic restaurant by not trying to make an authentic restaurant."

Puglisi's confidence in breaking away from tradition, while gleaning the best aspects from it, has also helped him use what he learned in kitchens run by the likes of René Redzepi and Ferran Adrià. "I'm a very independent kind of person, so I fast understood what I really enjoyed myself and was able to set myself up so that I could cook what I wanted to eat instead of doing what I thought was right because other people say so."

As he boiled the salt cod three times, draining it each time, it reduced down to a floss-like substance, more of a condiment than a main course.

When Puglisi opened Relae, he was careful to put his own stamp on the place. "I was very afraid in the beginning that it would be, 'Oh the noma sous chef…' But then I did not want to do any foraging, I did not want to do any of things that were very noma-ish. They weren't me. So, that worked because people understood it was not the same thing and it actually made things interesting instead of just being another version of what noma is doing."

As he recounted the early days of Relae, Puglisi boiled potatoes for 15 minutes, passed them through a ricer, and emulsified them with butter and milk, producing a supremely velvety texture.

Puglisi admitted that as other chefs have begun to emulate his style of cooking, it has become harder to stand out. Even so, he said, "I don't feel the need so much anymore to stand out. It's OK, this is what we do." The world of New Nordic cuisine is still a young one, with plenty of space for a creative chef.

"I often say that when people talk about Italian food and French food, it's such a long tradition," he explained. But the New Nordic movement, he argued, is barely a decade old: "It's like a restaurant showed up out of nowhere and started defining what the Nordic cuisine would be, because there was no definition. Instead of the best restaurant being the best version of the cuisine, it was the one restaurant making the cuisine, which was noma."

While whipping up a simple vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon, Puglisi stated that he agrees with Claus Meyer—who is often credited as the founder of New Nordic Cuisine philosophy—that the restrictive Protestant culture of the Scandinavian countries "sort of did not allow you to take joy in food." He explained, "The fact of indulging in anything is just not a part of the culture. It created a desert of nobody cooking or growing or doing anything interesting."

Finally, Puglisi took the disparate elements he had been patiently creating—the salt cod, the potatoes, and the vinaigrette—and assembled a masterpiece. The resulting amalgamation—potatoes topped with cod and the olive oil mixture—was a salty, creamy, fishy revelation. Perfect to dip crisp, fresh, newly picked vegetables in.

Coming of age just as Nordic cuisine was being redefined was a unique opportunity for this child of diverse cultures. "I felt as a kid that I came to a country that didn't have any good food. And I came from a country that had great food. So for me it was a part of my history. I think it was a part of what made me go into cooking."