JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
What's for dinner? Our answer to that question starts in this hunters market in Greenland's capital, Nuuk.
INUNNQUAQ HEGELUND: The fisherman or the hunter will come with this fish or meat here, and then we can buy it fresh.
SUMMERS: That's Inunnguaq Hegelund. He is a star Greenlandic chef.
So some of the things that they're advertising are musk ox, belugas and narwhals, seals, caribou, polar bear, walrus and large whales.
It's late in the day when we arrive, and the selection is pretty limited. But Hegelund immediately grabs a very fresh-looking sea duck.
It's a big plastic bag with a bird inside. It's still fully intact. You can sort of see the beak, the head.
HEGELUND: The head is on still.
SUMMERS: Yeah, the head is still on there. I see that.
Hegelund has been a chef for about 20 years. He got his culinary training in southern Greenland and has spent most of his career cooking in restaurants across Greenland. Hegelund agreed to take us out shopping and make us dinner so we can learn more about what he describes as new arctic cuisine. It's a movement toward local, sustainable and traditional food, more about the ingredients and sourcing than any particular technique. The next place he takes us is somewhere more familiar.
All right, so we're headed now to the supermarket to pick up some additional ingredients for dinner.
Hegelund immediately races toward a couple of freezer cases in the back of the store.
HEGELUND: Most of the food is actually imported. So you have some sections, like over here, the freezers with only Greenlandic foods.
SUMMERS: He starts filling a shopping basket. In goes some dried cod, then some halibut.
HEGELUND: Some smoked salmon.
SUMMERS: Some smoked salmon.
Hegelund says when people think of Inuit food, they always mention whale blubber. But what's at the front of his mind is dried fish.
HEGELUND: Like, for me, dried fish is really, really special because it's not just dried fish. So we are having, like, hundreds of different kind of dried fish.
SUMMERS: Not just one dried fish.
HEGELUND: No, no, no. It's like - I normally compare it to when you say curry. A family in India will have their own recipe in their own house, and it's the same with dried fish up here.
SUMMERS: Unlike in the U.S., hunters and fishers in Greenland can sell meat and fish directly to the grocery store or even to an individual chef.
HEGELUND: When I work with foreign chefs, they are getting, like, a shock when they come to Greenland because normally, they're used to the meat come vacuum-packed. And suddenly you get the whole animal that you need to butcher by yourself.
SUMMERS: We pack a big cardboard box full of groceries and go with Hegelund to his apartment. He lives in a small place that overlooks the fjord. Almost as soon as we walk in the door, he jumps into action - a flurry of activity in a small galley kitchen.
Tell us what you're thinking about for this meal. What's going through your head?
HEGELUND: I'm just going to, like, almost freestyle your food.
SUMMERS: You're freestyling our food? I love it.
He pulls out the bag from the hunters market and removes the duck over the sink.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNIFE CHOPPING)
SUMMERS: He's cut the neck off and severed it, setting the head and the neck aside, and now slicing up the back of the bird with a pair of kitchen scissors. He makes quick work of breaking down the bird and tosses the pieces of duck into a big red pot of sizzling oil.
(SOUNDBITE OF OIL SIZZLING)
SUMMERS: There's also a warning.
HEGELUND: I always say, take care of your teeth because - from the bullets.
SUMMERS: He tells us to watch out for any bullets we might find in this freshly hunted bird. Hegelund is now one of Greenland's most celebrated chefs. His resume is full of accolades.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOD SIZZLING)
SUMMERS: He decided to be a chef when he was pretty young. He says he kept asking his mom to bake cakes for him. One day, she'd had enough.
HEGELUND: She got so tired of it that she say, can you not do it by yourself?
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
HEGELUND: I think I was around 9 or 10.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISH CLANGING)
SUMMERS: Near the start of the pandemic, he opened his own restaurant but struggled. He says his restaurant hadn't been open long enough to qualify for government pandemic assistance. Ultimately, he had to shut it down. And he went to work on a fishing boat as he rebuilt his life.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOD SIZZLING)
SUMMERS: Today, he has a wide portfolio of culinary projects, including a food festival and a national competition for chefs in Greenland.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLATES BANGING)
SUMMERS: As we talk, he spreads out some plates full of traditional snacks on the dining table, starting with the small dried fish, winter-cured cod, then dried minke whale.
It's very meaty. It tastes sort of like a beef. The texture of it is pretty close to a beef jerky when you eat it. This is also very good. I like the smokiness of it.
And the big finish?
HEGELUND: And then we come to the good part. That's the skin of the narwhal.
SUMMERS: Hegelund delicately scores the narwhal skin with a sharp knife and offers a shallow dish of soy sauce alongside it.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHOPPING FOOD)
SUMMERS: I take my first bite. The taste is subtle, but the texture is unfamiliar, gelatinous.
You can taste the richness, the oil, the fattiness of it. Yeah. But it's not an - the flavor is not overwhelming.
HEGELUND: Really clean taste. Like I say, in Greenland, we have the world wildest kitchen, but we also have the most clean foods in the world.
SUMMERS: The world's wildest kitchen, he says, and the most clean foods in the world. He tells me that he wants Greenland to be self-sufficient and to preserve the time-honored traditions of local food.
What is it that ties all of these arctic cuisines together? What's, like, the connecting tissue?
HEGELUND: Definitely how to get the food. You do a lot of hunting. You are out in the rough nature. Even the fish you just eat, it's probably been a guy been out in -30 degrees on a dogsled and need to drive 30 kilometers to get to this hole where he's fishing. So definitely on how to get it, on how to eat it also.
SUMMERS: What is it that you love about being a chef?
HEGELUND: I think, like, still this day today, it's to see your happy faces when you have been eating. It just give you - a kind of medicine for me.
SUMMERS: He says it's like a medicine for him. By the time dinner is over, we've sampled from a feast spread on the table that includes lamb drenched in a mushroom sauce, red fish, a smoked salmon salad, rich smashed potatoes and fresh-caught halibut. A tour of the island and its heritage, all on one plate.
(SOUNDBITE OF SUME SONG, "PILERINEQ-TIKINNEQ")
SUMMERS: Tomorrow on the show, we explore another part of Greenlandic heritage - dogsledding.
STELLA: In some areas, you can see we don't have snow. So it's harder for the dogs to pull, but it's easier when we have snow.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
SUMMERS: All right, and this is what she was talking about, how it's a little bit more challenging to pull when there's not as much snow in front of us. There's some snow, but there are big stretches of brown where there's no snow at all. Stella's (ph) gotten off the sled and is walking alongside the dogs.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOGS BARKING)
SUMMERS: The impact of climate change on dogsledding.
(SOUNDBITE OF SUME SONG, "PILERINEQ-TIKINNEQ") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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