Guest Article: Victoria Burrows
This free newsletter features a guest story from food writer Victoria Burrows about pine, an ancient ingredient that is finding its time in the spotlight on fine-dining menus.
Pine trees are well known for their fragrance, often associated with warming winter spices and festive cheer, but the tree has also long been used as an ingredient in food and medicine around the world. For Tree Season, this guest issue of our free newsletter, writer Victoria Burrows shares how pine is enjoying some time in the spotlight on fine-dining menus around the world.
You can also read Victoria on the Sourced website. She wrote about the Korean fermented rice drink Makgeolli for Rice Season!
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Fine Pine
words and photos by Victoria Burrows
At two-Michelin-star Kadeau in Copenhagen, head chef and co-founder Nicolai Nørregaard has served a dish of smoked pork fat fudge. Underneath is a praliné of toasted sunflower seeds seasoned with lupin miso and bee pollen, while the fudge – a layer of melting caramel infused with pork fat from around the organs – sits in the middle.
On top, a chewy, sticky, sweet umami layer made from strips of kombu that have been braised in mushroom and the juices of raspberries and blackcurrants. Raw double cream is poured leaving a glistening island of fudge, dark and rich like soil from the forest floor surrounded by a moat of snowy white.
The dish, which featured on the seasonal Preservation menu, is already wonderful – creative, complex and utterly delicious – but on top are four aromatic preserves that elevate it even further. Arranged one per quarter are miniature pickles of elderflower, spruce, Scots pine and Nobilis pine – the latter bright pink against the peaty fudge and bringing a fleeting dash of tropical flavour to the dish.
The Kadeau team pick Nobilis pine cones from a tree next to their sister restaurant on the island of Bornholm from early May to June. They select only new cones from the top of the tree, which are pink inside, and fragrant. They pickle the cone’s scales in vinegar and sugar water, deepening the colour and bringing out the flavours – powerful tannins, like in banana skin, but also, surprisingly, warm, sunny, fruity notes reminiscent of mango and pineapple yoghurt.
Kadeau is one of a growing number of restaurant kitchens using pine, the common name for a conifer tree or shrub in the family Pinaceae usually found in the Northern hemisphere.
Many of the colder, northern regions of the planet have used pine over the millennia in a variety of ways, including needles being used to make teas throughout the North, from the Korean Peninsula to North America, and pinecones being made into jam in Siberia and across the Caucasus.
Nordic countries have used pine extracts in teas, essences, tonics and oils, and have baked pine-bark bread, for centuries but it was the New Nordic food movement initiated two decades ago that brought these neglected ingredients to the modern fine dining table.
Five-times World’s Best Restaurant Noma has long used different pine species and parts, for such dishes as reindeer heart grilled on a bed of fresh pine and even in 2019 barbecuing a whole Nobilis cone for a “pine cone on the cob.”
Geranium, another former World’s Best Restaurant, has had a dessert with pine-flavoured chocolate eggs on the menu, while at Alchemist, also in Copenhagen, gastronomic scientists published their flavour analysis of the needles of three Pinaceae tree species in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science.
Pine appears on menus far beyond Scandinavia, too. On the East coast of America, chef Matthew Lightner sprinkles young needles of Douglas fir over a dish of geoduck and white asparagus. The team at Ōkta in McMinnville, Oregon, pick the new shoots from a tree at their farm, which supplies the restaurant with most of its fresh ingredients. Lightner has also set up a fermentation lab at the farm where the team make a twice-fermented distillation of shio koji infused with Douglas fir tips.
Over in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, chef Prateek Sadhu takes inspiration from Korean cheong – fruit or vegetables left in their weight of sugar – to create a pine honey at his trailblazing new restaurant, Naar. The team cover green pine cones harvested from trees surrounding the restaurant with jaggery (palm sap sugar), which turns to liquid while absorbing the fresh, woody flavours. The syrup is served alongside apple jam with a selection of cheeses sourced from producers within the Himalayan belt.
Ana Roš at three-Michelin-star Hiša Franko in Slovenia makes a refreshing kombucha from pine needles, while in the Italian Dolomites, the team at Atelier Moessmer by Nobert Niederkofler (also three stars) recently foraged for larch buds and cones, from which they make syrup, use like candied orange peel in desserts, or ferment to use like balsamic. They also keep the cones fresh and use them scale by scale conserved under oil.
At Gucci Osteria in Florence, husband-and-wife team Takahiko ‘Taka’ Kondo and Karime Lopez have served pine cone syrup with panettone and pine leaves ice cream as a New Year’s Eve treat. The pine came from the mountains in Northern Tuscany, foraged by a local producer, one of their network of local producers and artisans who supply the restaurant with ingredients.
In London, Executive Chef at Hide Josh Angus appreciates pine for its adaptability.
“I like to use pine because it’s such a versatile product and different variations give off different flavours. I also enjoy using it for presentation – it looks visually stunning – and the aroma it gives off can complete a dish,” he says.
He developed a dish of iced spruce and pear cider float for last winter season. The Hide team foraged the cones, cooked them inhouse and turned them into a syrup.
“Pine is good in winter, obviously, but actually it’s very versatile and can be used all year round if you’re looking to add that fresh, grassy, herbal flavour”.
For Liam Fitzpatrick, head chef at Simon Rogan’s Our Farm in northern England’s Lake District, it is the citrusy acidity that makes pine so valuable.
“Pine shoots here just started emerging in June – there’s a short window of only couple of weeks – and they give a really nice citrus flavour. We’re always looking for ways to add acidity to our dishes without using citrus as obviously citrus doesn’t grow in this country,” says Fitzpatrick, who uses only local, seasonal and organic produce.
Executive chef Theo Clench back in London is equally enamoured with the flavours of pine. He uses Norwegian spruce oil to season his extraordinary broth that warms up diners at Cycene for the tasting menu to come. To make the oil, he uses needles – “very aromatic with a lovely citrus flavour” – picked from the Wiltshire garden of his chef de partie’s mother.
He blends the needles with a neutral vegetable oil and heats it to not more than 70 degrees Celsius to preserve the pine flavour. He then passes the oil through a double muslin cloth, and hangs it in a bag to allow any water to separate and be removed. He portions it up and freezes it to retain freshness.
“The citrus notes really bring some freshness to our poultry broth while adding a layer of richness to it due to it being an oil,” he says.
The Cycene team also use pine for smoking. When finishing ducks or pigeons over coals, they throw small pieces of the branches of Scot’s pine, which is foraged for them in Scotland, on to the barbecue to create a smoke that imparts a delicate flavour on the birds.
Spruce in particular will be appearing on more menus in the coming days and months as spring is the season for picking the new, lime-coloured shoots. At London’s Kol, Santiago Lastra has created a ceviche with local UK ingredients – “It’s our interpretation of the wild nature of the UK,” he says.
The scallop ceviche has elderflower jelly and flowers, a granita of sweet cicely, spiral wrack bladder seaweed from Wales, Spruce pine shoots and larch roses (immature cones of female pine) in syrup, and a spray of pine oil that adds citrusy aromas to the dish.
But pine is not a universally agreeable ingredient: Ramael Scully has pine cone kernels presently preserved in syrup in his fermentation kitchen but has not found a way to use them. At Scully in St James, London, the chef draws on his heritage – born in Malaysia and brought up in Australia, with a mother of Chinese-Indian descent and an Irish-Balinese father – to create boundary-defying dishes. So far, however, he has not found an Asian-inspired dish that would work well with the flavour profile of pine.
Sourcing various pine ingredients – which largely involves foraging – can be hard work, with the sweetest, newest shoots often at the tips of branches or new cones at the very tops of trees. Young shoots are usually lime-coloured, so easy to spot against the darker, older pine needles; even cooked or pickled, mature pine needles would be unpleasant to eat. Some species of pine, including Norfolk, ponderosa, lodgepole and yew, are toxic.
As with any foraging, chefs advise to only take what you need. Avoid picking tips from the very top of the tree, called the apical meristem, as this may stunt the tree’s growth, and when picking from branches, spread your harvest around to avoid stripping a single branch or any one tree.
Foraging can transcend the practical function of harvesting food and also be a soulful experience: in early summer, the Bornholm landscape is covered with Scots pines in full blossom, and in a quiet spot surrounded by trees, the Kadeau chefs say you can hear them click as the cones pop open. The restaurant has just become part-owners of an eco-camp on Bornholm so now you can eat, sleep in a luxury tent on the beach, and spend time listening to soft chatter of the island’s pines.
Victoria writes about food, wine and whisky for the Wall Street Journal Asia, South China Morning Post, BBC, Travel + Leisure, Nat Geo, Vogue India and more. After 15 years in Hong Kong and India, she's now based in London.