What Do the Most Innovative Chefs Keep in Their Fridges?

Though chef Bo Bech is best known in his native Denmark for hosting the country’s version of "Kitchen Nightmares," he made his bones helming Michelin-starred Restaurant Paustian and Geist in Copenhagen. His fridge is a science lab of exotic fermented foods. There are wild garlic seeds in brine, capers in butter whey, fermented elderberry flowers, brined rosehips and juniper berries in apple vinegar. The ancient practice of fermentation has lately attracted some of the food world’s most curious minds, who experiment with time, temperature, pH and salt level in search of the ideal way to preserve and enhance flavors. 

Having trained in locations as far flung as Greece, Dubai and Tokyo, German chef Sven Elverfeld takes a global perspective on food. His restaurant, Aqua, in the industrial city of Wolfsburg, has become a pilgrimage for foodies eager to taste his cutting-edge takes on European cuisine: blue lobster with Thai spice and “waffles,” charcoal-cooked pork belly with vinegar foam, herb-infused chocolates. His fridge, fittingly, is a tour de Europe. There’s a jar of German quark cheese, a venison liver pâté, some North Sea crabs and feta and Greek pickled onions. His recipe, for crab and egg “tacos,” is like nothing we’ve ever seen—brown bread “taco shells” surrounding warm egg and crab salad topped with a sauce of fragrant green herbs. 

New Nordic cuisine has been having its moment in the sun, in no small part thanks to Magnus Nilsson, the Swedish chef who runs Fäviken in the country’s far-flung Jämtland province. Those who make the journey will be fed with traditional Swedish homegrown vegetables and locally hunted game, but prepared in startling ways. A meal might include, say, a “sushi” of trout roe served in a shell of dried pig’s blood, cockles injected with beer and “bog butter” infused with lichen. Nilsson’s fridge reflects his fascination with local bounty and traditional methods of preservation: birch sap syrup, a jar of crowberries in water, pine mushrooms in oil and a drink made from juniper berries. “Curiosity is so important,” Nilsson says, in his chapter. “Discovery is just a part of life.”