Restaurant Noma has lived many lives since opening in 2003. From their early days exploring Nordic cuisine to hosting pop-ups around the world to reopening the restaurant on the other side of Copenhagen, the team has spent nearly twenty years cooking, learning, travelling, and studying the world together.
Noma Projects is the beginning of a myriad of projects that will have food, deliciousness, and education at its core. From special pantry products to new media endeavours to environmental programs, Noma Projects aims to transform the restaurant’s collective knowledge, craft, and spirit into an engine for creative output and positive change.
Projects 001 and 002 are the first of a series of pantry items, starting with one of Noma’s favourite garums, but there will be much more to come! Noma Projects offers products form the noma lab to your kitchen. Each product comes with unique recipes, developed by Nadine Levy Redzepi, for simple and delicious home cooking.
Project 002: Wild Rose Vinegar, is a bright and delicious vinegar made from handpicked rose petals, foraged earlier this summer on the beaches of Denmark.
Rosa Rugosa, commonly known as beach rose, can be found along the Danish coastlines, where they were originally brought over to Denmark from Japan in the late 1800s and planted as windbreaks in the 1950s. Now an invasive species, this shrub gives the most incredibly aromatic rose, which has quickly become one of the signature flavours of noma. The potency of the wild rose simply cannot be compared to a store-bought rose. It’s like comparing black and white to a colour TV.
Finding these flowers everywhere along the coastline, the Noma team has started exploring how to use them at the restaurant and has since found ways to infuse this rose into so many things, using them on the menu in everything from oils to kombuchas, misos to spice mixes, as well as for preserving.
Originally a byproduct of the pickled petals used in our test kitchen, they soon realized that this bright, floral vinegar was a delicious way to finish any dish–everything from the main course to dessert.
Foraged by hand beginning in late May, the earliest petals yield the freshest, most fragrant flavour. For every bottle produced, they infuse 50 grams of rose petals in unpasteurized apple vinegar, which is then masterfully blended by the Noma Projects production team to create the bright, floral vinegar.
Due to the short season and hand-foraged process, this product will be extremely limited.
Meant to be used in concert with other flavours, this vinegar can help add a bit of an edge or brightness, which can be used to balance most dishes. You’ll find that Noma’s Wild Rose Vinegar works beautifully in everything from cocktails to pork chops. Make sure to check out Noma’s selection of favourite recipes for some more inspiration on how to use it!
Wild beach roses have been used in the noma kitchen since the beginning and are one of Noma’s most loved ingredients. In bloom for only a short period in early summer, the petals were foraged by hand and blended in incredibly high densities to create a vinegar that is delicate, balanced and floral.
The new Wild Rose Vinegar was released on www.nomaprojects.com on Friday, the 30th of September and is already sold out. Pre-orders have been offered to newsletter subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now, so you won’t miss the next project!
All photos: Noma