Justine Schofield calls Norway her “final culinary frontier”, and she means it poetically. “Norwegian cuisine is exciting. It’s new. There’s a lot of amazing chefs there. And it’s really unexplored,” she says. “I didn’t associate Norway with food until I started to explore it.”
Her curiosity became an eight-part series, Norway Gourmet, which premieres on SBS Food on 26 October. It also turned into a recipe list that grew with every port. “We kept adding recipes to the show because I was like, oh, I need to cook this. I need to show people how to do this amazing dish.” The Norwegians, she found, “are proud of their food culture and their produce is so great.”
The route: fjords, fishing villages and the Arctic
Schofield travelled with Hurtigruten, first aboard the Original “Coastal Express” voyage, which traces the fjords and fishing villages of the Norwegian coastline. She then joined the Svalbard Line, Hurtigruten’s Signature voyage from Bergen to Longyearbyen, which pushes deep into the Arctic archipelago’s glaciers and wildlife-rich waters.
The further north she sailed, the clearer the culinary philosophy became. “There’s such a strong respect for the produce and a real sense of making the most of what nature gives you in each season,” she says. The larder runs from the cold seas to the mountains, forests and fjords: “fish, shellfish, reindeer, root vegetables and arctic berries, to name a few.”
The seaweed sirens of Lofoten
The conversation that stayed with her most happened in the Lofoten Islands, with two women she calls the “seaweed sirens”: Tamara Singer, from New Zealand, and local Angelita Eriksen. Both trained as physiotherapists, and both walked away from those careers to forage for seaweed.
“Their story was so humbling. These women transformed their life to produce and harvest beautiful seaweed, and they are so respectful of the sea. They really showed me there’s so much more to seaweed than just nori rolls and sushi.”
The film crew watched them dive in freezing Arctic water. “We’re like, these women are nuts!” Back on land, the seaweed appears everywhere, from delicious teas to the soaps found on board the Hurtigruten ships. That is no accident. “Hurtigruten really cares about where its products come from, from the soaps to the food. There’s a story behind it all,” she says, and the company works to connect with small businesses along the coast. The sirens have now been in business for a decade and are thriving. “It was a good decision to change their career!”
Foraging alongside them taught her how carefully Norwegians treat the landscape. “They’re very conscious of what they take from the land and sea, using what’s available but never taking more than they need.”
Cod, the ingredient that built a nation
Few ingredients carry as much weight in Norway as cod. “Cod is plentiful in Norway, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of years of history behind it,” Schofield says. “Back in Viking times, they would air-dry cod as a way of preserving it, allowing it to last for incredibly long periods.”
Dried, it looks almost like a stick, and it must be rehydrated before cooking. “The transformation is incredible.” The tradition passes from generation to generation, but modern chefs now add their own spin, using techniques like dry-ageing “a bit like Josh Niland’s approach to fish.” Restaurants across the country serve it beautifully, she says, and “the texture and flavour are just incredible. It’s an ingredient that’s deeply connected to Norwegian history and culture, but it’s still very much alive in modern cooking.”
Sami country, and a coffee to remember
Norway’s Indigenous Sámi culture grows stronger the further north you travel, and it was here that Schofield met her match. She filmed a segment with Maret, a third-generation reindeer herder and Hurtigruten’s Sámi culinary ambassador. Maret offered her a little reindeer tongue. “I said, oh, yeah, no worries. I eat beef tongue, so why not? But it was reindeer tongue in a coffee.”
The idea is to stir the tongue through the coffee so the fat lends it a lovely flavour. “No, it didn’t,” Schofield says. “That challenged me for sure.”
Coffee, as it turns out, is a serious matter in Norway. “Norwegians are some of the biggest coffee drinkers in the world, and they’re incredibly passionate about it. They care about the quality, the craft and the story behind what they consume.”
Bubbles from the seabed
On board, the nightly toast is Havets Bobler, or “Bubbles of the Sea”, a recent Hurtigruten initiative. The team takes Rathfinny English sparkling wine and matures it on the seabed, where “the consistent cold temperature and gentle movement of the sea create the perfect conditions for ageing the bottles, while marine life gradually grows on the glass.”
The bottles emerge looking “almost like something recovered from a pirate ship, covered in barnacles and crustaceans.” The wine inside is worth the theatre. “It has beautiful fine bubbles, with lovely toasty, biscuity and cereal-like notes. For an English sparkling, it’s really impressive.”
Brown cheese, waffles and the cinnamon bun question
Norwegian brown cheese divides visitors, so Schofield offers an Australian translation. “It’s like cream cheese mixed with Vegemite, although it’s not actually cheese. It’s made from whey, which is boiled down and caramelised, giving it that salty, slightly sweet flavour.” Norwegians eat it sweet, often with jam and waffles. She liked it, “although having it onboard in ice cream was a little unusual!”
Home cooking won her over just as easily. Waffles are huge, “every household seems to have a waffle machine”, and they differ from the Belgian kind. Sour cream turns up everywhere, too: “The richness really suits the cold climate, and I loved how they incorporated it into their morning porridge, with a generous dollop of local cloudberry jam. It was delicious.”
And then there are the cinnamon buns. If she could export one Norwegian tradition, this would be it. “They love cinnamon buns, it’s the biggest thing. You will never go to a cafe and not find a cinnamon bun. Different regions have different types of buns, and I ate a lot of them because they were just divine. Soft and fluffy and beautiful laced with cinnamon icing, yum.” Her advice for first-time visitors is simple: “As soon as you get off that aeroplane, go and get yourself a cinnamon bun because you will not be disappointed in any way!”
The lesson of restraint
Ask what Norway taught her that a kitchen couldn’t, and her answer is a single word. “Restraint,” says Justine – preferring to hero the product.
“If you’ve got great seaweed, don’t overcomplicate it, keep it simple and let the ingredient speak for itself.”
Seasonality sits at the heart of it. “I really learnt the restraint of cooking seasonally: if it’s not in season, don’t use it.” Norway lacks Australia’s year-round abundance, so cooks make the most of each ingredient at its peak, then preserve it. “From curing meat and fish to preserving berries and vegetables, these techniques have been passed down through generations.”
That restraint shaped her recipes for the show. She began with a scallop dish “with garlic, lemon and all sorts of other ingredients”, then took everything out until only pan-fried scallops, “beautiful local butter and truffle seaweed” remained. “It was simple, but it allowed those key ingredients to really shine.” She saw the same discipline in Hurtigruten’s kitchens, from buffet to fine dining, in “a beautiful piece of cod with a simple butter sauce, for example, allowing the local produce to be the hero.”
The end of the line: Huset, Svalbard
The voyage ended at Longyearbyen, in Svalbard, at Huset, a fine-dining restaurant owned by Hurtigruten Svalbard and a culinary highlight for guests. “There are no trees growing there, and you’re surrounded by Arctic wilderness, yet you’re sitting down to incredibly sophisticated food, and almost everything is made from scratch.”
Schofield went through the kitchen and cooked with the chef, then explored his “treasure trove of ingredients”. Chef Alberto harvests salt from the local rocks, makes his own soy sauce and miso, and grows micro herbs and lettuce on site. “I don’t say that lightly, I challenged him on it!” she says. “He makes and sources everything locally. Chef Alberto is like a mad scientist, working exclusively with local hunters and fishermen and constantly foraging and fermenting.” It was, she says, “the perfect way to finish the Hurtigruten voyage, a truly extraordinary dining experience in one of the most remote places on earth.”
What came home in the suitcase
One souvenir made the trip home: truffle seaweed. “There’s no truffle in it. The seaweed naturally has this incredible truffle-like aroma. We watched it being harvested and tasted it fresh, and I couldn’t believe the flavour.” She has since used it to flavour beurre noisette and spooned it over scallops, a pairing that gives seafood “this incredible umami flavour.”
Her tip for the next big thing in Australian kitchens is Norwegian lamb prosciutto, a salted, dried and cured leg of lamb that dates back to the Viking age. “We use pork leg to make prosciutto, but we’ve got so much lamb in Australia, we should be making lamb prosciutto. I don’t see it anywhere here. I don’t know why. But it’s a great little product to experiment with.”
Justine Schofield travelled on Hurtigruten’s Original “Coastal Express” voyage, then joined the Svalbard Line, Hurtigruten’s Signature voyage from Bergen to Longyearbyen. Norway Gourmet, an eight-part series hosted by Schofield, premieres on SBS Food on 26 October. Visit hurtigruten.com.