Marcus Jernmark’s Tale of Two Pigs

“Our chawanmushi dish is something that I love. It’s a dish that’s fairly easy to take in — it means a lot to people and triggers emotions in them when they eat it,” says Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark.

Chawanmushi, for those who don’t know, is a Japanese steamed egg custard served as part of a traditional kaiseki meal. Mixed with dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and salt, it’s a simple but elegant appetiser with a smooth, delicate texture. If you’re fortunate enough to dine at upmarket Stockholm eatery Frantzén, you may enjoy it served with caviar and aged pork broth with freshly cut chives and a dash of olive oil.

“We fortify the pork dashi with our aged pork, which is essentially dry-aged pork that we cure halfway. So instead of making traditional bacon, we are dry ageing the meat for 45 days and you get this really nice, funky meat that we cure with soy, mirin, and a touch of salt. Then we age it for ten days before hot smoking it for about four hours then drying it for at least 45 days. You get plenty of umami because you’ve developed a lot of flavour in the first 45 days. Then we use a lot of that sliced very thin in the broth.”

This precise way of preparing the pork is today meticulous and intentional but it wasn’t always so. The story of this small dish starts six years ago in the summer of 2016 when Marcus was diligently at work planning the re-opening of Björn Frantzén’s new central Stockholm restaurant. The menu, it goes without saying, needed to be mind-blowing. Particularly so to justify the hefty price tag.

With just a year and a half until doors opened - which would have been time enough were it not for the magnitude of the task at hand - planning was already well underway. Around this time, Marcus had the idea to engage a couple of pig farmers to create a very special product for the opening menu.

“The idea was to work with a grilled pork dish. We all like Jamón Ibérico and so we went to meet a pig farmer, who told me we couldn’t get one sample pig, we needed two because pigs need company. So we put them on special diets with Swedish acorns and wild thyme; we even brought in a nutritionist. Then we wanted to grow them a little bigger than the standard slaughter size which is 96 kilo, so we grew them to 120kg and did a manual slaughter process which puts much less stress on the animal.”

With just weeks to go until the grand opening and 240kg of pork primed and ready to be prepared, Marcus couldn’t shake off the feeling that something wasn’t right. The dish had been signed off and in the works for well over a year, but he was uneasy about the direction they were taking.

“I was like ‘who are we doing this for? Are we doing it for the guests or ourselves?’ So I was the first one who didn’t feel comfortable, and I went to Björn and he agreed. We had a conversation and we decided to develop the dish with veal sweetbreads. So we got some heart breads from France and decided to go a different route.”

The question that remained was what to do with the two enormous pork bellies hanging in the restaurant’s drying cabinets. To buy some time, the pork was put into Cryovac bags with 10% soy sauce, 5% mirin and some salt, before being left to cure. Time soon ran out again and the team was no closer to a solution and so they stalled by creating smoked bacon in the cabinets. Around 100 days later they sliced the pork and used it to infuse a dashi. The rest, as they say, is history

“We take dashis very seriously in the restaurant. So I infused the dashi and then we tried it with some caviar. That for us was mind boggling because I think we all want food to be that stylistic and simple and honest but it’s quite hard to create something truly complex with three components. Then over time we have fine tuned the flavours and added more or less chives. I think the olive oil came into it later and gives it a really wonderful contrast which does a lot for the dish.”

It’s a particular favourite of Marcus’s, and after much reflection over the past six years he feels he has finally put his finger on why.

“I never realised what was so brilliant about it, or why I loved it so much. Even though you have good integrity in the eggs, it’s still quite soft. When you treat something that is quite soft, and you put it against something softer, then that becomes the texture. So you can identify the quality of the caviar in the caviar serving. As soon as you put something that is a little bit fattier than the caviar, then the caviar is no longer fatty enough. When you put it against toast or brioche, it becomes something else. It competes. But this dish, with all its flavours, gave a complex picture of what the caviar could offer the dish. It’s respectful to the caviar and really does it justice.”

“We take dashis very seriously in the restaurant. So I infused the dashi and then we tried it with some caviar. That for us was mind boggling because I think we all want food to be that stylistic and simple and honest but it’s quite hard to create something truly complex with three components. Then over time we have fine tuned the flavours and added more or less chives. I think the olive oil came into it later and gives it a really wonderful contrast which does a lot for the dish.”

Words by Sophie Miskiw. Photography by Johan Ståhlberg.