“Once we throw it in the water, the fish go crazy because they think it’s sperm" – All the dirty details of Greenlandic cooking

Surviving in Greenland is all about adapting. In this harsh and unwelcoming Arctic climate, nothing is ever certain. After spending a season cooking here, chef Poul Andrias Ziska knows this all too well. “I’ve had a wild fascination with Greenland for years,” says Ziska, who welcomes us in the small settlement of Ilimanaq on Greenland’s west coast. Here, the 34-year-old has moved his celebrated two Michelin-starred restaurant Koks from his native Faroe Islands for a two-summer residency. He made the temporary move, he says, to challenge himself and the team, and to get a first-hand look into Greenland’s wild pantry.

That’s what we’re here for as well. It’s late June and usually there’s wild herbs and berries to forage. This year, however, summer is late and virtually nothing has come out of the ground. Instead, we’re looking at a brownish and barren rocky wasteland, and the few shrivelled crowberries that Ziska finds amid the shrubs. They turn out to be from last year.

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But as head chef at what is possibly the world’s most remote top restaurant, Ziska is no stranger to scarcity. On the windswept Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, there are more sheep than humans, but hardly anything can grow. Since taking over Koks at just 23, Ziska’s insistence on making use of the few but unique ingredients found on the islands has become a fundamental part of the restaurant’s renown. Ziska challenges guests with everything from whale blubber to lamb legs that ferment for six to nine months in specially designed drying sheds, gaining a pungent, blue cheese-like flavour in the process.

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So, when the ‘green land’ fails to provide, Ziska adapts and turns to the sea; after all, Illmanaq is located on the UNESCO World Heritage Ilulissat Icefjord. We hop aboard a motorboat so he can show off how he catches one of his favourite ingredients on the Greenland menu. “We call them cucumber fish. When fresh, they smell exactly like cucumber,” says Ziska as we navigate between massive icebergs. The fish in question is capelin, a small species of smelt abundant in the waters here around Ilimanaq. Besides the distinct smell, the fish have a beautiful, glistening silvery-green skin. Here, they are called ammassat and they are an easy catch. All it takes is a fishing net and some yoghurt.

“Once we throw it in the water, the fish go crazy because they think it’s sperm,” Ziska says, proceeding to empty a jar of yoghurt in the water. Within seconds, the surface turns black with shoals of capelin and Ziska grabs a net, shovelling in a heavy load. It only takes five minutes of yoghurt-fishing before he’s filled a plastic tub with over 40 kilos of fish. In Japan, sushi chefs love their beautiful bright-yellow roe but in Greenland, the fish were traditionally dried and kept as protein for winter. Nowadays, the fish are mainly used to feed the huskies, shackled around the varicoloured village houses in Ilimanaq, home to only 55 inhabitants.

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Ziska nods to local traditions by putting the capelin on Koks’ 300 Euro tasting menu in the form of a tartlet filled with the dried heads and tails along with an emulsion of Arctic roseroot and rendered whale blubber. The roseroot is the Arctic answer to ginseng, he says. Traditionally, in East Greenland, the roots were kept in rendered seal fat, and were used as a means of easing depression and fatigue. While the crispy fish on the tartlet almost tastes a bit like pork crackling, it’s still a pungent bite. But Ziska didn’t come to Greenland only to please. “We’re here because we want to learn, and because we believe there’s some excellent ingredients here to inspire us,” he says. “It’s no fun if we don’t come up with something new and challenging.”

While both the Faroe Islands and Greenland are still part of the Danish Realm, when it comes to culinary traditions, the two outposts are much closer to each other than to Denmark, Ziska argues. “In both cultures, we eat whales, dried fish, seals, and seabirds,” he says. “You don’t see that in Denmark.” When Ziska spent a year in Denmark, on Lolland, at a so-called efterskole (the Danish version of a boarding school for grades 8 to 10), he shared a room with a boy from Greenland. Both would have delicacies from their homeland shipped in, and he remembers how they would often share the dried fish in hiding, to avoid being made fun of. “I can’t speak for Greenland, but I think, to some extent, that the Faroese have been hiding our culinary traditions because they were looked down upon,” he says.

Today, he is proud of his heritage. He also believes that this common culinary bond with Greenland has made it easier for the Koks team to enter as outsiders. Had it been a Danish restaurant settling in Ilimanaq, the historically strained relationship between Denmark and its former Arctic outpost would have made things more complex. In the 18th century, Ilimanaq served as a whaling station for Dutch and Danish whalers, and Koks’ temporary home in Greenland is in the restored former house of a Danish missionary and trader named Poul Egede.

The whaling heritage is also reflected on the menu. One of the first bites is an intricately folded black and white parcel of black whale skin around diced cubes of mattak, raw whale blubber. The blubber is soft but must be chewed thoroughly. Eventually, it releases a sort of sweet, nutty flavour. Today, mattak is a widely enjoyed snack in Greenland. It’s the Arctic take on chewing gum; the fat is chewed on for several minutes before the sinewy backside is spit or swallowed.

Ziska and his team have also taken on some of the gamey seabirds roaming these parts and applied age-old techniques to create new flavours. Take, for instance, the local razor bill that’s been matured in shio koji – a salty mass of rice inoculated with the koji mould traditionally used to ferment sake, soy, and miso. “The koji enriches the meat with umami, and the process makes the meat so juicy and fleshy, with just a touch of that seabird gaminess,” says Ziska, who is looking forward to applying the technique to the Faroese seabirds when his stint in Greenland comes to an end after September.

Yet while he may already be making plans for his return home, Greenland has already left a culinary mark on Ziska and his restaurant – and it’s clear he’s not done with the place just yet. “I don’t want to just come here, do our thing and then leave,” he says. “It would be great to be able to leave something that could benefit Greenland in the longer term.”