Hand-to-mouth recipes for Michelin success

COPENHAGEN (Reuters Life!) - Michelin-starred Danish cook Rene Redzepi puts his life on the line in search of the local flavors that have catapulted his "Nordic cuisine" into the international spotlight.

"We just eat things. If you work a lot with products you can see what looks succulent, if you just put it in your mouth and you bite a little bit, usually nothing happens," he said, before admitting that maybe it is a technique best not used at home.

"I have tried many times choking," he added, launching into a wheezy imitation of someone struggling for breath after sampling a poisonous berry.

"But if you don''t swallow, you just put it in your mouth and let your tongue taste it, nothing really bad can happen. You can have an unpleasant 10 minutes, but that is it," he says.

Redzepi has scooped up international plaudits by being as rigorous about his cooking as he is cavalier about his health.

When he started Noma restaurant -- the name comes from the Danish words for Nordic and food -- six years ago, it was derided by locals, who thought it would be a flash-in-the-pan and joked about cooking gourmet whale blubber and seals.

Instead, he has soared through the rankings of Restaurant magazine''s list of the World''s 50 Best Restaurants to secure third place behind contemporary legends El Bulli and The Fat Duck -- and Redzepi himself was this year voted "Chef''s chef" by those who run the other 49 top eateries.

He has done it partly by using just local, seasonal ingredients. There are no tomatoes or citrus fruits, no olive oil, garlic or foie gras in his dishes, no wines in the sauces.

His techniques and the composition of his menu are also unusual. There are more vegetables than meat, and much of the food is not even cooked -- although it comes with exquisite sauces that take hours or days of preparation.

A tasting menu includes raw squid and beef, and wild flowers and seaweed. There is even a dish made almost entirely of onions of different sizes and shape, boiled, pickled and reduced.

He also does a lot of old fashioned preserving of spring and summer ingredients, and makes unusual winter deserts with vegetables, to stick to his seasonal principles.