tokyo food file: farming

The gleaming hot-tuned motors were all lined up to greet us outside the Big Sight expo hall on Saturday morning. But it wasn't the farmers and their produce that lured me to Farming Frontier 2012, nor the wagyu samples, nor even the promise of the so-called Sake Street with its extensive tastings of regional nihonshu. It was this:

Thorsten Schmidt is the chef at Malling & Schmidt, in the city of Aarhus, some 350 km from Copenhagen. I'd chatted with him briefly on his previous visit, and watched him prepare one dish at the Nordic Star Chefs' masterclass at the Hattori acadamy. I'd also heard great things of his collaboration with chef Yoshihiro Narisawa.

So I was keen to see him in action more. First though there were the inevitable speeches, with Dr. Yukio Hattori doing the honours before Schmidt got to work.

This was the menu du jour...

It was a very impressive presentation, showcasing Schmidt's inventive imagination, his technical ability and his creative use of ingredients, from exotic and high-end to simple, common-and-garden.

The height of the stage and the hovering camera crews meant we couldn't see that much directly, but the big screen allowed us to follow as he talked us through the processes and how he came up with the ideas for these dishes.

The highlight was, of course, getting to actually sample the finished items. As a gentleman of the press, I was one of a lucky few ushered to a table and served a mini meal comprising all four courses we'd seen being prepared earlier – served by the chef himself.

Starting with the seasonal vegetables steamed with sea water, served with a creamy horseradish dip (the root grated to a smooth paste on a Japanese shark-skin oroshi-gane).

Followed by a terrine of akaza-ebi lobster – produced through an ingenious but incredibly time-intensive process), served with two kinds of caviar – the usual black fish roe and also tonburi, aka "hatake no cabiaa" (field caviar) – accompanied by various seaweeds and finally bathed in a rich lobster bouillon.

The third and "main " course was steak tartare made not of horsemeat, nor of beef, but wild venison, carefully scraped and minced by hand (Schmidt now seems to be using all Japanese chef's knives), then fashioned onto the bone, to remind us, as he told us, that this meat actually has "an address" (ie it comes from an animal).

It was beautifully, painstakingly plated with blobs of pine-infused mayonnaise topped with berries and mushrooms, and given a wonderful rich sauce that Schmidt produced through the duck press visible in the photo above.

And thus to the final course: Oak chocolate covered with bread and chestnuts. The image for this came, Schmidt told us, from him visiting a charcoal burner in Denmark – in turn inspired by hearing that Narisawa-san's father makes Bincho charcoal – and watching the slow, traditional process.

The "charcoal" was nitro-chilled chocolate infused with oak. This was covered with "earth" – a syrup-sweetened black bread – and fine shavings of chestnut. And then "grass" was layered over the top in the form of fine-slivered sorrel leaf, adding a light tartness to the overall flavour.