Flavor Box 2

Head of the Noma Test Kitchen, Mette Søberg has been the force behind countless iconic recipes, flavors, and dishes at Noma. Her approach begins with a simple but expansive idea: an ingredient is never just one thing. Unripe black currants can become capers. Licorice can move far beyond confectionery.  Coffee grounds can behave like cocoa solids. A single ingredient can offer bitterness, acidity, aroma, sweetness, structure, and depth, depending on when it is harvested, how it is treated, and what form it is asked to take. 

For Flavor Box #2, Mette shared the products her team has been developing over the past few months, each created to capture maximum flavor and complexity from ingredients at their ideal moment. As Mette explained, the work of the Test Kitchen is often about looking again: finding unexpected uses, preserving fleeting seasons, and transforming familiar ingredients into something that reveals an entirely different side of themselves.

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Flavor 4: Saffron and Licorice Kombucha

Built like a layered infusion, Saffron and Licorice Kombucha is our latest experiment with bold and unexpected flavors in a living beverage. Blackcurrant shoots add green, foresty depth, while saffron brings floral warmth and licorice gives rounded sweetness. Enjoy it chilled on its own, or use it in cocktails, mocktails, dressings, or to macerate fruit.

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Flavor 5: Poppy Seed Praline

Chef Mette Explains Poppy Seed Praline 

The first version of this praline began as a savory take on a “Nordic mole,” which we started developing after returning from our pop-up in Mexico. Over time, it became something sweeter, and it has since appeared on the menu at Noma in several different forms. 

The praline is built around poppy seeds, an ingredient often found in Danish pastries. Here, the seeds are crushed and blended in a stone grinder with hazelnut paste, then seasoned with vanilla and licorice syrup. The result is nutty, aromatic, slightly floral, and deeply spiced, with the poppy seeds giving the praline its distinctive texture and flavor.

At Noma, we like to pair it with other strong spices. We’ve served it with saffron ice cream and Mexican chocolate in one dessert, and with cardamom mousse in another. At home, it works beautifully with most ice creams — vanilla and hazelnut would both be great places to start. 

You could also fold a few spoonfuls into whipped cream and serve it with fresh berries, or spread it over warm pancakes.

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Flavor 6: Spring Pickles

Chef Mette Explains Spring Pickles 

For our Spring Pickles, we wanted to create what, in our opinion, is the perfect pickle mix. The jar brings together these pine cone olives with salted Japanese quince and our beloved black currant capers. Each ingredient captures a different side of spring: green, sharp, floral, salty, and aromatic. 

After many trials with pine trees in Denmark, we found that the best time to harvest pinecones is in the spring, while they are still bright green, young, and tender. 

To prepare them, we blanch the pinecones ten times to remove their bitterness, then place them in a salt brine to preserve them. Finally, we cook them with aromatic black currant wood until they become tender and deeply fragrant. The result is what we like to think of as a kind of pine cone olive: briny, resinous, and full of spring flavor. 

You can eat this assortment of pickles as they are, serve them on a skewer with your favorite cocktail, or even use a small pine branch as the skewer. You can also chop the pickles together and mix them with some of the oil from the jar, fresh herbs, finely chopped seeds or nuts, and a squeeze of lemon juice to make a bright spring pesto.

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Bonus Flavor: Espresso Drops

Francisco Explains Espresso Drops 

I would describe Espresso Drops as a shot of espresso in solid form. They carry the full intensity of the Benti Neka coffee we use to make them, with the aroma, bitterness, fruit, roast, and depth of the beans coming through in a concentrated way. 

Technically, they are built a little like white chocolate. White chocolate is usually made from cocoa butter, sugar, and milk powder; for Espresso Drops, we remove the milk powder entirely and replace it with very finely ground coffee beans roasted by Noma Kaffe. The result is something that melts like chocolate, but tastes unmistakably like coffee. 

To make them smooth, we refine the ingredients in a stone grinder for 48 hours, until the particles are smaller than 20 microns. At that size, the coffee becomes silky on the palate instead of gritty, while still holding the full flavor of the bean. Because the drops are made with cocoa butter, they also need to be tempered like chocolate, which gives them their structure, snap, and clean melt.

I first started making this type of confection in 2014, so the base recipe was already established. For us, the real question was which coffee beans would work best. That took some time, especially because each batch needs about two days in the stone grinder before we can properly taste and evaluate it. 

What makes this product unique is that you do not really see this sort of thing on shelves. It is not coffee-flavored chocolate; it is coffee treated like chocolate, made with beans we roast ourselves in house. For me, that represents a lot of what we do best at Noma: developing flavor, changing the form of an ingredient, and finding new ways for it to express itself.