Keeping high standard in fast growing environment

Using ingredients from Åland is a priority for the chef at Silverskär

He hangs meat to tenderize it, ferments vegetables, and experiments with his own vegan tempeh. Viktor Eriksson, chef at the Silverskär Islands conference center in Åland’s northern archipelago, believes in constantly improving and learning new things.
“I want to turn ingredients from next door into unbeatable food,” he says.

Viktor’s interest in food was sparked in the domestic science sessions he attended secondary school. He found cookery to be fun and when one day he read in the paper that Åland’s award-winning celebrity chef Michael Björklund was going to come back and open a restaurant, Victor saw his opportunity to learn from the best.
“I went to the restaurant and asked Micke if he had a job for me. I got a job washing dishes.”

Worked in a Michelin-star restaurant
Viktor went on to study to become a chef at Åland’s vocational training school and the Åland Islands Hotel and Restaurant School. At the same time, he did part-time work in Michael Björklund’s restaurant and, after he graduated, Björklund helped him get a job at the two-Michelin-star restaurant Chez Dominique in Helsinki. He also worked at a bakery in the capital but after a series of night jobs and hundreds of hours of work each month, he made his way back to Åland.

Growing interest in local produce
In 2011 a vacancy came up for a chef at Silverskär. Viktor was given the job and that was the start of his passionate relationship with local produce.
“When I started working in kitchens 15 years ago, there wasn’t so much interest in local produce. French ingredients were the best you could cook with. But at Silverskär there has always been a desire to uphold the tradition of using local produce – it felt natural for me to continue along those lines and see how far I could take it,” says Viktor.
During Viktor’s time at Silverskär, his colleague Johan Mörn coined the concept “Axgan”*. An “Axgan” is a person who chooses food produced in Åland, thereby contributing to sustaining the community of small-scale local food industries.
“I live and work on the basis of those values, and even though I don’t go around and tell everybody that I’m an Axgan, it’s good that the concept exists so that people have something to rally around,” says Viktor.

An extensive range
According to Viktor, Åland has an incredibly wide range of local food industries.
“We have fishing, market gardening, animal husbandry, our own abattoir and dairy, and everything else that the countryside has to offer. Silverskär stores champagne on the seabed for Veuve Clicquot in France, and when I was visiting them and telling them about Åland’s wide range of local produce, the chefs were envious. They have to travel a long way to get hold of anything other than grapes while in Åland we have amazing diversity in a small area.”
Proximity to the producers is another advantage.
“I can drive to the farms and have a look at what they have in the way of food waste. Have they got any late bean plants or maybe a few carrots that are too small or the wrong shape to be sold to a wholesaler? If they have, I can buy them instead.”

Building a meat cutting plant
The challenge for Viktor is to maintain a high and consistent standard at the same time as wanting to develop all the time.
“In the winter I go and learn new things. One winter we built a meat cutting plant so that we could buy whole animal carcasses, which we ourselves could cut up and hang up to tenderize. There were no training courses I could go on, so I read doctoral theses from the USA to teach myself. The aim was to serve unbeatable well-hung and tenderized meat without having to buy it in from outside suppliers. I wanted the meat to come from the farm next door,” says Viktor.

Vegetarian and vegan
Another winter Viktor explored fermentation and, as more and more people have requested vegetable-based dishes, he has started to experiment with local proteins such as peas and field beans.
“If you’re going to be strict about meat, fish, and vegetables coming from Åland, you can’t then start using Oumph or soya milk just to have a vegan option. So we try to find local variants, and we’ve started to serve tempeh made from peas, for example. It’s delicious,” says Viktor.

*The word “Axgan” starts with Åland’s country code “ax” and the suffix “-gan” is the same as that used in words like “vegan” and “began”. The hashtag #axgan is frequently used on social media when people who are interested in food want to show that they eat, buy or cook food made from Åland ingredients.