Culture mongers

It all begins with bread and butter. As the opening plate on your table of course, and it also marked the very start of FHIOR’s narrative when we opened our doors in 2018.

Both are made in house – the bread from Bere barley, an ancient grain from Orkney. But it’s the butter that really expresses the culture of FHIOR (full-fat pun intended). A culture of minimising waste and maximising flavour.

Chef Patron Scott Smith explains: “Think of vinegar mothers and sourdough starters. To make butter, we inoculate cream with a milk bacteria that I started eight years ago. We add buttermilk from the previous batch of butter and let it ferment for three to four days until it looks like crème fraîche. We get up to 16 litres a week of buttermilk through the process. Some we use to make ice cream or cure fish. But there’s another by-product that adds a delicious touch to the start of every meal at FHIOR.”

This is brunost. Nestling next to the quenelle of white butter on your wooden Scandi platter, you’ll find a matching oval of brown butter that looks like its namesake, the famous Norwegian cheese. For brunost we cook buttermilk for six hours until the curds begin to caramelise and brown. Cream is added back before cooking for another three hours. “It’s a very FHIOR process,” says Scott. “No waste.” And it tastes as unctuous as fudge.