From garden to table, we sample Swedish chef Filip Gemzell's favourites

Filip responded to a call from Mattias - the grandson of the founders of an Ästad Gård farm in western Sweden, who was looking for a chef to enhance his dining experience - and fell head over heels in love with the project. He trained in London for a number of years before returning home to take the helm at Rest. ÄNG* (Tvååker) without hesitation, bringing a cosmopolitan vision that explores cultures and culinary techniques from around the world without ever leaving home.

With a focus on proximity, seasonality and sustainability, everything cooked at ÄNG is grown on the farm and personally harvested by Filip and his team. Because of our changing seasons, we use what we grow in the summer to make preserves, pickles, fermented and smoked products that we can use all year round," explains the chef. This, together with a good dose of creativity, creates new and memorable forms of flavour expression, which earned him his first Michelin star in 2021. Today, he has brought two of his most famous creations to the Andorra Taste kitchen.

Starting with the earth, he has prepared his "signature dish", a beautiful recreation of stinging nettle leaves, "an ingredient that has always been used in Swedish cuisine, even in medicine for its richness in vitamins". He prepared crispy chips fried in butter, which he used to cover a leaf shape 'with a texture similar to a pancake, made with nettle puree, egg and flour', which he fried in oil. He filled it with a salad of sorrel and podagaria with a spicy green chilli and vinegar dressing, and small pieces of green asparagus 'which we pickle using the technique of slow cold fermentation, at refrigerator temperature, so that it doesn't lose its texture'. Intense in colour, flavour and aroma, it was a real feast for the senses.

And he concluded with a seafood dish 'that took us a year to create. Because although it seems simple, it has enormous depth. It is an umami bomb," he described. And he does this by squeezing the most out of the mussel, 'a species that is abundant on our coasts', and preparing it in different textures to exploit its full potential. On the plate, an emulsion base made with the mussel broth "steamed for 14 hours and reduced for another 24 hours; 10 kilos of mussels reduced to a few grams, producing a sauce of enormous flavour". On top of this he placed mussel tartar made with dill cream 'grown in our own garden', pickled chilli, also home-grown, and chopped caramelised onion 'to give it a sweet touch'. It was topped with sourdough breadcrumbs 'for the sour and crunchy touch' and finished with a spongy foam, made from the mussels themselves, of course.