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'Russian caviar is old-school luxury," declares chef Claus Meyer, the Emeril of Scandinavian TV. "You can keep your truffles We're creating the most inventive dishes with barley and rye." And brewer's malt. And grasses from uninhabited zones of the Arctic. And the thickened milk known as skyr, from a rare breed of Viking-era cow.

In a burst of regional pride, Scandinavian chefs are developing stunning new dishes from traditional ingredients, like the meat of the shaggy, ill-tempered musk ox, sometimes served raw at Copenhagen's upstart noma, the restaurant Meyer co-owns with chef René Redzepi. Even cheeky preparations such as smoked ice cream, celery root baked in charred hay or desserts such as sheep's milk mousse with grassy sorrel granité - Redzepi's take on "the sheep and what it eats" - emerge with enough panache to charm two stars from the notoriously old-school Michelin folk.

In fact, this region of extremes and contradictions - of sunny nights, moonlit days and vast tracts of uninhabited tundra - has become the launching pad for a new movement in the culinary arts: New Nordic cuisine.

"This is beyond organic, beyond biodynamic," says Redzepi, part of the elite group that set out a formal manifesto for the movement (http://www.nordiskkoekken.dk), which has a mandate to harness the remarkable attributes of cold-climate ingredients. The range of products from this high-latitude terroir is superb, these chefs maintain: seafood pulled from the brackish Gulf of Bothnia, 200 types of horseradish, 110 types of rhubarb, 700 varieties of apples, and turnips sweet as pears.

These wild Nordic ingredients are the focus at Meyers Deli in Copenhagen, the star chef's café/artisan grocery store, which carries comestibles such as birch nectar - a delicate-tasting flavour

enhancer pulled from the roots of a birch tree in the manner of maple syrup - and opalescent sea buckthorn juice, with its oddly tropical notes of mango.

Yet it's the explosive flavours of seemingly mundane foods like Arctic Circle prunes, so slow-growing they barely have time to ripen, that reveal the bitters and acids of this region; like wine grapes in sandy soil, plants that are stressed as they struggle to mature have flavour dimensions far more complex than those of crops effortlessly proliferating in warm, sunny climes.

For modern Scandinavians, this fresh look at old ingredients is spiking interest in dishes their ancestors ate mainly because fresh food was scarce.

For instance, around Christmas, the theatre crowd at Oslo's Engebret Café can be seen tucking into lutefisk - air-dried whitefish soaked in lye - tempered by green pea stew and aged gamalost cheese.

Young Swedes seek out their roots - and test their olfactory mettle - with surströmming, fermented herring so pungent that Air France and British Airways have banned its bulging cans as an explosives risk. But you know a food with an aroma compared to "gas from the back" is going to have a few intrepid devotees, and aficionados of this dangerous delicacy have opened a museum in Skeppsmaln, the centre of surströmming production on Sweden's High Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There they can devour their fragrant lunch at the museum's outdoor café - the operative word being "outdoor" - one of the few places to consume surströmming outside private homes.

Yet while most Swedes under 80 have only consumed surströmming on a dare, a few sophisticated Nordic chefs (who choose to remain nameless) maintain the best herring is fermented months past its formal expiration date, partway down the road to becoming surströmming, pummelled by enzymes to a cloudlike

tenderness.

For chef Mathias Dahlgren, whose Stockholm restaurant Matsalen was awarded its first Michelin star last week, just nine months after it opened, the New Nordic cuisine is an idea whose time has come.

"Twenty years ago, haute cuisine was defined by ingredients like foie gras, lobster and cream," he observes. "Ten years ago, we focused on technique. Now, naturalness is the key to Nordic cuisine."

At the extravagant Matsalen, in the Grand Hôtel Stockholm, he finds new uses for intriguing local produce such as unripe strawberries - their state for most of the summer in these northern climes - mating their soft bitterness with the citric bite of grapefruit. He also elevates bread from an afterthought to a tasting menu, pairing rustic loaves with three different fats: nutty rapeseed oil, chiffon of smoked pork fat and milk fat - a.k.a. butter.

Next door, at Dahlgren's free-flowing "food bar," Matbaren, diners can slide onto a stool at the stainless-steel counter for small plates of regional products rarely seen outside Scandinavia, such as whitefish roe from Kalix - quite different from the Canadian product, the chef maintains - and croquettes made from freshly picked nettles.

It's a windy boat ride to Oaxen, a limestone isle in the Stockholm archipelago and home to chef Magnus Ek's wildly imaginative Oaxen Skärgårdskrog. In an old quarry manager's house on Himmerfjärden Bay, surrounded by woods heady with white truffles, Ek unites duck liver with cardamom sugar and juniper, bakes halibut in burned grass and appears to invite representatives from every corner of the barnyard to cohabit a plate of cinnamon-fried duck braised in Sotholmens Stout, with trotters and breast of veal bathed in cream of Gotland truffle. Most guests arrive by private skiff or ferry, but those who can't tear themselves away when the last boat departs can reserve a cabin on the restaurant's 19th-century steamship, M/S Stjernorp, tethered to the dock.

Like Ek, Leijontornet restaurant chef Gustav Otterberg has a passion for foraging, even though his kitchen is in the heart of Stockholm. Inspired by nearby farmers, Otterberg creates unusual pairings such as sweet beetroot with seared salted cod and Skagerrak langoustine, and local elderberry sorbet with rustic malt bread.

In Helsinki, meanwhile, best known for its fearless designers, chef Hans Välimäki is creating culinary buzz at Chez Dominique, garnering two Michelin stars for stylish farm dishes like "BBQ" suckling pig.

Budget diners beware: Rustic as these ingredients may seem, they're priced like exotic fare. The practitioners of New Nordic cuisine are redefining extravagance by exploring far and deep for new sources - ascending to 1,000-metre-high meadows to milk goats for piquant Jämtlandish cheese, foraging on the remote tundra for tea, or diving deep in the Faroes for 45-year-old horse mussel banks. Perhaps even more demanding than their colleagues in New York and Paris, Nordic chefs are seeking out rare ingredients such as Arctic brambles - "the rarest berry in the world and hell to pick," Meyer says.

This is truly end of the Earth cuisine - worthy of the hardiest gastronomic explorers.

Pack your appetite

Copenhagen

Noma Strandgade 93; +45 3296 3297; http://www.noma.dk

Meyers Deli Kongens Nytorv 13; 33 25 45 95; http://www.meyersdeli.dk

Helsinki

Chez Dominique Rikhardinkatu 4; 09 - 612 7393; http://www.chezdominique.fi

Oslo

Engebret Café Bankplassen 1; 22 82 25 25; http://www.engebret-cafe.no

Skeppsmaln, Sweden

Fiskevistet-surströmmingsmuseet http://www.fiskevistet.se

Stockholm

Matsalen and Matbaren Grand Hôtel Stockholm, S. Blaiseholmshamnen 6; 46 (0) 8 679 35 84; http://www.mathiasdahlgren.com

Oaxen Skärgårdskrog Oaxen, SE-153 93Mörkö; +46 (0) 8-551 531 05; http://www.oaxenkrog.se

Leijontornet Lilla Nygatan 5, Old Town; +46 (0) 8 506 400 80; http://www.leijontornet.se