Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Made in Sweden
Spreading the joy of food Take a kitchen assistant with roots that go back to the 1600s and add a bread recipe developed using algorithms and computers. What do you get? A whole lot of love for baking. By Linnea Dunne | Photos: Ankarsrum
A man is standing in a modern kitchen with shiny, white tiles, doing vocal warmups. He has his arms in the air and gazes up at the ceiling, and he turns to one side and back the other way, clearly testing the acoustics. Then he starts talking about bread, his French accent unmistakable. He picks up a recipe, says something about an algorithm, and starts baking. Sébastien Boudet is a bread expert and baker from France, now based in 62 | Issue 102 | July 2017
Sweden, and together with Ankarsrum he has developed ‘the bread of the world’.
A true original With its roots in a 1937 redesign of a bulky professional-use baking machine, Ankarsrum Assistent Original has grown to become a solid favourite amongst food enthusiasts and hobby bakers throughout Sweden and its neighbouring countries. Perfect for mincing, blending, pas-
ta and sausage making and bread and cake baking, it is a reliable and versatile kitchen friend – and it is easy on the eye, too. “Many of our customers are wellread and skilled, and they all share an enthusiasm and passion about what they do. Quality is really important to them,” says Marcus Grimerö, marketing manager of Ankarsrum, the company that produces and markets the kitchen assistant. “We’ve got strong Swedish roots and are all about that hand-made quality, which is exactly what their hobby is about too – baking, cooking, using their hands.” Ankarsrum stands out from the crowd in that it is small, comparatively speaking,