LIVE: A Really Cool Childhood Dream Come True

FARGO — You probably wouldn’t recognize it under the mask and frost, but he’s a familiar face on the cooking line at the popular southside Fargo Luna restaurant.

And he’s back home in the kitchen for the first time in a year ever since making his childhood dream of seeing Antarctica for himself come true.

South Pole Sous Chef and Luna Kitchen stalwart Steven Schalau is sharing with the Morning Show what it’s like to keep an entire crew of researchers and contractors fed and healthy through a whole year of cooking for them in one of the toughest climates on earth.

It wasn’t that they don’t have supplies or a plan of what to cook, Schalau explained.

It’s more that it’s like an extreme version of “Chopped,” where you’re faced with a very specific meal you need to serve, to meet nutritional and caloric needs of the team, but with ingredients that have been stored underground at minus 60 degrees, most of which expired before they even arrived at the South Pole.

Fresh ingredients can’t be flown in starting sometime in March, he said, since it’s the beginning of winter there, and it’s simply too cold for planes to fly.

Schalau talked about what it’s like to survive in weather that puts ours to shame (minus 98, with a wind chill of minus 150,) how to get strawberries and tomatoes to grow in Antarctica, and what was the most astonishing part of his adventure at the very bottom of the globe.

To find out what Schalau is cooking up here at home in these (comparably) warmer winter temps, check out the link to Luna Fargo and its menu, including the smoked potato and popover dishes he recreated for the researchers there:

https://lunafargo.com/