Finland's Top Chef Gets Top Cookbook

When TV channel Sub debuted Top Chef Suomi in Finland in January, the show was a big success, with an average of 315,000 viewers and an audience share of 14.4. But before Sub had even started, a big question was: What should the grand prize be? "The first idea of giving the winner a job in a three-star Michelin restaurant abroad wouldn't have worked if an older contestant with Michelin experience and a family won," says Pete Paavolainen, executive producer at Sub. "So we decided that a winner's own cookbook would be the perfect prize."

Sub turned to book publisher Tammi - Tammi had collaborated with sister channel MTV3 on several cookbooks previously - to put together a cookbook featuring the recipes of the winner, a project that needed to be put together in record time. Although the two companies started talking three months before the actual premier of the show, the real work couldn't start until the actual winner was chosen, one month before the premier of the show and only three months before the final was broadcast.

Tammi publishing editor Kaisa Nummenpää was excited to work on the project - she was a big fan of the American version of the show. Which is not to say the tight time schedule didn't present some serious challenges. "We got to know the winner the same time as the channel, and in the first meeting in December a couple days after shooting the last episode, we asked the winner, Akseli Herlevi, to write down as many of his best recipes as possible," Nummenpää says.

From there it was a matter of deciding how to arrange the book, making sure it was appropriate for people in their 20s - the same age as the winner - and that they were fairly easy to prepare at home. Then there were three days of shooting photos with photographer Laura Riihelä to go along with the 60 recipes, which also had to be carefully tested. When Akseli left for a trip to Vietnam, another part of his prize, it could have been disastrous as the layout had just been finished. But he managed to approve it before he left.

"Thinking about it now, him being away helped us all to keep the secret better," says Nummenpää. "So in a way it was a good thing that he had won the trip to be away for a while."  And keeping the winner secret was definitely one of the challenges, says Paavolainen. "We knew the result four months before airing the final on TV," he says. "But the book was announced as a prize for the winner at the start of every program and we had a clip showing a dummy of the cover with a silhouette and a big question mark. Basically, you have to have total trust in the production people on both the television and the publishing side."

The cover, which was designed by Timo Hämäläinen, was a particular challenge, since Nummenpää usually likes to get as many opinions as possible to help pick a good cover. "This time we had to count on ourselves," she says. "But I'm proud of the cover, as well as the content. Akseli's recipes are good and work well, the pictures are mouthwatering and people have commented that they like the extra tips that Akseli wrote for your average chef at home." She also gives a lot of credit to the production company Solar Television, which produced the show and provided the black and white photos from the show used in the cookbook.

And of course the popularity of the book  - Täydellä sydämellä which translates to "Put Your Heart Into It" - speaks for itself: The first edition sold out in the first week, and a second edition is due shortly from the printers.