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The Spirit of Competition

Despite the global economic downturn, culinary competitions are still going strong this year.  During Hofex, from May 6^th to 9^th, we have the Hong Kong International Culinary Classics, one of the biggest international competition events in the region.  The last HKICC saw hundreds of competitors come to compete from all around the world, in a wide range of categories, both individual and team events.  The Hong Kong Young Chefs Club will also be sending a team to compete in the Gourmet Team category. 

In June 1^st and 2^nd, we also have the 2^nd Hong Kong Norwegian Seafood Young Chefs Challenge.  Last year’s event saw 21 teams of chefs, aged 25 and under compete for the ultimate prize, an educational trip to Norway and a chance to see the European Bocuse d’Or finals.  This year, the format will be adjusted to bring us in line with our fellow international competitors, turning this event into an individual competition.  The time limit is still 5 hours, including plating and cleanup, with 4 courses featuring Norwegian cod and salmon.  Further updates will be provided.

In September, during the Restaurant & Bar show, we have the 2^nd Tabasco Hot Chefs Team Challenge.  Last year saw six 3-man teams compete for the chance to go to Singapore and battle against the hottest young chefs in Asia. 

My own first competition experience was in the United States when I was still in college.  A classmate and I applied for the Accellis Culinary Arts Challenge in 2000.  Somehow, both of us were selected among the 20 finalists from over 150 culinary schools in the country, and a fancy write up on yahoo.com tauted us as the top 20 student chefs in America.  There was nothing that could puff up a young student’s ego than telling him he was special, and unfortunately I bought my own press.  I was in the unique position in that I had already had a few years of industrial experience, and that simple cooking was something I should be more than able to handle.  So, I made the ultimate, most critical mistake you can make when competing.  I didn’t practice.

The Accellis Culinary Arts Challenge featured a brand new type of convection-microwave oven.  It sounds like familiar technology these days, but back then, it was something really special.  The oven temperature was held at a base temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, with 100 kilometer per hour air currents helping to brown food on the outside whilst the microwave steams the interior.  Just to give you an idea of its performance, this oven could roast a whole chicken from raw to fully cooked in under 3 minutes!  A whole roasted Boston lobster could be cooked in 90 seconds, and my own entry, a roulade of pork tenderloin stuffed with lychees and dates took 45 seconds to cook it to medium doneness. 

You’d think with such a fast oven, finishing four portions in 75 minutes should be a breeze.  But because I didn’t practice, didn’t properly organize my thoughts and processes, I ran into problems.  The competition was a major media event.  Charlie Trotter, famed for his namesake restaurant and beautiful cookbooks, was one of the judges, along with six of the thirty or so American Culinary Federation Certified Master Chefs.  The competition was held in the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone School in Napa Valley, California.  While we were cooking, a team of journalists armed with notebooks and video cameras poked and prodded at our work, got in the way of our stoves, even messed around with our ingredients!  The allotted time flew by in a blink and I realized I was barely even halfway done.  I asked the floor judges if I could just give up and quietly disappear, but they informed me that Charlie Trotter wanted to see my finished product. 

In the end, I didn’t even get a medal, understandably.  I had gone 45 minutes over my time limit.  However, during my critique, the tasting judges told me they were more interested in seeing if I would finish what I started.  Charlie Trotter later told me that being willing to go back in after admitting defeat showed strength of character he would like to see in more chefs today.  I later shared a glass of champagne with him and sent the photo to my mother. 

I promised myself that if I ever competed again, I would practice myself to death, and I nearly did just that. 

A year later, I was asked to join the college competition team to compete in the ACF Junior Culinary Olympics.  We practiced 2 or 3 times a week, every week for a year.  For the first component, we had to refine our knife skills to be able to produce with absolute precision a wide range of knife cuts within an hour.  The exact knife cuts were determined by a draw, so we had to know all of them.  These included tournée (7 faces, 2 inches long, 3/4 of an inch in diameter), fine brunoise (1/16^th of an inch fine dice), paysanne (1/2 inch squares, triangles and circles, 1/8^th of an inch thick), along with concassé of tomato, finely chopped parsley, minced garlic, and rondelle of carrot. 

Now, I like to think that Hong Kong chefs have some of the finest knife skills in the world.  Still, it took a lot of time and commitment to achieve these exacting standards.  The judges really do go around and measure your cuts with a ruler! 

The main part of the competition though was the 4-course meal, 4 portions of each.  We had developed our own dishes in collaboration with our team coach, Michael Edrington, a big, rough-yet-dignified Southern fella, who also happened to be a hell of a chef.  My own part to play in this was a piña colada bavarois, a creamy coconut and rum-scented dessert filled with pineapple compote, placed on a tempered chocolate coated sable cookie, with a thin layer of pineapple and vanilla jelly on the top.  As an accompaniment, I had included a caramelized sugar cage in the shape of a pineapple, placed over marsala-macerated berries on toasted macadamia sand, along with two sauces (one a berry jus, the other a kiwi fruit purée).  Oh, and a tempered chocolate filligrie; all this to be done in 75 minutes! 

The exact layout of the plate, the components, the flavours, textures, etc. took the better part of a year to develop.  I actually lost sleep over this plate, to the extent that I would be playing with the arrangement in my mind’s eye whilst driving on the Southwest Freeway at over 85 miles per hour at 2 o’clock in the morning.  I almost got thrown out of school because I began missing classes.  I went from one extreme to the other, but my commitment eventually paid off in big ways.

The first competition we had was for the Texas state title.  Texas is a big state, about the size of Western Europe, and our chief rival, a team from Dallas was led by a master patissier from France.  Our practice prevailed however.  The 75 minutes went by in a blink and I was wondering if I’d even started yet when the results were announced.  A gold medal!

In last year’s WACS Congress in Dubai, I met a chef from South Africa who gave a talk about the spirit of competition.  He said that getting your first gold medal is “…better than sex!  And I’ve had a lot of great sex, let me tell you!”  A bit coarse, but he pretty much summed it up though.  That first medal isn’t about you beating all the other competitors, but about besting yourself.  I always hate it when cooks tell me they’re doing the best they can, because you really have no idea what your best is until you push yourself beyond what you think is your limit.  Competition is all about besting yourself, bettering yourself, discovering just how much more there is to you.

I’ve been in a total of 4 competitions, not a great number when compared to individuals like our HKCA competition guru, Mak Kam Kui of Disney Hollywood Hotel.  I had the chance to team up with him in Penang, Malaysia along with Ken Chow and Martin Lam (an old HITDC classmate of mine) for the 3^rd Penang Chefs Challenge.  It was one of the most intense competitions I’ve ever seen, let alone competed in.  For five rounds, 28 teams from around the world were faced off against each other, one on one.  The winning team proceeded to the next round, sort of like in Wimbledon.  Each round saw a host of chefs racing to fight over ever-dwindling (and decomposing) supplies of ingredients, plus two mystery ingredients provided at the last minute.  Limited refrigeration and work space, domestic stoves and stifling heat made for a truly challenging environment.  Gelatine, chocolate and sugar work was made next to impossible due to the heat and humidity.  To top this off, the competition took place in a public area where hundreds of spectators milled about.  We managed to place 1^st runner up in the end, and made a lot of new friends too. 

Culinary competitions are probably the worst place to try new things.  There are so many variables, so many unknowns, so many things that can go wrong at the last minute that you want to eliminate as many as you can before you go in.  Know your equipment, your ingredients, your methods, everything.  I see so many young chefs try to “reinvent the wheel”, create new flavour pairings and then try to justify their wild choices to the judges.  You want to make sure of as many things as possible when you go into that arena because competition is all about execution.  Creativity comes and goes long before you first pick up that knife after the timer starts. 

Practice is the key, and with it comes commitment.  You shouldn’t get into competition if you aren’t going to give it your all.  Don’t give a mediocre performance or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.  You’ll constantly be asking yourself, “Could I have taken gold if I’d tried that little bit harder?”  Even if you don’t win, you can take away a tremendous learning experience. 

Also, always remain humble.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re always right.  Get second and third opinions.  Socrates said that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing.  If you start thinking you’re smart, you’re going to find yourself in a slugging match with the judges, and that’s a truly embarrassing position to be in.  When you get a critique, take notes and learn from it.  The beauty of being a chef is that you can never know it all.  There’s always something you can learn from someone else. 

Anyway, good cooking!  Francis Lo

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Molecular Gastronomy a system of knowledge

By: Christopher Gallaga

 

I suspect some were disappointed to learn that Dr. Hervé This, would not be conducting a “cooking show” during his seminar on Molecular Gastronomy, presented at the HITDC in Pokfulam. In his clear words he does not pretend to be a cook. I, being a lover of science, food and cooking was delighted that one of the worlds most affable, approachable and readable food scientists would be discussing the science of cooking.

 

Early in his presentation Dr. This, stated unequivocally that he was not here to answer, but rather to ask, questions. He then set about asking several empirical questions about eggs (why do they foam, how does a whisk work, which whisk is better, where is the yolk inside a shell, and so on), to which he always answered, “We don’t [yet] know.” After demonstrating the first fundamental of the scientific method: to explore phenomenon without prejudice, he then demonstrated how we could find out the true answers to all those questions (and more).

 

We delved into both elementary physics and chemistry, and were even presented with several quasi-cooking demonstrations, (a microwave soufflé, a mayonnaise “pudding” and a egg cooked by ethanol) but our professor again quite strenuously noted that he is not a cook, but a scientist. He plainly stated that the scientist and the chef are two distinct and important vocations in the creation of food, and that while they could be the closest of friend, while they both pursued their purpose with equally vigorous passion; they had very different goals. Scientists are in endless pursuit of sublime knowledge, while cooks are in endless pursuit of the more ethereal artistry of creating pleasure through nourishment. The scientists can no more drive the actions of the cook than the cook can force the science against reality. For mutual benefit the two must work in harmony in order to increase the vast lexicon called the art and science of cuisine.

 

Dr. This did provide one clear and important answer to a multi-part question that is currently on a lot of chef’s minds. He stated unequivocally that Molecular Gastronomy is the scientific study of food, while molecular cooking is an adoption of certain new knowledge and modern technology to add to or enhance the established glossary of cuisine. Throughout history we see a steady progression of food knowledge while every generation or so this fundamental knowledge is punctuated by trends and specific advancements. In time the overall food compendium adopts those specifically important features of any trend, discarding the rest. Thus it is really not a choice of either/or; it is simply that the overall encyclopedia is the big picture progress of cuisine and cooking while any trend, including molecular cookery, is the temporary divergence to a small picture specialty. Exciting in the moment, but over all just one of many contributors to a much larger base of knowledge and technique.

 

In the end, what Hervé This tried to do was to teach chefs the scientific method, to teach chefs how to ask questions and how to devise and perform experiments that will yield factual answers rather than more of the same “old tales” steeped in mystical supposition. To that end I found the lecture a value packed two-hours of learning, and will certainly take this scientific approach into improving the understanding the facts behind my chosen vocation. Perhaps in time I can help advance the knowledge contained in the lexicon of cookery, myself.

 

       

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