Chef Ireland Competition @ Food & Bev Live
Food & Bev Live, Citywest Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
What a great experience!
The annual Food & Bev Live tradeshow was held in the Citywest hotel at the start of February this year. It is an amazing event that brings together foodservice and hospitality professionals to showcase their talents and exhibit innovative goods for the catering industry.
Preparation
As part of the event, there is a professional cookery competition created by Chef Ireland. As a Culinary Arts student in Cork Institute of Technology, I joined a group of students under the leadership of our lecturer, Kieran Scully, and entered into the competition.
This was the first cooking competition that I entered so as you might imagine, I was quite nervous and did not know what to expect. Mr Scully was excellent in his aproach and guided all 13 students’ creativity whilst leaving them to explore their own capabilities.
The cooking competition was broken down into 3 classes. Junior, Senior and Open. You could enter into a number of individual competitions if you fall under their classification. Competitors then had to prepare and serve a dish from scratch in a specific time-frame. The theme of this yea’s event was ‘sustainability with an emphasis on awareness of ingredients and origin of the foods‘ with competitions in the cooking of Lamb, Duck, Pork, Beef, Fish, Vegan, Pasta, Asian and desserts. I was entered in to the Silver Hill duck and the Chef Team of the year competition.
In the lead-up to the competition we had meetings in college where we discussed what we could expect from the competition and discuss what dishes we thought of preparing. We also had opportunities to practice the dishes in the kitchen in college.
Competition Time
On the day we arrived at college and had to gather all the individual ingredients,weight them out and place them in our own dedicated trays. You can just imagine how many boxes there were since all 13 students were entered into at least 2 competitions! We packed all our ingredients along with all the equipment that we needed into a big van and made our way to Dublin.
The next morning the first competition started at 8am. It was all very fast paced and competitors had to set up their stations 5 minutes before the start of their competition. There were a total of 8 stations competing in the same event. All students from CIT supported each other by helping to set up and to wash up afterwards.
Silver Hill Duck Competition
The Silver Hill duck dish competition started at 9am on the Tuesday morning. Contestants had 40 minutes to prepare 2 main course dishes of their own design. Silver Hill duck breasts were provided and the rest of the ingredients had to be provided by the competitors. The only prepared item allowed was stock, everything else had to be prepared from scratch. For my dish I did pan roasted Silver Hill duck breast with pearled spelt, cavolo nero, confit turnip, parsley crumb, Mealagulla Orchard apple gel & Longueville House apple cider jus (see picture below). Silver Hill duck is a hybrid of the Peking duck varietal, unique to the brand. Combining this quality ingredient with locally sourced and seasonal produce, delivers a dish that showcases sustainability and flavour. I won a silver medal for this dish!
Chef Team of The Year 2020 Competition
For this competition I teamed up with Karina Quinlan, a fellow student. She is an amazing chef with international experience and a great knowledge of wild and foraged foods. We were allocated one and a half hours to prepare, cook and serve a starter, main course and dessert for three covers. The same rules applied where everything had to be prepared from scratch with only stock allowed.
Our starter was spiralised kohlrabi, Shepherd’s Store Ewe’s milk cheese sauce, Goatsbridge trout roe, West Cork black garlic. This looked a bit like a spaghetti dish, a nice play on the senses. We were able to serve the dishes to the judges as soon as they were finished, unfortunately we were too busy to take a photo of the dish.
The main course was lamb rack, crispy lamb sweetbreads, potato fondant, carrot puree, furikake heritage baked carrot, buttermilk gel. No photo for this one either, you will have to take my word for it that this dish was beautiful! Finally, our dessert was gorse flower mousse, poached rhubarb, rhubarb & sherry vinegar gel and caramelised white chocolate. Photo below. This was a tough and challenging competition, a constant race against time, but very rewarding. We won a silver medal for our dishes!
Media Coverage
The cooking competition was a great success for Cork Institute of Technology and for the students. We received more than 30 medals in total with a few ‘best in catagory’ awards. The publicity is great for CIT and proves the quality of students it produces. The story got picked up by local news outlets like Cork Beo, full article here, and it also featured in the Irish Examiner! This has been a great achievement by students and lecturers alike.
I truly hoped that you enjoyed this article, please get in touch via social media or email!
Relish 