It was an unusually busy day at the Taipei Kaiping Culinary School (開平餐飲學校) last Tuesday, when the school’s usual activities were overtaken by the hosting of the United Tastes of America — Asian Chef Challenge (美國之味 — 亞洲廚藝競賽), an event nominally sponsored by the US Meat Export Federation working together with the American Institute in Taiwan. This year was the first time this culinary challenge has been held, and Tuesday’s event was the last of four preliminary national competitions that have been held in preparation for a regional faceoff in June between competition winners from qualifying rounds in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Taipei.
At 3pm, the 16 two-person teams were finalizing a display of four-course meals of an appetizer, soup, entree and dessert that required the use of a variety of prime US ingredients. It’s the first time this competition has been held, and its aim is the promotion of US ingredients and encouraging culinary creativity among chefs in countries around Asia.
Up in the kitchens, teams work furiously in the scalding heat to get meals cooked and plated within the required four hours. The list of ingredients that the chefs had to use had only been announced the night before, and the teams had been working furiously since then to create their menu. Apart from using the list of required ingredients, the food had to look beautiful, show technical skills, and above all taste delicious. Competitors came from major hotels, culinary colleges and restaurants. Heavy hitters included teams from five-star hotels such as the Ambassador and Regent Taipei, defending their reputations for culinary excellence against smaller establishments such as Bite 2 Eat and Sowieso.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew, Taipei Times
Chefs attempted to show off their skills with wildly complex dishes. Cream of cauliflower and Wisconsin ginseng root soup with jack cheese and chicken drumstick dumpling was quite a mouthful even before you got around to tasting it. Some concoctions, such as seared rib eye Carpaccio with Sunkist jelly salad looked better suited to pleasing the judges than the taste buds of ordinary diners.
“When it comes to the word competition, people go a little bit haywire,” said Alan Palmer, who headed the panel of five judges who would select the team that would go on to the regional finals.
“I had to insist, today and yesterday, to ‘keep it plain and simple.’ If you have a nice piece of beef, cook it nicely, season it well, serve it up with a nice garnish. But no, they try to create something. They have sometimes tried too hard to be creative, foregoing (the more important elements) of taste and presentation.”
Photo: Ian Bartholomew, Taipei Times
Time was a major factor for competitors working against the clock, and sometimes focusing on one thing meant neglecting another.
“In some cases, elements that were on the menu were not on the plate,” Palmer said, suggesting that in some cases chefs simply had run out of time or forgotten what they had originally proposed. This meant losing valuable points.
“Some of the presentation was very nice,” Palmer said. He added, referring to a dish that he had just judged, “this last one, it had smoke, so it used the cloche, and it looked very nice, from a visual point. But then there was the issue of the raw rice.” Every dish had an almost architectural complexity, too many factors for some of the less experienced teams.
This is the first time that such a competition has been held in Taiwan. Davis Wu (吳秋衡), director of the US Meat Export Federation’s Taiwan office said that it was a chance for chefs to become familiar with a wider variety of ingredients.
“We want to encourage people in the food and beverage industry (in Taiwan) to use more creativity in preparing these agricultural products. This is especially important now that Taiwan is embracing a global market,” Wu said.
The styles on display at the competition were certainly international, but finding a signature style is not easily achieved, and the fallout from the struggle to use the required ingredients and create something that stood out from the crowd could be seen at the judging table. A lumpy blueberry mousse with walnuts was one of the dishes that signposted a wrong turn in the creative process.
As the judges cogitated over the scores, the teams themselves inspected each other’s creations with an eye for detail that may even have surpassed that of the judges. For all the competitors, this was intended as a learning experience and there were animated discussions about the piping of mashed potato and the consistency of sauces.
In the end, the teams from the big hotels, who had been the odds on favorites to win going into the competition, were knocked out by two young chefs, Li Dun-li (李敦立) and Lin Ying-wei (林盈緯) from the restaurant Bite 2 Eat (薄多義, reviewed in Taipei Times Sept. 16, 2011, p14). In the award ceremony, Palmer said that the teams from the three other qualifying rounds were already preparing intensively for the finals in Taipei this June, and that Taiwan’s food and beverage industry should get behind these outstanding chefs and give them all the support they need.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist