Taiwanese jam and preserve maker Ke Ya (柯亞) lauded the importance of using local ingredients in cuisine, after winning top prizes in a prestigious marmalade competition in the UK on Friday last week.
Since 2005, the World’s Original Marmalade Awards have celebrated the citrus fruit preserve as a quintessentially British part of breakfast.
Ke, the founder of Keya Jams, said that she was as surprised as anyone to be going home from the competition in Penrith, England, with two gold, two silver and two bronze awards — an unprecedented honor for a Taiwanese participant.
Photo: CNA
“It is like if Taiwan held a braised pork on rice competition and some foreigner took the top prize,” she said, adding that the event this year involved close to 3,500 marmalade samples from 40 nations.
One marmalade, which uses kumquats from Yilan County as its base, with a splash of bitter orange and yellow lemon, won gold for having interesting ingredients and another because it pairs well with fish dishes, Ke said.
The company’s signature marmalade, a mandarin orange and Kavalan whiskey mix, won silver in the interesting ingredients category and another for pairing well with meat dishes, as well as bronze in the alcoholic marmalades category, she said.
The last entry, another kumquat-based recipe flavored with Earl Gray tea and white wine, won bronze for pairing well with fish dishes, Ke said.
Two other preserve makers, one based in the Netherlands and another in Syria, also went home with two gold medals, although Keya Jam’s kumquat, bitter orange and yellow lemon was the only marmalade to receive a perfect score of 20, she said.
Making jams and preserves is a passion she accidentally discovered a decade ago while recuperating from an illness at her family home in Changhua County, Ke said.
Her interest in jams and preserves was piqued when her foray into making strawberry jam from a spur-of-the-moment purchase at the local traditional market went badly, she said, adding that she had rarely cooked prior to that.
She researched seasonal fruits, experimented with tea and wine pairings and collected sugars from around the world for jam making, which turned into a career, Ke said.
Taiwanese agriculture is highly developed and the nation possess the rare ability to cultivate temperate and tropical fruits in the same soil, she said, adding that she is proud her marmalades could raise the profile of the nation’s fruits on the international stage.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS