The Chef’s Challenge 2018
Judging food events is always an educational experience. If you’ve never had the chance to do any structured food comparisons, or even if you have, remember the next Tour de Buffalo Wing is on Saturday. You are cordially invited. All of the information can be found here.
Attending food events can be equally illuminating.
Last Thursday, the Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region invited me and a guest to their annual fundraiser, The Chef’s Challenge. The Barefoot Aya was kind enough to accompany me around the room at Excelsior Springs, tasting the food, drink, and dessert offerings.
Maybe one of these days, I’ll be invited to be an official judge of this event. This year all three seats were auctioned off as part of the fundraiser. The way the contest works is that two chefs battle it out, cooking a three course meal in the middle of a banquet hall, with one mystery ingredient that has to find its way into all three dishes. This year, that ingredient was ricotta.
Returning champion Thomas Gulbrandsen from Excelsior Springs was going up against Krista Espinal from Malcolm’s in Schenectady. Amazingly, the official judges were at a near deadlock, and the contest was decided by a one point difference in the entree course.
But who won or lost wasn’t the big learning of the night. Here was my big takeaway:
Tour de Wings: Pine Hills-ish
Did yesterday’s story about judging burgers make you hunger for the excitement of participating in a food competition? Well the tours are a competition of sort. There is always a top pick, and while sometimes the favorite place is clear, on other outings participants are divided.
Regardless, it’s always fun, not to mention a tremendous learning experience. This time we’re going out for buffalo wings, and we’re heading to the big juicy middle of Albany where many of the students live. Pine Hills makes up a large part of it, but we may technically extend past the neighborhood’s official boundaries.
Last week, we opened the floor to nominations. Today, after carefully reviewing those nominations, I’m thrilled to announce the full slate of five local wing joints we’ll be visiting on Saturday, June 2.
Of course, before that happens, I should probably address a small handful of the issues that come up in the nomination phase.
Bursting With Burgers
Part of me feels like I failed you. As a judge in the New York Beef Council’s Best Burger contest, I didn’t think it would be right for me to lobby for a particular burger in the nomination phase of the promotion.
So it’s possible you may not even have known that the contest was under way. Surely, if I had taken a more active role, you would have helped to make sure Swifty’s deep fried buffalo burger scored a spot in the top ten.
This contest took place in three phases.
Phase one was public nominations, which were then whittled down to ten. Then came the voting on the top ten, with glamor shots of each featured burger. And once the field was narrowed down to four, a team of Yelp Elites went out to sample each of the burgers, and evaluate them on taste, texture, and appearance.
It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Actually, I got to be on a team with Steve N. who wrote up the experience on his newly redesigned blog. If you want pictures, or the details of the burgers, you’ll need to go to Steve’s site.
What I wanted to share was less the play by play, and more some of the deeper learnings.
Bourbon Chicken
Is there a mall food court anywhere in America that you can walk through and not be accosted by samples of bourbon chicken? I mean, typically there are two cups. One has a piece of breaded and fried chicken in a sweet and sticky sauce. The other is naked and permeated with a sweet and salty flavor.
Part of me always thought of these dueling samples as the angel and devil on your shoulder.
The fried one says, “Oh yeah, you know you want me. I’m hot, crispy, and delicious.”
The other one counters with, “But you know better than to eat fried foods, choose me.”
I have no data to support this, but my hunch is that when presented with a healthier option, people still go for a plate of deep fried chicken more times than not. Surely, there is some intense physiology and psychology going on. I think I once read about a similar phenomenon at McDonalds. The mere presence of salads on the menus allows the visitor the freedom to choose fries and a shake with a cleaner conscience.
With that in mind, I never paid that much attention to the salty brown cube of chicken. But it’s called bourbon chicken. And just yesterday I happened to stumble onto a recipe to make it at home.
Dios mio.
A Beautiful Night for a Walk
Saturday was a bleak and rainy day.
If you were smart, you spent the afternoon inside the Albany Institute of History and Art drinking beer with some local brewers who decided to skip out on the larger Saratoga Springs beer festival held outside in the rain.
Actually, one of the brewers had been at both, and walked in a little waterlogged, although none the worse for wear.
Spring.
I’m perfectly willing to put up with a little Saturday rain if it means late sunsets, cool evenings, and temperate days. Even though it got warm yesterday, I felt totally comfortable opening the windows and hard boiling a batch of eggs for the week. The Fussys have settled on the ten minute egg as our hard boiled egg of choice, for the moment.
Walking is great whenever.
These days I’m starting to sound like a broken record when it comes to the joys of walking around the city. My hope in telling you all about the experience is to try and normalize this weird and freakish behavior in an effort to get more people to enjoy more of our fair city.
Five One Ate Day
Today isn’t a holiday… yet.
Do you follow CulinaryMary7 on Instagram. I’ve known her for a few years now, and she may have been the first person to push the 51Ate hashtag. While there may be some people who are enjoying Troy, spreading Albany love, or preaching that Schenectady does not suck, there seem to be fewer people who are Capital Region proud.
Some people might say we have an inferiority complex. But we could definitely use more regional pride. Whatever is going on, it’s certainly complicated. We don’t need to untangle all of that today.
Today is May 18. Now if April 20 is an unofficial holiday for marijuana smokers, and May 4 is an unofficial holiday for Star Wars fans, I think today should be an unofficial holiday for Capital Region eaters. I’m not entirely sure what we should do to celebrate. However, there are a couple local businesses who have started to capitalize on the date.
Freezer Scraps
Cooking. I love to do it. The idea of taking raw ingredients and transforming them into something entirely different is almost like a kind of magic.
I can’t remember when I last made a pot roast. It must have been some time this winter. But you start off with a large raw piece of beef. Mine probably was some form of chuck roast. On it’s own, the cut is tough, and super fatty. That’s one reason why it’s good ground up into hamburger.
But you can also sear it to develop flavor, deglaze the pan with onions, deglaze those browned onions with stock, wine, tomatoes, or all three, and throw in some other aromatics for good measure. After hours of very slow simmering, you’re left with something so meltingly tender, rich, and delicious, the idea of turning it into hamburger feels like a crime.
Ant that’s coming from someone who love hamburgers.
So, when I cook, I make things in quantity. The chuck roast I started with was sizeable. It fed my family for several days, in many forms. But I guess we didn’t finish it all. Because last night, in a fit of panic trying to put together a quick dinner, I found a small chunk of it buried in the back of the freezer.
It felt almost like striking gold.
How can a rock-hard six-ounce piece of frozen braised chuck roast feed a family of four in thirty minutes or less? I’m glad you asked. Part of the secret is keeping a whole bunch of reserved fats on hand. The other is pantry staples.
Nominations for Tour de Wing: Pine Hills
Spring chicken.
It’s spring. And if memory serves correctly, the FLB tries to organize a quarterly food tour. Sure, this past winter’s tour was on the outside edge of the season, but that didn’t stop us from going around Schenectady in search of the best NY Style Pizza Slice.
Perhaps the biggest learning from that tour was that NY Style Pizza might be held in too high regard, at the expense of other, more delicious forms of the dish. I’m not entirely sure I agree, but let’s table that discussion for now.
Because it’s spring, and that means chicken. It used to be that spring was time for our tours of frozen treats. We’ve done soft serve, gelato, homemade hard, and frozen yogurt. But then the summer tour was left for something savory. After the Tour de Italian Deli, I decided never again would we eat spicy meaty treats during the hottest months of the year.
That’s when we made the switch to the spring savory tours. So if you had your heart set on something sweet and cold, you’re just going to have to wait a couple more months.
Today is the day to not only announce the date of the next tour, but also to open the floor up to nominations. So put those thinking caps on, grab your calendar and a pencil, and let’s get geared up for the Tour de Wing: Pine HIlls Edition.
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