At Culinary House this past weekend, two teams of chefs assembled on Saturday evening to do battle. They came ready with cooking equipment to use and recipes to modify. They were given an hour and a half and access to Culinary House's food and seasoning supplies, and told to make an appetizer, a meat dish, and a dessert.
This was the beginning of the Iron Chef competition, based on the TV show of the same name. Carleton's chapter of Slow Food International organized it to promote the way they believe food should be made: in people's homes, prepared by friends, preferably with locally-grown, organic, and sustainable ingredients, and without the rushed impersonality of fast food.
Ironically, during the Iron Chef competition, the food was prepared as quickly as possible by teams of opponents. The atmosphere of home cooking was still present, though – shelves of cookbooks and spices adorned the walls of the upstairs and downstairs kitchens where the rival teams worked.
Every dish made for the competition had to include a "secret ingredient," which, as far as I can tell from my limited culinary experience, is usually an ingredient which the chef knows about but does not reveal to the diners. But in the world of Iron Chef, it's an ingredient kept secret from the chefs themselves until the competition begins, at which point they have to incorporate it into everything they make.
Some of the participants speculated that it would have been easy to make apples the secret ingredient, since Culinary House still has many, many bags of unused apples left over from the extremely bountiful apple-picking runs at Fireside Orchard earlier this fall.
Team 2 had a hunch that it would be beets – they even had a plan to create caramel-apple-style dipped beets on a stick for dessert.
However, the expectations of all were confounded. The secret ingredient was sweet potatoes.
Though both teams started with sweet potatoes, the teams' plans diverged immediately from there: Team 1 made Sweet Potato-Squash Soup, and Team 2 made small orange Sweet Potato Puffs. A minor debate sparked up within Team 2 over whether the puffs should have sprigs of parsley sticking out of them like trees, and was eventually resolved by saving that idea for Team 2's meat dish, the Sweet Potato Curry. Team 1 cooked a Sweet Potato Savory Tart with Cheese for their meat dish.
As it happened, both meat dishes were vegetarian, which is not actually a violation of the rules.
For dessert, Team 1 baked a Sweet-Potato-Carrot-Apple Cake, while Team 2 did a Sweet-Potato-Apple Pie. I got to eat both desserts, and I am happy to report that they were both quite excellent.
The judges (students living in Culinary House) were harsher than I was in their critiques of everything – they said the pie was too juicy, and tried their best to act unamused by the parsley trees, as true professional connoisseurs must do. In the final point tally, Team 1 carried the day, which I'm sure must have been made possible by the fact that they cut their carrot slices into star shapes.
At the end of the day, though, as I'm sure Slow Food must have planned, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat were squashed by the presence of food, as both teams, the judges, the Slow Food organizers, and I sat down and ate everything. If all intense struggles had such delicious ends, we would live in a friendlier world.
