Student chefs soar in Air France competition

Nation's Restaurant News, June 15, 1992 by Florence Fabricant

In April, Air France held the final round of its first student chefs competition. The contest, open to American culinary students and apprentices, was designed to foster an exchange of culinary ideas and training between France and America.

In the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, each of the six finalists was given a market basket of ingredients with which to devise a main dish and appropriate accompaniments. The dishes were served to a panel of six judges: Pierre Franey, chef and food writer; John Mariani, food writer; Gregory Usher, director of the Ecole Ritz-Escoffier in Paris, which was awarding one-week courses to the winner and two finalists; Teresa Farney, vice president for consumer affairs of the National Turkey Federation, one of the sponsors; Helmut Hamann, president of the International Chefs Association; and me.

To reach this level of the contest, the students first had to submit recipes to a panel of food experts. More than 100 entries were screened before selection of the six finalists. Each of the finalists was from a different program, for example, The Culinary Institute of America, Johnson & Wales University, the California Culinary Academy and the Colorado Culinary Institute.

The main source of protein in the mystery basket was turkey tenderloin, thanks to the Turkey Federation's co-sponsorship of the contest. Among the other ingredients were assorted vegetables like peppers, mushrooms, potatoes, Swiss chard and zucchini, plus cranberries. The chefs did not have to use every ingredient, and they could also request kitchen staples.

The winner was Gregory A. Maggi from the California Culinary Academy. His dish was a roasted tenderloin of turkey with a mushroom and Swiss chard stuffing, served on a bed of roasted red and yellow bell peppers with a cranberry reduction sauce. The sauce called for cranberries, chicken stock, white wine and cream. Also on the plate were turned vegetables and duchesse potatoes.

As with the other contestants' plates, there was a great deal going on in this dish - too much, perhaps. But Maggi's creation was the only one that had lush sauce on the plate to function as a liaison for what was a rather disparate collection of ingredients. That element as much as his technical expertise and the professionalism of his presentation made the judges unanimous in their decision to award him the grand prize.

The other contestants, whose plates tended to have some watery, underseasoned liquid masquerading as "jus" on them or whose dishes came without any sauce element at all, were asked about their approach.

They explained to the judging panel that in the course of their studies they had come to understood that Americans do not want sauces on their food and prefer to avoid all fat except olive oil. The student chefs were proud of cooking with mere driblets of olive oil and no butter. One contestant made turkey sausage with no fat at all.

It is undeniably essential that chefs learn how to reduce the fat in classic preparations and even to replace it with other flavorful elements. But if this contest is any indication, it seems that students and apprentices lack sufficient training to handle this most challenging aspect of contemporary cuisine.

Instead of attempting to impress the panel with the sheer quality of their expertise, the students somehow felt the judges might be dazzled by what they could do with little fat. Unfortunately, they failed to understand how much more experienced a chef must be to achieve satisfying results on a low-fat diet.

Another of the students created pan-roasted turkey tenderloin with a cranberry infusion and wild mushroom jus accompanied by lattice Idaho potatoes, a flan of zucchini and yellow squash and a confetti of red and yellow peppers. In another example of the misplaced fear of fat, the lattice potatoes were baked, not fried, so they came out unattractively limp.

Finally, to compound their misperception, the concepts tended to be overly busy. In many cases color, as it functions as an element of eye appeal, was ignored. If this is the wave of the future, it's time to pile up the sandbags and head for higher ground before we drown in "jus."