A quail and a fish have helped a Paul Kane graduate take silver at a national skills competition.
Chef Peter Keith, 21, won silver at the 18th annual Skills Canada National Competition held May 13 to 16 at the Edmonton Expo Centre.
The event pitted about 500 of the top students from across the nation against each other in a battle of skills in some 40 different trade and technology areas.
Keith, who cooks at Edmonton's Hardware Grill, took second in the cooking/cuisine post-secondary category with a series of plates based on quail and salmon. He had won first in that category at the provincial skills competition held just two days before at the Expo Centre.
"To be ranked amongst the best is almost surreal," Keith said. "It still hasn't really sunk in."
Long-time coming
Staffers at Paul Kane's cafeteria were all hugs and smiles when Keith came to visit the day after his win.
Keith has kept up his presence at the school since he graduated in 2009 by acting as a coach for the school's high-school culinary challenge team, said Randy Kozak, head of career and technology studies at Paul Kane.
"He's the Iron Chef," Kozak said. "We bring him in whenever we do anything."
Keith said Kozak and the school have been very supportive of him over the last few years, especially when it comes to providing access to their kitchen so he can train.
"Anything I've needed, they've been the first to step up," Keith said.
This was Keith's first time at nationals and his fifth at provincials. It was also his last, as he'll be over the age limit next year.
It was incredible to finally grasp the gold at provincials after five years of trying, he said.
"I did the best food I could have possibly cooked and it turned out exactly how I wanted," he said.
Cooking challenge
Chefs were asked to cook an appetizer and a main course using quail and salmon at both provincials and nationals.
It was Keith's first time working with quail.
"It's a tiny, tiny little bird," he said, which makes it tough to work with.
"If you're not careful, you can lose a lot of the meat."
He decided to do three appetizers with the quail, starting with a cylindrical dish of deboned stuffed poached meat called galantine and followed with a citrus-marinated quail breast. He finished with a quail pot-pie.
"A big part of the way I like to cook is to keep things very simple and cook things everyone likes," Keith said. "It's not something you'd see on Iron Chef, but at the end of the day, it tastes really good."
His salmon dish used a technique called sous-vide, where ingredients are cooked inside a vacuum-sealed bag placed in a water bath. This lets you cook food for much longer than normal at lower temperatures, Keith explains, and helps draw out the flavours.
All this had to happen while the cooking area was swarming with kids, parents and judges.
"It can be chaos sometimes," he said.
The judges later told him that it came down to a photo finish between the top two competitors, Keith said.
"One of my mentors told me he felt that I had a gold medal performance," he said.
It would have been great to get the gold, "but I can be very proud of what I did," he said.
Keith said his time with Skills Canada has taught him the importance of confidence.
"Having confidence in your abilities and your skills can be the difference between a gold medal and last place," he said.
Trades jobs might not be that popular in white-collar St. Albert, but they're one of the best ways to do something you love, he said.
"For me, I can't picture myself doing anything else other than cooking."
Or competing, it seems – he may be done with Skills, but Keith says he's now a member of Culinary Team Alberta, which is aiming for the World Culinary Olympics later this year.
