Two St. Albert students are enjoying the sweet taste of victory this week after taking silver and bronze in a regional high school culinary competition.
Grade 11 student Anke Jacobs of Paul Kane and Grade 12 student Charlotte Campbell of Bellerose Composite took second and third place, respectively, in the 14th annual High School Culinary Challenge, the winners of which were announced April 26.
The Challenge is an Edmonton-area contest that showcases the talents of young chefs, said judge and Paul Kane alumni Peter Keith.
The Challenge is typically a one-day event done in person at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology where teams compete to create three dishes under a tight time limit. Due to the pandemic, this year’s event was a solo and online affair, which Keith said made it tricky to judge.
“Cooking competitions are normally heavily focused on taste, and we didn’t see a way to do that in a safe and feasible matter in 2021,” Keith said.
This year’s event asked 22 Edmonton-area high school students to create an original appetizer, entrée or dessert (or all three) that highlighted local Alberta ingredients. Students had from Jan. 16 to March 24 to perfect their dishes and submitted photos, recipes, and videos to the judges for evaluation.
“We could tell quite a bit from the photos,” Keith said, such as whether something was overcooked, and it was a fun challenge to think about how the different ingredients would have tasted when assembled.
Just desserts
Jacobs and Campbell said this was their second time competing in the Challenge. Campbell said this year’s event was easier than the last one, as she got to work in her own kitchen.
Jacobs, who works in the St. Albert Sobey’s bakery, said she picked the dessert category due to her interest in pastry art.
“Seeing people enjoying something after a long day or having a fresh-baked cookie right out of the oven … it just makes me happy to see other people enjoy it.”
The dessert contest gave competitors three hours to produce something that used eggs, sauce, sugar, whipped cream, chocolate garnish and a piping bag, Campbell said. She went with a chocolate lava cake with milk chocolate and raspberry liqueur filling sprinkled with nuts, supplemented with a white chocolate garnish and a raspberry sauce made with berries she picked the previous summer.
Jacobs produced a choux pastry (giant cream puff) filled with vanilla bean mousse filling and a berry compote, garnished with sugar baskets stuffed with mousse and fruit.
“I wanted to represent the flavours I know and I grew up with,” she explained, so she loaded her dish with raspberries, blueberries and blackberries from Superstore.
Campbell said plating her dish proved to be a challenge, as she didn’t have much time to work with before the cake cooled and lost that “flowing lava” effect.
She and Jacobs both fed their dishes to their families, who gave them rave reviews.
“My family decided to eat dessert for dinner that night,” Jacobs said.
“We were pretty full after that.”
Campbell and Jacobs said they were thrilled with how they did in the challenge, with Jacobs saying she screamed to her family when she stumbled upon the results online. Both were impressed by the other winning entries.
Keith said this year’s winners would get premium cooking tools and a chance to apply for culinary scholarships at NAIT.
Campbell said she was off to Memorial University in Newfoundland this fall to earn a science degree and hopes to keep cooking as a hobby.
Jacobs said she hopes to take part in next year’s Challenge and was eagerly awaiting the results of the Skills Canada Alberta competition she participated in earlier this spring. (Results were to be announced May 13.)
Visit highschoolculinarychallenge.ca for pictures of this year’s winning dishes.
