UM Iron Chef...sort of

Last week, a student named Bryce came to the office asking for two ETAs to serve as judges for the Dormitory Students’ Association (DSA) cooking competition. Susan and I ended up going, which worked out well considering Susan is the biggest food critic and I am the most experienced chef among the four of us heh. We were joined by two UM students, Ben and Ian, who could also have been considered “impartial” since they were from Mozambique and the teams were mostly cooking Chinese dishes from various regions =P

Putting up the banner for DSA "Dormitory Week"

Originally, the roster included an intimidating twelve teams (I really didn’t think I had the patience/stomach capacity to try twelve different things), but there were enough no-shows that the final roster was whittled down to eight or so. The judging criteria were taste, presentation, creativity, and nutrition, each out of a possible 25 points. As the students were preparing their entries, Susan and I walked around to chat a little…

Semi-ironically, the dorm was having fire safety training in the courtyard right next to us

Stir-frying on a hot plate hehe

Kneading dough o_O

Two teams hard at work

To be honest, the whole thing was rather disorganized. There didn’t seem to be any preset rules about what kind of food the students were supposed to cook, or any pre-arranged focus ingredient as there is in the real Iron Chef. We had everything from appetizers (e.g. chicken wings) to main entrees (e.g. noodles or spare ribs) to dessert (e.g. cake covered in whipped cream), so it was clearly a bumpy playing field. Some photos of the entries below:

Spare rib pieces with sweet 'n sour sauce plus pineapple chunks
(sauce way too sweet, plus overcooked broccoli = yuck)

This won my top ratings for creativity (counting effort) and nutrition: hand-made noodles (that's what the aforementioned dough was for) plus veggies and tomato/egg sauce

A crock pot-made broth with carrot and red dates

The cake smothered in whipped cream (it was supposed to be chocolate but it wasn't the least bit chocolaty...at least the strawberries added flavor)

It doesn't look like much, but this got top ranked for taste: spare rib stewed in an anise-flavored broth

At the end of the night, we handed in our score sheets – Bryce would tally them up and announce the winner at the end of the “UM Dormitory Week” on April 10, so we actually don’t know who won =P We made some suggestions for improving next year’s competition, e.g. informing all contestants that they have to prepare a certain type of dish (e.g. an appetizer) or feature a specific ingredient (e.g. eggs), as well as simplifying the scoring (just rank the best to worst for each category). Still, it was a pretty fun way to spend a Wednesday night, and now I have more ideas for things to cook (or avoid cooking!) on my own =D