On March 2, 16 students competed in the Tech Chef competition organized by CHEFS, a cooking club at Tech, Stamps Health Services, GT Dining Services and the GT Campaign for EveryBody.
The winner of this year’s competition was ME grad student Sathyanarayanan Raghavan and her two sous chefs from the entrée division. Her entry consisted of a biryani with mango, shredded mango seasoned with chili powder and mustard; amrus, a kind of mango yogurt; a salad with homemade sprouts and fried dumplings. Raghavan, who was also the winner of last year’s competition, received an engraved chef’s knife for her efforts.
…winners included a mango beignet stuffed with mango filling and topped with a sweet mango crème sauce…
Tech Chef was inspired by Iron Chef, a popular Japanese cooking show from the 1990s. The competition featured three competition categories: breakfast, entrée and dessert.
Teams of one to three students had 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the category, to prepare a dish featuring a key ingredient. For this year’s competition, the key ingredient was mango. After the cooking period ends, a panel of judges tastes and evaluates each dish and decides upon a winner for each category. After all three competition categories, the final scores are tallied and one overall winner is declared.
Other category winners included a mango beignet stuffed with mango filling and topped with a sweet mango crème sauce in the breakfast category and a mango puff pastry made with mango crème and topped with fresh mango in the dessert category.
The judging panels for each of the three categories were drawn from both local chefs and chefs from Tech’s dining services. One of the pastry category judges, Jeffrey Gardener, was an Atlanta chef who competed in the Chopped competition on Food Network.
A major ideas behind the competition was to promote healthy and delicious meals to help promote better life styles. As part of the submission requirements, competitors were required to submit a recipe and nutritional data for the dish to meet certain nutritional standards.
According to Health Services’ website, “The goal is to help students plan and create delicious and nutritionally balanced meals, while understanding nutritional concepts.”