Young Chef of the Year👨‍🍳

Young Chef of the Year Competition 🍴

We recently visited Writhlington School for the Young Chef of the Year Competition! A group of talented Year 9 students from schools across the region went head to head and showcased their culinary skills. The quality of the dishes was exceptional, all of their practising and research prior to the event was very clear! The students were all judged based off their presentation, kitchen cleanliness, dish quality & originality.

Arthur David were a sponsor for this competition along with The Food Heroes, we supplied most of the ingredients that the students used, as well as supplying prizes for the winner. This included a fine foods hamper, breakfast at The Woodford, Chew Magna & a site tour at Arthur David! We really enjoyed getting to see what dishes the students could come up with when using our ingredients, it was great to see that everyone was able to create their own unique meals and use our ingredients in a range of different ways.

Steve Shore, Patryk Wieczorek and Sean Horwood were all judges for this competition, Patryk & Sean also delivered a masterclass to all the students at the start of the day. Steve Shore is our development Chef at Arthur David, and was also a judge last year! Demonstrating their phenomenal cooking expertise, Patryk, who is a chef at Babington,  created an amazing Ravioli with a lemon filling. Sean is a chef at The Centurion and made a great Tom Yum soup including scallops. The students got involved and partook in the masterclass, they then all tasted the food after and got a print out recipe of the dish that the chefs demonstrated so that they can try at home!

Whilst the Students were busy cooking, the judges walked around and gave advice as well as finding out about each students dish and technique, which helped them judge at the end. There was a variety of meals made including duck, swede curry, salmon pasta and Venison, you can imagine the smell's in the kitchen were amazing!! They all had an hour and a half to create their best work and have it ready to serve to all of the judges.

Steve and the other judges each tried some of every dish and came to a decision together for who was going to be 1st, 2nd, 3rd & who was going to get the award of cleanliest work station. A huge congratulations to Elliot who was awarded the Young Chef of the Year, Elliot won with his Tom Yum Soup which was bursting with flavour, along with his handmade dumplings! Elliot was focused throughout the entire competition and had practised multiple times, which clearly paid off!

Young Chef of the Year Winner - Elliot W👏

Imogen Tincknell - Marketing Apprentice