Tastebuds were tempted at last week’s Sujon BC Blueberry Creative Cuisine Competition. The competing chefs delivered on the innovation-front with an array of dishes that placed blueberries firmly centre stage.
If a mouth-watering blueberry lemon cheesecake, a tastebud-teaser blueberry chocolate sponge or a slow roasted salmon with a little blueberry Aigre Doux, don’t move you, then probably nothing will!
Held in Wellington, the event drew together seven chefs from the Weltec School of Hospitality student body. They were to test their skills in designing a dish that showcased the blueberries in all their radiant glory and mouth-watering temptation.
We wanted to create an event that would showcase both the versatility of our frozen blueberries and at the same time establish relationships with up and coming chefs from local regions. “The idea is that we can provide the chefs with a versatile product they can apply their creative instincts too and come up with new and innovative ways to use these fantastic blueberries.
This year’s competition was judged by Frank Prskawetz and Ray Morrell who are both Patisserie and Cookery Tutors at Weltec School of Hospitality. Their’s was a challenging task but also a majorly rewarding one as they got to sample some simply delicious dishes and spot some unique talent among the competing chefs. The judges selected Jasmine Beech’s Blueberry Lemon Cheesecake as the overall winner. Runners up who caught the imagination of the judges, were Anna Kong, who created a blueberry chocolate sponge cake and Tom Thorpe with his slow roasted salmon with wilted greens, blueberry aigre doux and crispy kumara .
Sujon plans to make the competition an annual event and stage it in different regions around the country each year. In this way the company intends to keep it’s frozen BC blueberries at the forefront of the creative cuisine industry.
One aspect of the competition was that the competitors got to assess the quality of the frozen blueberries and their suitability for creating various dishes – something very important to Sujon’s desire to be always leading innovation in the cuisine industry.
Our family has been proudly sourcing the world's best blueberries from the British Columbia (BC) region in Canada for over 22 years.
The delicious flavour and consistent shape of the BC berries is something that always stood out to us and interestingly was also commented on by the contestants in our creative cuisine competition.
Follow us @sujonberries to see more videos and recipes from the Creative Cuisine Competition.