Cooking for a Classic: Gummy bears and beef

How would you work gummy bears and a choice cut of beef into the same up-scale dinner?

That was one of the challenges facing the two chefs who competed in round two of the Cooking for a Classic fundraiser. The event uses a competition dining format to pit eight local chefs and their teams against each other, two at a time. The teams receive three secret ingredients and a curveball ingredient in the morning, and have all day to craft dishes that will impress diners and judges enough to win their votes and advance to the next round.

Cooking for a Classic, in its fourth year, is a fundraiser for The Lucy Daniels Center, with proceeds used to fund direct emotional and mental health services for children from birth to 12 years old. The winning chef drives away in the "classic" of the title, this year, a 2002 Chevrolet Corvette convertible.

Tuesday’s second round featured teams led by Blake Gotliffe of Under the Oak Restaurant and Kyle Teears of Whiskey Kitchen. Their secret ingredients sent many diners in the room straight to Google, looking up such words as “Kohlrabi” (you may have heard it called German turnip) and “Teres Major of Beef” (a beef tenderloin cut from the shoulder). The third ingredient, plums, was much more familiar, and the curveball ingredient was gummy bears. Overall, it was a motley crew of flavors, and diners were eager to see how they could all fit together.

Six rounds of creativity draw praise from judges, crowd alike

Each round is served blindly, meaning neither the audience nor the judges know which chef presented it until the event ends. Each chef must present a vegetarian appetizer, a protein, and a dessert.

The first appetizer out of the kitchen came from Gotliffe: a wispy presentation of pickled fennel, charred plum vinaigrette and crispy kohlrabi served on a whipped goat cheese. The presentation was airy and light and the flavors blended well together, combining the acid of the marinade with the fat of the goat cheese and the salt of the crisped kohlrabi.

Our second appetizer was Teears’ kohlrabi and oyster mushroom dumpling, served with a plum and gummy bear gastrique and pickled poblano chow chow. Knowing what was in it, many diners at my table tasted the gastrique first, to see what a plum and gummy bear concoction could be. We agreed that the gastrique was quite gummy-bear-forward – a phrase I never thought I would use. Taken together, as a meal is intended to be eaten, the dumpling and the plum and gummy bears complemented each other well, however.

Next up, the protein.

Gotliffe served a Seared Teres with a smoked kohlrabi puree, garlic chips, a plum jus and roasted mushrooms. The smoke dominated this dish for me, and I found a certain heaviness to it that left me seeking something to brighten the flavors; however, the judges all commented about how balanced they found this plate. Don’t worry though – I cleaned my plate with a smile on my face because it was still quite delicious.

Teears and his team presented a whiskey-soaked teres major with a Carolina Gold rice and corn cake, carrot puree, and charred leek demi. While the first course was not at all tough, this treatment of the teres allowed the beef to melt in my mouth. The diners at my table said they preferred this entrée because of the different textures added by the rice and corn cake and the lightness the carrot brought to the whole.

Then came dessert.

Anyone who has participated in competition dining before knows the cardinal rule of dessert: chocolate wins the crowd. Teears bypassed that rule, going instead for a gummy bear cheesecake with liqueur roasted plums and an almond crumble. The texture was spot on, the plums added the perfect tartness to the dish, and turning the gummy bears into a multi-colored gummi-wheel accent on top was a delicious touch.

The final dessert was Gotliffe’s milk chocolate cremeux with a flourless chocolate cake, plated with plum jam and gummy bear orange gel. That amounted to chocolate on chocolate with a splash of fruit to break it up, provided in three differing textures. Overall, this appeared to be the preferred dessert of diners at the tables adjacent to mine.

What did the judges think?

The evening’s three judges were Bryan Keller of Rosewater Kitchen & Bar, Serge Falcoz-Vigne of Bodega Tapas, Wine & Rum, and Dean Thompson of Concord Hospitality. Keller said he is new to the Raleigh restaurant scene, and that he is impressed by the camaraderie he sees here. Keller also pointed out the nerve that one chef had for bringing out gummy bears twice – once in the appetizer and once in the dessert round – saying, “whomever used gummy bears twice, wins.”

Thompson and Falcoz-Vigne are both veterans of competition dining events in the area, and spoke to the challenges of turning out 160 plates of delicious food with a plan crafted only that morning. Thompson specifically pointed out the work that goes into Teears’ handmade dumplings in the appetizer round, and the creativity of a gummy bear cheesecake. Thompson also pointed out the strategy of the size of the dishes. He said serving two or three bite dishes left you wanting more, and that’s what you want to do when you want someone’s vote – leave them wanting more.

Falcoz-Vigne said that in all three rounds, the dishes were “very different but very good”. He pointed out that there was not a single dish that he could point to over the night as being less than the rest. “We can taste the love they put into these dishes,” he said.

In the end, Chef Blake Gotliffe of Under the Oak Restaurant was declared the night’s winner. Gotliffe and his team will advance into the semifinal rounds. They will face Monday night’s winner, Chef Kevin Smith of 41Hundred and his team on Wednesday, March 4. Tickets for that event are still available.