The Kapio Newspress

Issue date: 3/1/10 Section: News

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Meng-Ling Kuo Culinary students take lessons learned from the competition in New Mexico back home and use it to improve their culinary skills in the kitchen.

KCC culinary students participated in the American Culinary Federation's Western Regional Competition held Feb. 6 and 7 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The ACF competion has four regions: western, central, southeast and northeast. From these regions, there are subdivisions. The subdivision of the western region included Hawai'i, Colorado, Washington, California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon.

The Hawai'i team was made up of seven members: San Shopell, Anna Hirano, Meng-Ling Erik Kuo, Erin Tsukamoto, Kasey Watson, Lauren Hamai, Clifford Manansala.

Professor Alan Tsuchiyama and chef David Brown were the two coaches involved in managing the team.

"As a coach, my job is to help them to be better cooks and to give them tools. I do this all up until competition day. From there, it's up to them to put their knowledge to use. The anxiety is there because I can't do anything, but it's a time to relax," Tsuchiyama explained.

Even though the competition was in February, the students began training a few months before. The students put a lot of work into their training and had to balance that with classes.

"It's hard work. They worked through Christmas break, including a 14-hour day on Christmas Eve. They work a minimum of 40 hours a week on top of school," Tsuchiyama explains.

This is the eighth year that KCC has entered in culinary competitions 0and it has enabled the coaches and the students to become skillful in the challenges at the event.

The students are selected from two groups: students in the competition course and those who were on the previous team. An overlap (of returnees and new competitors) has proven successful, Tsuchiyama explains.

During the two-day competition, there was one food event held on the first day and two food events on the second day.

On the first day, the first competition was to serve a cold food platter for eight people; the theme was seafood. Tsuchiyama's philosophy going into the event was to use locally grown foods, but the team could not take everything to New Mexico. According to Tsuchiyama, the judges were impressed at the use of local foods.

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