We are World Culinary Champion

Singapore chefs serve up a winner

AFTER creating seven Chinese dishes in four hours, a Singapore team took the trophy at the World Culinary Contest at the 2005 Taipei Chinese Food Festival on Sunday.

SAVOURING THEIR VICTORY: Award-winning chef Austin Ong (second from left) and his team. Participating teams were required to present an appetiser, a soup, four main courses of seafood, meat, poultry and vegetables, rounding off with a dessert.

The competitors were not informed of the ingredients they would be supplied with until the last minute.

Among the dishes prepared by the Singapore team, led by Mr Austin Ong, were a crab salad, black-bone chicken soup, eel, two-flavour squid, red-grain pork stew and white bitter melon.

Their dishes were highly praised by the judges from France, the United States, Japan, Germany and Hong Kong, reported the Taiwan News. Mr Stanley Yen, the head organiser, said that non-Chinese judges have been invited this year to provide a broader perspective on Chinese cuisine.

'You need to treat your dishes like you treat your wife. You need to love them,' said Mr Ong, who is a chef at the Grand Hyatt Singapore hotel.

The Singapore team of five revealed that on the eve of this year's contest, they had spent more than 10 hours devising recipes for ingredients likely to be picked by the organisers.

Teams from Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong and Beijing also took part in the contest, held at the Taipei World Trade Centre.

from The Straits Times Interactive
9 August 2005