Mobile chef represented province in national culinary competition
By Mark Squibb | Vol. 13 No. 3 (February 6, 2020)
Local chef and entrepreneur Kyle Puddester’s kitchen prowess landed him a spot representing Newfoundland and Labrador at a national culinary event this past week.
From Jan. 29 until Feb. 3, Puddester was in Ottawa for the Canadian Culinary Championship.
Puddester’s place in the competition didn’t happen by accident. First, Puddester had to compete in the regional competition in St John’s on Nov. 1, 2019. He competed against four other local chefs, and came out the gold medal winner.
Winning that competition allowed him to represent Newfoundland and Labrador at the national level.
“It was a great opportunity. I’m very proud of what we did,” said Puddester, adding that it was an honour to represent the province.
He had a sous chef, a personal friend from Halifax, and three students from Algonquin college, to aid him in his station.
The event kicked off in Ottawa on Thursday, Jan. 30; after introductions, media shoots and, of course, dinner, where the chefs received the key to their first competition; a bottle of mystery wine.
Chefs had to wake up Friday morning and, on a budget of just $500, buy ingredients to prepare a meal that would pair with the wine and feed roughly 350 attendees. For the dish, Puddester paired his wine (a Closson Chase Pinot Noir 2017) with mi cuit (half cooked) rainbow trout, with pear and fennel salad, citrus, walnut brittle, and vanilla buttermilk.
Saturday’s competition was a Black Box competition.
Each chef receives a box of seven diverse ingredients and upon opening their box, they must create a meal to please the most distinguished palate.
For this competition, the sous chef was not allowed in the kitchen until after the first 25-minutes, just to make things a bit more of a challenge.
Puddester opened his box to find elk, parsley root, phytoplankton, black kale, oats, berries and pickled fiddleheads.
All perfect ingredients for phytoplankton dusted, pan seared elk, oat porridge with kale, parsley puree, and fiddlehead chimichurri.
The third competition seems to be the easiest on paper— using your own ingredients, re-create your gold medal winning regional dish. For Puddester, that was a wild willow partridge dish that incorporated several local berries including blueberries and partridgeberries.
It actually turned out to be the most challenging, with the difficulty beginning before Puddester even set foot inside the kitchen
“We actually had some wild foraged blueberries and crowberries that were supposed to make it on to the dish, because part of the story of the dish was because that was what was in the crop of the bird” explained Puddester. “But when we arrived on Wednesday, West Jet actually had lost two very important bags of luggage. One was all my kitchen equipment, and my knives and a couple of different ingredients that we had to re-prep up there Thursday night, and all my clothes.”
By the time the luggage situation was straightened away on Thursday, there was a nasty surprise inside one of the suitcases.
“Somehow the berries had exploded over all my clothes. So, all my clothes were died blue. And we lost all the berries.”
He said that the two-hour time constraints and close quarters also made for a stressful final competition.
Puddester didn’t place in the top three, but still did get to rub shoulders with some of the best in the business and shed a little more light on the province’s culinary scene.
And, he got to do what he loves.
“It’s a chance to be creative. And you’re actually physically making something with your hands. I like being where we are, in such a small restaurant, where you get immediate feedback from people,” he explained. “It makes me happy to make other people happy, and to be able to be creative and make nice food and beautiful looking plates. It’s basically just like creating art, only it’s edible.”
Puddester began cooking in 2009. Him and his wife, Kayla O’Brien, run the 28-seat casual-fine dining Fork restaurant in Mobile. The restaurant began in 2017 as a seasonal pop-up restaurant operating out of the Irish Loop Coffee House in Witless Bay.
