The classic Iron Chef competition, well known on television for its high intensity premise of having renowned chefs cook a full course meal in a given time limit with a secret ingredient, arrived at RPI last Saturday.
Circle K hosted the event to raise funds for the Heifer Project, which is an international humanitarian organization dedicated to ridding world hunger and improving the land. This is accomplished by sending a variety of livestock, such as heifers, llamas, and water buffalo, or trees and honey bees to help the Earth. The proceedings from the raffle and t-shirt sales also went to the Heifer Project. The DVD detailing what the project does was playing in the background on the project entire time.
The competition itself, however, was not a one-hour energetic competition like the television show; the eight teams arrived with precooked food all containing the secret ingredient, animal crackers, revealed beforehand. Also, the recipes were submitted earlier to make sure the foods were proper and safe.
There may not have been much to watch, so fans of the show would be somewhat disappointed, but there was plenty to enjoy in terms of eating. All of the teams prepared at least one or two courses with animal crackers involved somehow, and every recipe showed innovativeness with the animal cracker requirement. The prepared foods ranged from animal cracker breaded fried haddock with sweet and sour sauce, to animal cracker chocolate strawberry pudding. It was all a lot of fun to eat. Collectively the teams prepared such diverse courses that it made the meal that night one of the oddest and most savory I’ve had in some time.
There was an hour and a half allotted for tasting and judging. Then the call for all final judgments was put in, and at this point they tallied up the scores and decided the winner. First the Troy-area businesses that donated to the program were all announced and applauded, and then the raffle winner was announced and given a gift basket. Then the 2008 RPI Iron Chef was announced; the winner was the Bray Bombers, who were awarded for their beer-battered shrimp, coconut banana tappers, ranch-dipped animal cracker chicken tenders and animal-cracker éclair cake. They all received a selection of gift cards and a gold Iron Chef medal.
It was a fun night overall, and I would definitely go again just to experience all the different kinds of tasty food, if not compete and try to work with some odd secret ingredient.
