Tracey Sweeting, award-winning chef of Bahamas Culinary Classic and international Culinary Olympics fame, returned from the Martinique Culinary Arts Festival this past October with another of the region’s most prestigious culinary honours added to his already full trophy case — the Madin’ Gastro Kannari D’or (Golden Pan) Award.
Organized by the Corporation of Cooks and Pastry Cooks of Martinique, the Caribbean chefs’ culinary challenge was designed to reinforce the relationships between the culinary professionals of the Caribbean, develop their competitive spirit and promote the revaluation of local produce.
The only native-English speaking candidate in the field of seven Francophones vying for the coveted honour, Chef Sweeting did not count on bringing the gold home this time. The other chefs, favourites from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti, made formidable opponents, he admitted, but ones that he would ultimately overcome despite the myriad of other challenges he would meet during the course of the competition.
The invitation reached Chef Sweeting through the Ministry of Tourism and The Bahamas Hotel Association who were looking for top chefs to represent The Bahamas at the premier Martinique festival. “They just asked if anybody was interested in doing it,” said Chef Sweeting, who turned out to be the sole applicant from The Bahamas. “Nobody else came forward, so I said ‘okay, let me try’. I wanted the challenge and it turned out to be a real challenge indeed.”
For Sweeting, sous chef at the Radisson Cable Beach Resort, the first challenge lay in the daunting language barrier. He was facing his first advanced level solo competition in a foreign country and pitied by his fellow contestants and the Quebecois judges because he did not speak the language. “They were telling me, ‘you don’t speak French, I feel so sorry for you’,” he recalled.
And not only was he unfamiliar with the language, he was also new to their regular diet. The competition called for Sweeting to create an original three-course meal, developing entrees featuring five key ingredients. No difficulty there, except that three of the five were items totally alien to this Bahamian chef. Chicken and crayfish he had prepared many times, but this would be his first encounter with rabbit, octopus and cobia – a large tropical game fish also known as black salmon.
“Now, I’d never worked with rabbit before in my life; never worked with cobia, never with octopus,” he said, although these items were the main ingredients and carried the most points. Fortunately, this exotic shopping list was provided to him three weeks in advance and gave him a chance to do what any other culinary professional would: “I ordered a few rabbits and I went to town on them, learning their texture, how to break them down and how to work with them.” He soon found out that rabbit has a consistency akin to chicken.
The cobia proved a greater challenge because he would not come face to face with it until the day of competition. The octopus he tackled with a simple island policy: treat it like conch. “I marinated the octopus and prepared it like cracked conch,” Sweeting explained. “The texture is similar to conch so I tried to see how I could incorporate items that I never used before into what we do well in The Bahamas. It was a crossover; a fusion and it came out pretty good. I just kept changing the dishes to come up with what I deemed to be the right presentation and use of flavours.”
Preparation for the Martinique competition helped to foster Sweeting’s own creativity during The Bahamas Culinary Festival where he and the Radisson team won a total of 19 medals, gold, silver and bronze. Shortly thereafter, he left for Martinique with about $3,000 worth of “bought, borrowed, or rented” equipment in tow, thanks to Chef Edwin Johnson, Genevieve Bullard, Barbara Barnes, and Renee McKinney of Cable Beach Resorts, The Bahamas Hotel Association and The Bahamas Culinary Association.
“What I learned in Martinique is that I didn’t have to speak the language to cook,” said Sweeting. “As with all competitions, we went in with someone favoured to win. In our case it was a guy from Martinique, but I spoiled that plan because after I finished cooking and presented my dishes, that was it.” If he was anxious about being a stranger or trepidatious about working in an unfamiliar, ill-equipped kitchen, he hid it well, choosing instead to show confidence, even to the extent of naming his culinary creations after the award they would soon earn him. His Tropical Kannari D’or (Golden Pan) Seafood Sampler blew the judges away.
Despite the obstacles, Chef Sweeting considers this win a different kind of victory. “It was harder,” he said. “In a predominantly French competition I don’t know how The Bahamas got involved, but it demonstrates to me that we are further ahead in the culinary arts than we think. I love challenge and I went in thinking, ‘let me see what these chefs are all about’. I wanted to see where they were in terms of skill level and creativity and to measure myself on where I am. After this experience I feel like I’m on the right path.”
In the end the Quebecois chefs who pitied him eventually invited him to participate in an advanced competition in Quebec. He dedicates his Golden Pan award to his three-year-old daughter Taniah. “Everything I do is for her,” he said.
Source: The Bahama Journal
