Two Paul Kane chefs are back from Brazil this week bearing gold medals and wild tales of cooking – tales that include ducks, presidents and the rock band KISS.
Paul Kane graduate Peter Keith won gold in the culinary arts category last week at the 2012 Worldskills Americas competition in SÃo Paulo, Brazil – an event that pitted about 870 young tradespeople from North, South and Central America against each other in 50 different contests of skill.
His cooking coach, Paul Kane culinary arts teacher Randy Kozak, was also there as a judge.
Keith beat about 11 other chefs to win gold for Canada in the culinary arts category, and received a second award for having the highest overall score on Team Canada.
The awards ceremony was spectacular, Keith said, featuring laser lights, smoke machines, loud music, air-horns, acrobats and about 3,000 cheering fans in a hot, packed stadium. "Our ears were ringing for two to three days after."
There was tremendous energy in the room, said Kozak, with many award recipients kissing the stage and crying tears of joy after they received their medals.
"It's big for a lot of them," he said.
It was a wild end to an even wilder year of competition for Keith. Just back from winning gold at the Culinary Olympics last month, he had just three weeks in which to prepare for this event.
"I knew this was a huge opportunity," Keith said, so he poured everything he had into his preparations. "I was getting two to three hours of sleep a night."
The contest itself involved 22 hours of cooking, during which chefs had to prepare specific dishes using mystery ingredients. It ran from Nov. 13 to 18.
The first day of competition was cancelled due to massive organizational problems. "I'd say about a quarter of the ingredients were missing," Keith said, as was much of the equipment – he had just one frying pan when he needed four, for example. "I spent half an hour trying to get butter."
Many of the competitors had to wait hours to even get into the venue due to a visit from Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, whose presence caused security staff to search everyone at the door. Ironically, Keith noted, this meant that there weren't many competitions going on for Rousseff to see.
Of greater concern to Keith was how he would explain to the security detail the razor-sharp, 10-inch cooking knives he had with him. As it turned out, the guards didn't even check his knife bag when they searched him.
"That tight security really wasn't so tight after all," he said.
There were even some safety hazards, Kozak said, such as power bars placed under leaky sinks.
"We were joking about CSA standards and BSA standards," he said. (The Brazilian equivalent to the Canadian Standards Association, or CSA, appears to be the Brazilian Association for Technical Standards, or ABNT.)
The rest of the contest was plagued by five power outages, Kozak noted, the last of which he suspects was caused by the band KISS doing a sound check across the street. The problems gave him new respect for the smooth operation of Canadian skills events.
Keith said he had to grapple with strange ingredients, many of which had wholly different tastes and textures from Canadian ones. (The cream was like yoghurt, for example.)
"You can't just assume you can cook the dish the same way you do in Canada," he said.
Not ducky
He also had to deal with a missing duck. He planned to make a duck appetizer on the second day, he explained, but found out that the kitchen was duck-less when he arrived.
When Keith told the judges that he needed the bird within three hours, they sent someone on a motorbike weaving through traffic to get it. "I'm picturing a James Bond car chase," he said.
As zero-hour ticked ever closer, Keith said the judges gave him a minute-by-minute account of the duck's delivery. "It was like running the Olympic flame."
Finally, several minutes late, the chief judge rushed up to his station with the duck in hand.
It was frozen, and therefore useless.
His plans ruined, Keith turned to his backup bird: chicken.
"That was kind of the story of the whole competition," Keith said: improvisation and snap decisions. While other chefs were often scrambling, he said his skill and experience let him keep his cool. "If this had been three to four years ago, I would have been freaking out."
Kozak tried to tip the odds in Keith's favour by planting a lucky loonie under his stove. They still have the coin, he added, and took it on stage with them at the awards ceremony.
It was a great way to finish his career in Skills, Keith said – he's now too old to participate in student events. "This year has been one amazing experience after the next," he said, "and this one really tops it all."
Kozak said he would now start looking for Paul Kane's next champion chef.
As for Keith, he said he planned to go on vacation in Thailand. "Just eating, though. No cooking."
