National Honey Board awards $8,000 in Culinary Institute of America scholarships to culminate Sweet 16 Honey Recipe Challenge

After intense deliberations, the National Honey Board named CIA student Perry Xu Cao, enrolled in the Hyde Park, N.Y., campus, the grand-prize winner of the inaugural “Sweet 16 Honey Recipe Challenge.” Cao was awarded the $5,000 scholarship for his Goat Cheese Tempura with Honey Dipping Sauces following a morning of fierce but friendly competition at the Aug. 20 Sweet 16 Honey Recipe Challenge’s “Final Four” cook-off event at CIA Greystone in St. Helena, Calif.

Cao’s winning recipe was a simple yet elegant appetizer featuring three varietals of honey infused with aromatics to create mouthwatering sauces, providing a delicious balance to the crispy, citrus-laced and savory goat-cheese tempura. His tempura recipe was inspired in part by his first kitchen job, making shrimp tempura. For the Sweet 16 Honey Recipe Challenge, Cao artfully concocted three dipping sauces, infusing three honey varietals (from ubiquitous clover to bold buckwheat) with floral essences and uniting them with spices and flavorful berries. The result is a mouthwatering appetizer that can be dressed up or down, suitable for white-tablecloth to fast-casual establishments. For high-volume applications, the dipping sauces can be prepared in advance and easily served using squeeze bottles. What’s more, the colorful sauces will complement a variety of savory items, including pork, chicken and vegetables.

The taco renaissance taking the nation by storm is spurred partly by innovative chefs. But Americans seem to have recently realized that just about anything tastes better and is more fun to eat when it’s nestled in a folded tortilla.

By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE, HAAC

At the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago, we keep our finger on the pulse of emerging food trends. What’s on the horizon in the taco realm? Fish tacos.

While fish tacos aren’t new, they’re not yet everywhere. After first tasting a Baja fish taco in Mexico, Ralph Rubio returned to San Diego to hand-craft his own recipe and introduced America to the fish taco in 1983. Now with dozens of restaurants in California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, Rubio’s still menus The Original Fish Taco® that started it all: sustainable wild Alaska pollock hand-dipped in seasoned beer batter and cooked to crispy perfection, then topped with Rubio’s white sauce, mild salsa and fresh cabbage and served on a warm stone-ground corn tortilla and garnished with a slice of lime.

A Washburne Culinary Institute instructor wins second prize, and students from Wisconsin and Indiana cook their way to cash awards in the 2012 Discover Duck Chef Recipe Contest.

Duck, a natural fit for today’s global cooking culture, was very evident in the 2012 Maple Leaf Farms Chef Recipe Contest. This year’s contest challenged entrants in two categories—professional chef and culinary student—to produce an original small-plate recipe showcasing Maple Leaf Farms duck. More than 250 entries from across the country were submitted in competition for the cash prizes.

Based on Mintel research, as age increases, so does the likelihood that adults are maintaining a mostly healthy diet.

Healthy eating has come to the forefront of many minds over the past several years with help from First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program and TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,” not to mention the extensive media coverage regarding the country’s growing obesity problem. Indeed, this increased interest in healthy eating is highlighted by new research from Chicago-based Mintel that reveals that just over two-thirds (67%) of Americans choose healthier foods to stay well.

Measuring digestibility, researchers find almonds provide 20% fewer calories than labels state. The results might have implications for other foods, as well.

A study conducted by scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and released in the August issue of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) provides a new understanding of almonds’ calorie count, showing that whole almonds provide about 20% fewer calories than originally thought.

At first glance, the study results beg the question: How can a food’s calorie count suddenly change when the composition of the food itself hasn’t?

The answer is that David Baer, PhD, and his team from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) used a new method of measuring the calories in almonds, which built on traditional methods and allowed the researchers to determine the number of calories actually digested and absorbed from almonds. Resulting data showed a 1 ounce serving of almonds (about 23 almonds) has 129 calories versus the 160 calories currently listed on the Nutrition Facts Panel. The results might have implications for certain other foods, as well.