This year’s Best Bajan Cook Competition is yet to be completed and already the organisers are looking forward to next year.
Chief executive officer of the National Cultural Foundation (NCF), Cranston Browne, said the foundation was looking at having preliminaries for the Best Bajan Cook Competition 2015, based on the response from this year’s inaugural event.
He was speaking as the NCF launched its Roberts NIFCA Culinary Arts Arena And Expo, starting today and running until Sunday, at the Gymnasium of the Garfield Sobers Sports Complex. The weekend event will feature a celebrity showcase, a mixology competition, various workshops and a junior duelling chefs competition.
The response has been so overwhelming that Browne said the NCF was looking at making the Best Bajan Cook Competition an annual event on its NIFCA calendar.
“I think next year, for the Best Bajan Cook, we will probably have to do preliminaries because this year, we started a bit late so we had to turn back some persons, but next year we don’t want to be turning back anybody,” he said, adding that the event could grow into a “massive celebration”.
Browne explained that the event was a new thrust to focus on the culinary arts which, he said, were often neglected in favour of the performing arts.
Meanwhile, coordinator chef Peter Edey said as the 12 competitors in the Best Bajan Cook Competition stirred their pots, there would be others getting the recipes down for posterity.
“What is happening these days is that we are losing our culinary identity, so our people are cooking more of what we see on television – the Food Network – because nobody is helping them to push what is our local culinary culture,” he said.
“So we are going to be writing recipes for all of the things that people prepare here. So once they prepare them, I have my people sitting there producing recipes . . . . It will be Bajan recipes but new Bajan recipes with the same final flavour. That is what we want to capture and eventually there will be a big manual on it,” Edey said. (HLE)
