Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

On Saturday, Canadian trio "Go Big or Coho" won the Chilkat Chef competition for the second consecutive year, despite struggles with parsnips and a short circuit that halved their cooking time.

Team members Liz McCarville, Chelsea Jeffrey and Moriah MacMillian from Whitehorse have been coming to Haines for years, but it wasn't until they won Chilkat Chef last year that they truly felt part of the community.

"To walk down Main Street and be recognized as Chilkat Chef winners...to me it was so awesome to feel like we're part of the community," MacMillan said.

The fourth annual Chilkat Chef competition, hosted by Lynn Canal Conservation, brought 183 visitors to Harriett Hall to celebrate the event's tagline- "the valley that feeds itself."

Six teams were given 50 minutes to prepare a dish using ten raw ingredients they brought, a coho salmon, and five locally sourced mystery ingredients. One plate from each team was auctioned off at the end of the event, with proceeds donated to a nonprofit of the team's choice.

Mystery ingredients included leek, sauerkraut, rose hip, thyme and parsnip.

Professional chefs Travis Kukull, Debra Marshall and Michelle LaBrosse judged the competition.

Go Big or Coho concocted open-facd sandwiches made with sourdough crumpets using 120-year-old starter carried across the Chilkoot Trail. The crumpets were topped with salmon, and each finished with a different mystery ingredient on top: one featuring parsnip frites made in a thyme butter and birch syrup reduction; another with juniper berry butter, caramelized leeks and a pickled cranberry; a third with sauerkraut and rose hip syrup.

Despite repeatedly blowing the fuse to their power source, the team was able to cook everything they planned, they said. The hardest part? "The parsnips," McCarville said. "We tried to pickle the parsnips and realized upon tasting that we had made a grave error. So we decided to throw them on the grill and crisp them up a bit to turn them into frites. Felt like a gamble but we were all pretty impressed with the outcome."

"It was thoughtful and tasty," judge Kukull said. "It had a little history with the sourdough starter, they used all the ingredients accurately, and the dish was visually pleasing. I would put it on a menu."

The team won $500, which they donated to benefit resident Merrick Bochart's cancer treatment.

Jenna Kunze

In second place was Camper's Delight, a team comprised of Tracey Harmon, Gabe Thomas, Jessica Price and Josh Price. They prepared pasta carbonara, incorporating leaks, heirloom tomatoes and bacon into the sauce. They grilled salmon with homemade blackened seasoning, served on skewers over sauerkraut with a side of flambéed parsnips. The team won a $200 gift certificate from Mud Bay Lumber Company, also donated to Merrick Bochart.

Third-place winners, Salmon Slayers Tiffany Dewitt, Brooklyn Dewitt, Tonya Clark and Natalee Grant, won $150 to Howers IGA for their family chowder dish served in locally grown pumpkins. "It was a fun, festive dish," Tiffany DeWitt said. The team, representing Haines Head Start, will use the $40 from the plate auction to contribute to its community pumpkin-carving party next week.

The event also hosted fish printing with Lindsay Johnson and Betsy Shiner, and a performance from local band, Funkybutt.