Saskatoon chef joins team Canada in Culinary Olympics

Culinary teams representing 40 countries will face off against one another in a week-long culinary competition in Germany.

Of the 2,000 chefs making the trip to Erfurt, about 300 kilometres southwest of Berlin, is executive chef Scott Torgenson from the Radisson Hotel in Saskatoon.

Alongside five chefs from B.C. and another from Winnipeg, Torgenson will be cooking for Team Canada, and he expects to bring home gold.

"I wholeheartedly expect us to come home with gold. It's a matter of us all producing what we need to do over the two-day span," Torgenson told CBC Radio's Saskatoon Morning. "It's 50 points for hot show and the cold so they're equally as important so we all just have to come with our A-game."

The Culinary Olympics, as the name suggests, is the highest level of competition in the culinary world. While this competition may not receive the same notoriety as the summer and winter Olympic Games, it takes just as long to qualify, and training is no joke.

Torgenson said the team representing the Great White North was blended over four years. Torgenson added that the team heading to Germany has been rebuilt a couple of times, but the groups heading to the competition has been together working and practicing for the past eight months.

"We practice at least once a month. We fly to Vancouver, we do hot and cold practices over the span of a couple of days, so I'm generally in Vancouver once a month," he said.

Hot and cold competitions

The first leg of the competition comes with teams creating a three-course menu for 110 guests. Torgenson said the first course is a fish dish, followed by a meat entree and dessert. The whole service takes about 5.5 hours.

"It's a big endeavour. It's a huge endeavour, actually, and we have a good manager and he makes sure everything is ready for us and we just have to show up and make the food," Torgenson said.

For the cold competition, it's less about the taste of the dish and more about the look and the design of the plate.

"Basically what we have to do is produce food to its peak and then we glaze it with an aspic so that it can be presented for 10 hours."

The competition begins on Oct. 22.