Moore: Work on presentation

ONE of the key areas that students participating in this year’s Annual Fish Dish Competition need to work on for next year is presentation.

 

This is coming from Executive Chef and one of the judges for this Competition, Michael Moore, who spoke with The Barbados Advocate after the judging at the Fisheries Division recently.

 

He stated that some of the presentation methods utilised were too simplistic. “Some of the presentations need to be worked on to be quite honest. A lot of them used parsley and chopped peppers and things like that for presentation. But over the years, how you arrange your food and present your food forms a part of presentation instead of putting things like tomatoes or chopped parsley or peppers just to give it colour.”

 

Aside from presentation however, the Fourth and Fifth form students performed well in the other judging criteria, which were originality, taste and texture, and creativity. Moore stated that the majority of the dishes had a lot of creativity, such as boiling breadfruit or sweet potato and rolling it out and stuffing it with something. 

 

The dishes also received high marks for taste as the students used a lot of spices and herbs, while some of the students scored highly on originality as they combined international and local flavours. The Executive Chef commended the students on incorporating flavours from various places around the world.

 

“It was good to see the students using the various fishes and to see how they could turn local fishes into international dishes. It is a good start for children at this sort of age.

 

“At this age don’t give up, because we depend on tourism and dealing with food shows our culture, which is a part of tourism.”

 

As for those who are planning on participating next year, he suggested that they “look at your competition this year and see what they have produced, get from the judges the areas where they fell short in and work on these areas”.

 

Moore also called on more schools to participate next year. “The only problem with this year is that we only had three schools, but in the years before, we had many more schools who took part and it made it more interesting. With only three schools competing, it is not really a competition.”