Tag: garlic festival

Cal Fire captain Herb Alpers was in quite a bind leading into Friday’s inaugural Champions for Charity first responders cook-off at the 2016 Gilroy Garlic Festival.Only days away from the competition, which pitted four first responder tandems from different agencies against one another in a three-course elimination format, Alpers needed to find a new partner. His fellow fire captain Anthony Anastasi was forced to bow out due the all-hands-on-deck scenario brought on by the 35,000-plus acre Soberanos fire burning in Monterey County.So, at the last minute, Alpers leaned on a retired firefighter Tom Evans to join him on the festival’s Cook-off Stage to battle for the $3,000 top prize to be donated to the charity of their choosing.The makeshift Cal Fire duo found instant chemistry in the kitchen and pulled off a victory for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the recipient of the charitable donation made by the Gilroy Garlic Festival Foundation on their behalf.“It was a little more pressure than I’m used to cooking in the firehouse. We had to think quick on our feet,” said Alpers, a 20-year veteran of Cal Fire who remained calm cooking on stage in front of a live audience. “We were so busy cooking and keeping track of time that we didn’t realize our surroundings. All I could focus on was the task at hand.”Two hours earlier, Gene Sakahara and Sam Bozzo, the famed “SakaBozzo” duo of local retired administrators and past Garlic Festival presidents, donned the same Cook-off stage for their final cooking demonstration along with their grandsons.The first responder teams were tested with a surprise basket of ingredients for each of the two rounds, cooking an entree in the opener and a dessert in the finale. It was originally supposed to be a three round competition, including an appetizer, but the Gilroy Fire Department cookoff team was forced to withdraw due to the fire as well.The two other competing teams were paramedics Peggy Brapp and TC Warford from Santa Clara County EMS (playing for nonprofit “19 For Life”) and fire engineer Vince Grewohl and fire fighter Bill Olguin from the Hollister Fire Department (playing for Chamberlain’s Children Center).“When I’m on duty, I cook 90 percent of the time. I love Italian food, but I cook a little bit of everything (at the fire station),” shared Olguin prior to the first round basket being revealed. “Usually it’s what’s on sale; we all chip in for dinner; and there’s a lot of experimenting.”In the opening round, which teams had a half hour to make into tasty dish, the ingredients revealed in the basket (just like on the Food Network’s “Chopped” program) were chicken thighs, pickled garlic, artichokes and hot sauce. While Cal Fire and Hollister Fire made their own concoctions of sautéed chicken with pasta, County EMS produced a Greek lemon chicken with artichokes.“I feel like Gordon Ramsey but not as mean,” said celebrity judge Alexis Higgins, a contestant on Season 3 of Fox’s Master Chef Jr. show, as she tasted the three entrees. “Everyone had real creative dishes and you could really taste the garlic.”The three-judge panel, which also included executive chefs Danae McLaughlin from Harker Schools in San Jose and Benjamin Brown from The Lodge at Pebble Beach, used a points system to determine which teams advanced and the eventual champion.“It was really close and we just hate doing this,” said McLaughlin before Hollister Fire’s duo was eliminated in the entree round.In the 20-minute championship dessert round, the secret basket ingredients chosen were ladyfingers, blood orange cranberry punch, bacon and, of course, more garlic.The victorious Cal Fire squad served up a lady finger, custard, fresh fruit, candy bacon parfait, while Cal EMS made a concoction they called “Bloody fingers” with a Greek yogurt, tart dipping sauce.“I was really pleased with the balance of bacon and garlic in both dishes,” McLaughlin said. “Both pulled off incredible desserts.”In the end, Cal Fire’s dessert was the winning dish in the inaugural Champions For Charity event.

The 38th annual Gilroy Garlic Festival has come and gone, and while attendance numbers are down over last year’s, organizers say they should still be on track to reaching $11 million in donations over the lifetime of the event.

Don Christopher, the founder of the country’s biggest garlic producer, Christopher Ranch, started 60 years ago in Gilroy with 12 acres of the spicy bulb, sandwiched between his main crops, lima beans and sugar beets.  The man who was then known as the king of garlic, Joe Gubser, asked Christopher to plant some bulbs for him. He sold the garlic to Gubser for 9 cents a pound.

There’s somewhat of an urban legend that firefighters are the best cooks, even if it’s just meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy. But now a pair of local fire stations are being put to the test on Friday when it participates in the first-ever Champions for Charity cook-off at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Friday at 2 p.m.

Sherry Harig, this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival Art Poster contest winner, has her plane ticket in hand and is eagerly anticipating her upcoming trip to Gilroy.

It was during the fall of 1992 when Gene Sakahara and Gene Bozzo were called in at the last minute to replace Rudy Melone, Garlic Festival co-founder, for a cooking demonstration at the Nob Hill Foods Hecker Pass Family Adventure Park.A year later, when they made their way to the cooking stage for the first time as SakaBozzo, the comedic culinary duo were a hit with the crowd. This Friday will mark the 25th appearance at the festival for these Gilroy residents.But the sad part is it’s also going to be their final show.“We thought that we had a good run at it,” Sakahara said. “We want to go off while we’re still welcomed and then give other people a chance at it.”The show might be done with after this week, however Sakahara, 68, and Bozzo, 75, plan to be part of the garlic festival in a more low key situation.“The festival is in both of our bloods,” Bozzo said. “We believe in the festival. We believe what good it does for the community and we’re just moving over to another assignment. That’s all.”This year the two former garlic festival presidents are adding their grandsons to the show. Bozzo will have his grandson Dominic, 8, accompany him, while Sakahara will bring up his grandsons Bode, 10, and Kiden Gonzales, 9.“That’ll be fun because we’ve always tried to portray cooking for the family,” Sakahara said. “That’s what we’re about, is family. And we really enjoy the meals together.”Sakahara and Bozzo are known to mix it up year after year with new recipes that include garlic and this year will be no different. Sakahara will make Mendocino crab cakes with Bode and Kiden. Bozzo will make southern Italian red sauce with pork and Dominic will make a family recipe known as Carmela’s Meatballs.Bozzo said the inspiration for SakaBozzo came from someone he watched at the festival, but it wasn’t quite the vision he wanted to model the show after.“He cooked the same thing every year,” Bozzo said “People kind of got tired of that. We never did that, every year was a different recipe.”The SakaBozzo show was also all about cooking for the family and over the years the Gilroy Garlic Festival became a big family to them.Bozzo said they both have strong beliefs in cooking with family and friends. Nowadays, he said, people are always on the go and don’t have time for a family meal.What started as a friendly favor to substitute for an ill friend quickly turned into a success for the SakaBozzo show. They have been asked to make a special appearance at the 40th annual garlic fest in 2018 and they agreed without hesitation.“We’ll still be involved but not on the cook-off stage every year,” Sakahara said “But it’ll be good to just relax a little bit too.”

I love living in Gilroy. We’ve got the natural beauty of open space (for now, anyway), mountains all around us, an extremely friendly community, the Premium Outlets and best of all, a dozen or so awesome wineries right in our very own backyard.

Dressed in his puffy white costume, his cowboy hat decorated with garlic bulbs and wearing his trademark Birkenstocks, he strolls through the grounds of Christmas Hill Park, and everywhere he goes, choruses of, “Hey it’s the Garlic Dude,” are shouted by children and adults alike.

It’s that time of year again, the pungent aroma is in the air as everyone ramps up for the 2016 Garlic Festival, coming July 29-31. What a way to end the month!!