GILROY—For a seasoned chef, the perfect way to challenge your creativity and innovation in the kitchen is to undertake the ultimate challenge—the Gilroy Garlic Festival’s annual Garlic Showdown.
Jonathan Toste wowed the judges with his two dishes and took home first place, and the $5,000 prize. His first dish consisted of roast chicken with avocado puree topped with Tapatio hot sauce and grilled corn wheels. His second dish was a roast pork loin covered in a thai vinaigrette and a salsa concocted from the Dole fruit cocktail.
Toste hails from Hero Adams Restaurant Group and Willard Hicks Grill in Campbell. He has participated in the event for several years on-and-off and has also done several cooking demonstrations at the festival. He’s familiar with cooking in front of large crowds and finds it fun, not nerve wrecking.
“Our favorite part was probably the countdown,” he said. “It gets your heart pumping. It was difficult.”
Toste admits the secret ingredients threw his team “a couple of curve-balls” and says his biggest challenge of the day was dealing with the Spam. His strategy was to get “it nice and crispy, put some honey on it and some soy sauce on the top” to create a sweet and salty taste.
His inspiration for his dishes derives from his restaurant and what they’re currently creating in its kitchen.
“We have a fusion thing going on [at the restaurant]. I just want to give people a little taste of what we’re doing over there,” Toste said.
The event was hosted by celebrity chef Daphne Oz, co-host of ABC-TV’s “The Chew” and three-time Showdown champion Chef Jason Gronlund.
The Garlic Showdown is an “Iron Chef” style event unlike any other cooking event at the festival and pits professional chefs again one another with plenty of curveballs thrown in.
Competitors arrive at the event with only plating cookware for their dishes. They are only allowed to use the food provided by the event in the pantry at the center of the cooking stage. And only 30 minutes before the event were competitors told the four secret ingredients they had to incorporate into their dishes: Spam, white cucumber, Dole fruit cocktail and squash blossoms.
Throughout the event, judges Oz and Gronlun kept the crowd engaged in the competition as they made their way around the stage shuffling from competitor to competitor documenting the cooking process. Footage of long meat flanks on the grill and savory mushrooms sautéing appeared on the screens overhead for all the crowd to see.
Showdown judge Gloria Melone said she enjoyed the opportunity to participate in the event and seeing how each chef infused the four secret ingredients into their dishes.
“My favorite part of the competition is figuring out how the secret ingredients would be used,” she said. “I’m just amazed out how creative these chefs are. They’re such experts.”
For Melone, the most challenging part of the event was figuring out which dish was the winning dish when all were very great tasting, in her opinion.
“That’s the challenge when you’re working with good chefs,” she said. “They’re so close. They’re all very good. They’re all very creative, but in all very different ways, so it’s difficult to judge that.”
