Cook of the Week Challenge winner: Jamie Andrade
The third time proved to be the charm for Jamie Andrade, whose culinary creation earned the top prize Monday night at the Daily Herald's Cook of the Week Challenge finale.
Andrade and the three other finalists were tasked with making a meal out of four mystery ingredients in just an hour in front of a packed ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Schaumburg.
The ingredients were sturgeon from Fortune Fish, canned pumpkin from Whole Foods, whiskey from Binny's Beverage Depot and BroccoLeaf from Foxy Organics.
“I'd never cooked sturgeon, hate pumpkin, especially canned pumpkin, and had never heard of BroccoLeaf,” Andrade said soon after winning. “But at least the whiskey helped.”
Andrade, of Elk Grove Village, took those ingredients and added pumpkin beer, sweet potatoes and a lot of creativity and made what she called a Cornmeal-dusted Sturgeon with Sweet Potato, Pumpkin Puree and a Whiskey Orange and Brown Sugar Sauce.
Her dish earned her top marks from a panel of five judges who sampled the competitors food in front a crowd of around 500 Daily Herald readers and foodies.
John Junior, the executive chef at the Hyatt Regency, wrote in his notes that Andrade nailed the balance of sweetness and spice in her pumpkin purée.
“She cooks with a lot of soul,” Junior wrote.
Andrade and the three other finalists — Emily Geddes, 36, a nurse and mom from Geneva; Juanita Harrell, 36, a librarian from Wheaton; and Molly Sutton, a teaching assistant from Arlington Heights who is in her 50s — competed in two previous rounds of competition against 12 other suburban home cooks.
Andrade competed in the preliminary rounds twice before but had never earned a spot in the finals.
But this time around she got some help in the competition from her husband Jose Andrade.
“She knew what I was thinking,” Jose Andrade said. “She would answer my questions before I would even say it.”
While the four contestants frantically prepared their dishes, attendees leisurely sampled food, sipped wine and watched cooking demonstrations by cookbook author Gale Gand, Old Crow Smokehouse executive chef Tony Scruggs and Now Foods executive chef Suzy Singh.
For winning, Andrade got a prize package valued at more than $2,000 which includes a Bosch dishwasher and two fancy dinners, which Andrade said she would use for her 30th birthday party celebration next week.
The event was the best-attended Daily Herald's Cook of the Week Challenge finale in the competition's four-year history. Daily Herald Food Editor Deb Pankey said the first year's finale only used a space half as big as this year's.
More than $1,400 was raised in a charity raffle benefiting the Northern Illinois Food Bank.