Going For The Gold Young Chefs Prepare A Feast For A Regiona Cooking Competition

They’ve been practicing for weeks, perfecting their routines, hoping their hard work will pay off in a gold medal.

This weekend, they’ll find out whether it was all worth it.

Nagano? No, Sacramento - where a team of young Spokane and Coeur d’Alene cooks will test their skills in a Western regional competition.

The winner advances to the national finals this summer, where participants will have a chance of being picked as apprentices to top chefs for the actual cooking Olympics: the next International Culinary Competition in 2000.

“That’s the big goal. That’s what we’re shooting for,” says team captain Chris Solscheid, who cooks at Beverly’s in The Coeur d’Alene Resort.

After all the practices, adds teammate Michael Noble, “I can’t wait to get down to the real competition. The whole experience will be great.”

It all began last May when Solscheid and Noble, a pastry cook at the resort, organized a local junior chapter of the American Culinary Federation, open to students and cooks with three years or less of professional experience.

Tryouts for the contest team were held in August, with the top five scorers making the squad. In October, competing against senior chefs at a Spokane food show, the team took a bronze medal.

“When we started, it was, OK, maybe we can do this,” Solscheid says. “After the first competition, it was, it’s right there - we’re touching it.”

In Sacramento, they’ll match menus with 13 junior teams from throughout the West at an American Culinary Federation regional convention.

There are three phases to the four-hour competition: knife skills, executing a series of classic cuts; basic “mise en place” preparations, such as mincing garlic and peeling, seeding and dicing a tomato; and preparing an original four-course meal.

Along with how the food looks and tastes, they’ll be graded on how organized they are while cooking and their sanitation. Judges will even go through their garbage to see how efficiently they use everything. “Waste is a real big problem in kitchens,” Solscheid says.

Following some brainstorming, the team - coached by Spokane Country Club chef Robb White - came up with a Northwest-themed menu.

Solscheid, 28, handles the appetizer, a napoleon of wild mushrooms between pastry sheets, topped with a red onion confit and accompanied by a lentil ragout. The effect is earthy, yet sophisticated.

“I wanted to do something vegetarian,” he says. “It took me five tries to get it where I wanted it.”

The salad is the responsibility of 20-year-old Dave Evensizer, a cook at the Beachouse in Coeur d’Alene, who’ll make the competition the final stop of his honeymoon. Mesclun greens dressed with a Dijon vinaigrette spill out of an herbed salt cracker shaped like a cornucopia (made from a mold Evensizer devised), with marinated tomatoes on the side.

The main course, braised veal shanks with chateau potatoes and root vegetables, belongs to another 20-year-old, Matt Madison - a former Ridpath Hotel cook who moved to Portland to attend culinary school, but will rejoin his teammates in Sacramento.

“It’s kind of hard on him being over there,” says Noble, 25. “He always calls us during practices to see how things are going.”

In Madison’s absence, the entree is prepared at practices by team alternate Jerry Librande, an 18-year-old high-school senior who works with Evensizer at the Beachouse.

“He’s got the hardest job,” Solscheid says. “He has to know all four courses and know them like the back of his hand.”

Noble’s dessert is more easily described by sight - and taste - than the written word.

A cylinder of huckleberry stone cream (similar to a Bavarian) sits on an apple-flavored creme anglaise, backed by a semicircular cookie crisp made with hazelnuts and orange zest.

Around it are small balls of Granny Smith apple poached in a huckleberry wine (with the apple scraps used in the anglaise, for extra efficiency points). Dots of sauce made by reducing the poaching liquid are topped with whole berries.

Crowning the creation is a hazelnut coated in caramel that was allowed to drip and form a long, needle-like spire. “It gives height to the dessert, makes it delicate-looking,” Noble explains.

“I love the colors of it,” he adds. “That’s what caught my eye.”

Concentrating intensely, he assembles the dessert like an intricate clockwork, and holds it for a photographer like a newborn baby.

It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Noble also handles ice-carving duties at the resort. “They tell chefs they should do something else artistic to help with their creative side - play a musical instrument, paint,” he says.

The team’s overall results weren’t exactly artistic in the early going.

“The plates were nowhere near perfect the first time we did it,” says Solscheid. “But every practice we’ve had, we’ve improved in some way.”

A major test came two weeks ago when the team, assisted by other members of the junior chapter, made its menu for the senior chapter’s annual Chef of the Year Dinner at the Spokane Country Club. Instead of four servings, as required for competition, they were preparing food for 140 - including some of their bosses.

Solscheid directed one group in assembling a garnish for the main course that was concocted at the previous day’s practice, a fresh sage leaf baked between two thin potato slices soaked in butter.

Noble taught another crew the fine points of plating his dessert. “So, the poached apples should be pointing to 6 o’clock?” one assistant asked.

Evensizer sliced tomato after tomato, marking them off on a piece of paper to keep track of the count. Behind him were tray after tray of cornucopia crackers.

“I had to spend eight hours doing these yesterday,” he said. “After two or three hours, it got pretty old.”

But it was time well spent, Evensizer added: “You’ve got to practice, practice, practice. Everything is repetition.”

What makes it worth all the work?

“Medals,” grins Librande.

“It heightens your level of professionalism,” says Noble. “This tests your skills so much - your organizational skills, your ability to come up with new ideas. As a chef, you have to come up with some pretty good ideas for your restaurant to be successful.”

Plus, there’s the personal pride.

“People say you’re competing against somebody else.” Solscheid says. “No, I’m not - I’m competing against myself, to see how good I can be. That’s what it’s all about, to better myself as a cook, and someday a chef.”

And there are a few fringe benefits along the way.

“Every weekend, my staple diet has been eating that appetizer, and that salad, and that dessert, and that entree,” he says. “You might say I’ve been eating well.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos