A catering lecturer at Loughborough College has jointly won a prestigious culinary contest alongside a former MasterChef finalist.
Darren Creed, the College’s curriculum manager for catering and hospitality, won the Koppert Cress ‘Sechuan Button Challenge’ with his inventive dish of savoury edamame bean and Sechuan sugar crème brulee, savoury Sechuan lemon ice cream, goat’s curd and affilla cress.
He was a joint winner alongside Kurtus Auty who appeared in MasterChef: The Professionals in 2019, with judges saying they couldn’t separate the two due to the exceptional high standard of entries.
Darren said: “It was fantastic to get my competition whites on again. I keep pushing the students into competitions and how good they are for skills development and learning, so I thought I had better have a go myself!
“I loved the challenge. It was about food pairing and pairing the flavours with the Sechuan buttons by making sure the Sechuan buttons were still the star of the dish. I loved experimenting with the flavours and was really happy with the way the dish turned out.”
The competition was organised by Koppert Cress, a major producer of 'innovative' micro-vegetables for international gastronomy, in conjunction with Skills for Chefs and called on chefs across the country to create dishes featuring an edible flower that creates a ‘tingle with a champagne-like sensation at the top of the tongue’.
To see all the entries search #sechuanbuttonchallenge on Instagram.
To find out more about how you can learn from Darren at Loughborough College, visit: https://www.loucoll.ac.uk/courses/hospitality-and-catering.
Photo: Features lecturer Darren Creed (left) and learner. Taken pre-covid from the Radmoor Restaurant themed evening featuring leading guest chefs Mark Fletcher and Jon Fell.