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FORT LEE, Va. (Mar. 16, 2022) -- The mood is tense on the 2nd floor hallway of the Joint Culinary Center of Excellence at Fort Lee, Virginia. Staff members gingerly carry small plates of fine food. Shouts of “Corner!” as they approach wall openings to alert any passersby reverberate down the long hallway.
U.S. Army culinary teams from Fort Drum and Fort Bragg had practiced, or at least anticipated this day for three months. All that time and effort, and a lifetime of cultivating chef skills and studying nutrition was coming to a head in this moment.
“We were anxious the night before, so neither of us got much sleep,” said Sgt. Jodi Palmer, Culinary Specialist, 22nd Infantry Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, Fort Polk, Louisiana, who was invited to join the Fort Drum Culinary Team. “We were thinking about how it was going to go, whether or not we would place.”
This was the Nutritional Hot Food Challenge of the 46th Annual Joint Culinary Training Exercise, the largest military culinary competition in North America. It is sanctioned by the American Culinary Federation and showcases the talents of military chefs from around the globe in all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.
“There’s definitely a lot of validation in just making it here,” said Sgt. David Wisbauer, Culinary Specialist, 25th Quartermaster Company, 264th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, 3rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command. “When you’re not doing fine dining plates on the regular, or even at all, sometimes you ask yourself, ‘Am I that good? Do I belong in that category?’ And coming here and competing, and making gorgeous plates, and earning a silver medal is extremely validating.”
Wisbauer and his partner, Sgt. Christopher Hancock, 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, G Company, 82nd Airborne Division, representing Fort Bragg, earned a silver medal, and Palmer and her teammate, Cpl. Christopher Ramirez, 371st Cavalry, Delta Troop, 1st Brigade Combat Team, earned Fort Drum a bronze medal.
The two teams were not, however, in competition with each other, but with the Army standard. The judges awarded one gold, two silvers and five bronze medals in total for the Nutritional Hot Food Challenge.
“All of the competitors from each service need to fuel their service members to meet mission demands,” said 1st Lt. Nicholas Tommas, Joint Culinary Training Center Senior Nutrition Instructor and Dietitian. “So for this competition, we want them all focused on being within macronutrient percentages for proper fueling. The focus is on meeting that standard while also creating an appealing and tasty meal.”
Tommas is in charge of managing and teaching the nutrition courses for all food services personnel training at Fort Lee. His job at this competition is to judge the nutrition component of the nutrition challenge, verifying whether the competitors met the event’s nutrition standards.
“We’re looking for the correct balance of macro nutrients as well as calorie content,” said Tommas. “The limit for this one meal is 850 calories, and the macro nutrient breakdown is 15-20 percent protein, 40-60 percent carbs, and 20-30 percent fat. This would be a normal breakdown based on a general dietary recommendation for a normal training day for a service member to fuel well.”
According to Wisbauer, each team of two selected a four-course meal from menus with pre-calculated nutritional values and they had to prepare it in two hours.
“Part of the challenge was that we had to follow our recipes exactly,” he said. “Every calorie had been accounted for, every carbohydrate, every piece of protein, every piece of vegetable.”
Complying with the nutrition standards in this competition required a lot of focus, according to Palmer.
“If you take away an ounce of the fish, that lowers your protein, and you could end up short in that area and get disqualified right off the bat,” she said. “You had to approach it like you were feeding a Soldier, and you needed to make sure he or she got enough protein in that meal for their day’s work.”
Tommas explained that nutrition was not always the major focus at dining facilities in the past, but that is changing with recent initiatives like Go For Green Army, THOR3, and Holistic Health and Fitness.
“In the past, a lot of the flavoring [in the dining halls] would contain a lot of saturated fat or sodium, some of the things we’re now trying to limit,” he said. “And that’s one of the things we focus on a lot in the training I oversee, is how to flavor food and season it better without having too much saturated fat or being really high in sodium…just exploring different ways to make your food taste good.”
Ft. Drum’s Ramirez, raised in Brooklyn, New York and of Mexican-American descent, said he prides himself on flavoring his food, which made staying within 850 calories very challenging.
“It was definitely hard…I’d never done anything like this before [starting to prepare for] this challenge,” he said. “I’m really proud of the fact that we did manage to meet the nutrition standard and still give our food flavor.”
Ramirez and Palmer prepared a four-course meal that included a vegetable-filled dumpling with miso ginger sauce and a salad of spinach and romaine lettuce with roasted sesame seeds and a sesame vinaigrette. Their entrée was a miso-honey cod, yellow-Thai cauliflower with vegetable stir-fry and hoisin sauce, and their dessert was a chocolate mousse with a banana sorbet, roasted sesame seeds and a raspberry tuile.
“The judges liked our menu choices and they liked our flavor,” said Palmer. “I think they also liked our creativity with the plating.”
The plating, according to Palmer, was where she and Ramirez got to showcase their creativity.
“We really made the dessert our own by doing what’s called a splatter. We didn’t like the soupy look of the raspberry sauce in the tuile cookie, so we took a spoon and simply splattered it across the plate. It’s actually all over my clothes right now too,” she laughed. “We figured since this is fine dining, why not do something outside the box, and we came up with that idea, and it worked.”
While the meal preparation was cut-and-dry, almost formulaic, Wisbauer said that was both a blessing and a curse.
“By the time we’d got here, we’d practiced this menu about 100 times. It had become almost memorized,” he said. “But at the same time, with all those carefully practiced movements, if something doesn’t go right, it’s very easy to then overthink it, and then your next step is off. And the next step after that is off. And then you’re worried about the clock when you know you’ve got plenty of time.”
For the Nutritional Hot Food Challenge, Wisbauer and Hancock prepared: tofu-stuffed mushroom with grilled asparagus, a spring salad with pâte á choux and fresh fruit, a grilled salmon with quinoa, basil-pesto sauce and vegetable ragu, and a panna cotta dessert with a berry sauce and a tuile beet.
Everything went as planned for Wisbauer and Hancock except one detail once they reached the dessert stage. Their panna cotta desert did not set – meaning, it could not hold its shape and would wobble on the plate.
“The ingredients for the panna cotta that we were given to use were different to us. So even though we’d done this 100 times, we were used to certain brands of yogurt, soy milk and gelatin. Each brand is going to have a different consistency, a different thickness. Also, our refrigerators back home are different even,” said Hancock.
Hancock explained they had to stay calm and assess options. They had three choices: go with it as is, put it back in the fridge and hope it set after three more minutes, or try a blast chiller.
“We went with the blast chiller, and I think it helped a little, but not quite enough,” said Hancock. “Hindsight is 20/20, and there’s a million things we could have done differently along the way with that panna cotta. But the main thing is we kept our composure and didn’t do anything rash like give up and just throw it away.”
According to Hancock, this experience provided just the right level of stress to serve him well in both his Army and civilian career while also still being fun and enjoyable.
“Any school or paid gig, you’re going to have at least a little bit of stress. If it’s not stressful, are you really challenging yourself? Are you really learning anything?” he said. “With everything we did in this competition, you would say to yourself, ‘I really need to focus on this…I need to get this right.’ If it’s anything that’s worth knowing, you have to apply yourself a little bit.”
Meanwhile, the Fort Drum team also came away from this experience excited for the future. Cpl. Ramirez would like to train for this event all year long, but also sees an opportunity to apply what he’s learned to everyday dining facility cooking.
“I’d love to have the ability to constantly sharpen all my skills year-round. I appreciate the level of care and attention to detail that this competition required,” he said. “But even though cooking in the dining facility might not require that same level of attention, I have an even better appreciation now that all food has to have love. You have to put love into any kind of food you make.”
Wisbauer echoed that sentiment, adding that as much as chefs like him would like to prepare fine dining meals on a regular basis, he cannot forget his true responsibility as a Culinary Specialist.
“This is mainly about improving what we do on the daily, and that’s feed Soldiers,” he said. “If I can make a better meal for an Infantryman or a Motor Transport Operator, and they come through my chow line and leave with a smile on their face, that’s a good day for me.”
But according to Wisbauer, the real motivation, and perhaps the reason for all the tension in the hallway on this day, is this is one of few real opportunities for elite chefs to break free of their day-to-day Army responsibilities and perhaps break some preconceived notions.
“The outside perspective of us culinary specialists is that we’re stuck in the Warrior Restaurant, because that’s all that people really get to see,” he said. “Being able to come out here and showcase our skills really helps broaden our experience. Plus, it boosts morale when we get to show, not just other culinary specialists, but the entire military what we’re capable of…making delicious and nutritious food.”
| Date Taken: | 03.16.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 04.10.2022 20:53 |
| Story ID: | 416609 |
| Location: | FORT LEE, VA, US |
| Web Views: | 72 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Culinary Specialists prove their METL in Nutrition Challenge, by SGT Eric Zedalis, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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