Vail – About three-quarters of the way through the Colorado Lamb Cook-Off, a leggy brown dog meandered into the judges’ tent and threatened to upend a tray of lamb- quinoa squares.
‘Boarders and dudes from the nearby ski repair shop wandered by with hungry looks, and by the 15th lamb-based dish, it seemed the judges were ready to turn in their forks. Not that the entries weren’t creative, but that’s a lot of lamb.
“Why don’t they just do simple?” asked guest chef Martial Noguier, after sampling one too many overwrought attempts. Noguier’s One SixtyBlue in Chicago serves sleek food in an equally sleek setting. His taste for contemporary cuisine led him to prefer chef Thomas New- sted’s neat little phyllo packets of shredded lamb set atop green papaya slivers.
For the second year in a row, Newsted, executive chef at the on-mountain Game Creek Restaurant, showed judges and Taste of Vail-goers how to make a complicated dish come together without masking the flavor of the meat.
Any of the top three winners in the contest would make a lovely Easter main dish, but Newsted’s will take the most prep time.
His first-place lamb bisteeya combined sweet spices – cardamom, star anise, cinnamon – with the tang of green papaya and ginger. Bisteeya is a Moroccan dish of phyllo dough stuffed with shredded chicken, ground almonds and spices. Exotic, to be sure, but its formation was prosaic enough.
“I was at the house watching ‘Law & Order,’ thinking about the contest,” says Newsted. “Everybody’s got the same cut of meat, so I eliminated methods that were passe. I wanted to preserve the integrity of the lamb. I thought about these cucumber purses I used to make and thought ‘why can’t I do the same with phyllo?”‘
This thought process lasted throughout the one-hour drama as he mused over the counterpoints of crunch, squish, pucker and savor. “The texture of the phyllo and the papaya have the essence of spring around the corner but still being winter,” says Newsted.
The contest day certainly had the essence of both seasons, starting out sunny and ending in a snowstorm.
A flurry of smack-talk among the chefs upped the level of competition. “It’s a pretty small town – it gets a little competitive, but out of humor,” says Newsted.
But in the end, the food on the plates spoke for itself.
Second place went to dinner chef Chris MacGillivray, Grouse Mountain Grill in Beaver Creek, for his salt-crusted leg of lamb with mint-garlic relish. In contrast to Newsted’s, his recipe requires just 10 ingredients. His inspiration? “Simplicity. It’s all about bringing out the natural flavor of the lamb – the bright flavors of garlic, lemon and onion, and some shoestring potatoes tossed with curry.”
Taking third place, Australian Bernard Clancy, sous chef at Two Elk, the “gourmet cafeteria” on Vail Mountain, with a tomato-stuffed leg of lamb on a bed of roasted vegetable couscous. “It’s something simple. Some of the restaurants get so artsy,” said Clancy in his broad Aussie accent.
