Four young Christchurch chefs have taken part in a competition to find the Young Chef of the Year in the Christchurch Food & Wine Festival’s Best of the Best Awards, but they are going to have to wait until the evening of the Awards to find out the winner.

The chefs, who have to be under 23 to be eligible, are Charlie Farwell from The Three Tuns, Mathew Feltham from The Captain’s Club, Yannick Joynes from Splinters and Jonathan Ryan from The Captain’s Club.

During the competition, which took place at Bournemouth & Poole College at the Lansdowne, the chefs had to prepare, cook and present two covers of a three course meal within a two-hour period, all within a budget of £20.

Concentration levels were high as the chefs set to work producing meals which would be worthy of many a top restaurant. The judges, David Boland from the Centre of Vocational Excellence in Culinary Arts at the College and David Badley and Allan Wood from the Food Festival Organising Committee, had a difficult job coming up with a winner. The name of the winner will now remain secret until the Awards Ceremony on Monday 11 May at The Captain’s Club.

David Boland was very impressed by the way the young chefs set about the work and by the results produced. “Chefs nowadays are so concerned about the wow factor,” he said. “But these young chefs have shown that they actually know how to take a raw product and work that through using skills and tools until they come out with a good finished dish – that is what’s called cooking.”

The chefs’ menus were:
Charlie Farwell
Grilled Rosary goats cheese with warm beetroot jelly
Saddle of Avon Tyrrell venison, purple sprouting broccoli, yellow chanterelles and Bearnaise sauce
Valrhona chocolate fondant

Mathew Feltham
Crisp Solent seabass fillet, confit fennel, liquorice, Setley Ridge wine foam
New Forest roe deer loin wrapped in Denhay ham, lavender, smoked chocolate sauce
Floating island, praline, rosemary custard
More …

Yannick Joynes
Warm pigeon breast, black pudding, beetroot carpaccio and horseradish cream
Seabass fillet, salt cod wantons, chargrilled courgettes, sauce vierge
Orange and Grand Marnier panacotta

Jonathan Ryan
Avon Tyrrell estate smoked pigeon breast, watercress and radish salad, raspberry vinaigrette
Dorset pork loin rolled in nut dukkah, roast butternut squash puree, buttered spinach and port jus
Baked vanilla cheesecake with pear sauce and pear crisps