Butchery and Beer: James Arthur Vineyards "Top Chef"

On Saturday May 5th I took part in a competition at James Arthur Vineyards which is a local winery here in Southeast NE. The competition was supposed to be "Top Chef" style were we made samples of food for guests and judges to taste.

The competition is put on by the local ACF chapter the Professional Chefs and Apprentices of NE which I have been a part of for several years. Rob our chapter president organized the competition along with Jim Ballard of James Arthur Vineyards and Rob talked me into competing again this year which I won it last year.

This year I went as the chef for Single Barrel. We figured it would be a good way to get out and get some publicity for the restaurant since we are hopefully opening in about a month and a lot of the people that would be there would be our target market guests.

Another sponsor of this event was Nebraska Bison which I was really excited about. Rob had met them when we went with us out to visit the farm for Single Barrel and they donated Bison Chuck to us to use in one of our dishes.

The rules of the competition were that we had to use Bison chuck (obvious) in one dish and had to use a James Arthur wine in a cooking application with one dish and the dish that we didn't use the wine to cook with we had to pair with a James Arthur Vineyards wine.

So when we got the word that we had to use Bison chuck the first thing that came to mind was to make sausage. If you know me it shouldn't be a big surprise that that is what I went with. So we (Ross, Angela and Myself. The SB Culinary team follow us @sbchefs on twitter) thought it would be best if we did a Bison version of our Bangers and Mash that we are going to have on the menu at SB. We used James Arthur Vineyards Norton wine in the sausage and in the onion sauce that we served with it. After we made the sausage we really liked it and think that it will probably make some appearances on the SB menu.

For our second dish we decided to do a pork belly (again no big surprise). The only bummer about the pork was that we weren't able to get it from TD Niche and had to order it from our broad line supplier. Unfortunately we don't get our first pigs in from Travis until next week. We slow roasted the pork belly and served it with a sunflower honey-chili glaze and pickled fennel. The pork belly dish was awesome in it simplicity alone plus it just brought some great flavor along with it. We chose to pair this dish with James Arthur Vineyards Horizon wine. It is a rose that balanced great with the dish. I must really like that wine since I used it as a pairing in last years competition as well.

Angela and I went out to present the food at the competition. We were really busy since both of our dishes had several components to them that took a bit of work to plate plus Angela was pouring the wine as well. We served at least 100 plus portions of food and got great feed back from guests and got a lot of interest sparked for the restaurant to open.

In the end we were able to pull out the overall win in the competition. It was a great experience and was good for us and the restaurant.