Iron Chef Reflection

Iron chef was a unique assignment that provided a different experience than what I’ve done before as a final assignment. For our practice round, we were presented with the secret ingredient of pears. We thought since pears were sweet, it would be best to make a dessert type dish. However, our freedom was limited, since we were only allowed to use supplies from the classroom, which lead us to making crepes. Our crepes turned out really well and we were happy with how we did for the practice round. For the final round, we were instructed to use artichokes as our secret ingredient. Since either Owen or I knew much about artichokes, we were stumped for a little bit when coming up with the recipe, but eventually came to a group consensus. We decided to pair the artichoke with chicken, to balance out the dish with some protein. I noticed a lot of the other groups were thinking of doing an appetizer/side dish, so we wanted to prepare something that is more like a meal. We prepared all our ingredients on the first day and defrosted the chicken so we could get going straight away on the second day, since our dish would take slightly longer to bake. Since I had Owen’s social media on my phone, we were able communicate and decided to come to class earlier to get the dish going. Once we got to class, Owen and I immediately figured out our roles and what we needed to do. I started on the sauce immediately, a honey, lemon, and garlic mixture that would glaze over the chicken and artichoke. The sauce was supposed to contain Italian seasoning, which we did not have in the classroom. We substituted the seasoning with some thyme, basil, and rosemary, the type of spices that would typically be found in Italian seasoning. We poured the sauce over the chicken and artichokes and left it in the oven to bake. After we took it out of the oven, we discovered that the honey had burnt up, which was difficult to clean. Other than that, everything else was looking good. Since other groups were presenting first, we plated the dish and left it in the oven so it stays warm. We presented the judges with our dish and received some feedback saying that the chicken was a bit dry. However, I found the chicken to be quite juicy when I first took it out of the oven, my guess is that after we left it in the oven, it dried up a bit more. One thing that I wish I did was to balance out the dish more with more artichokes. Overall, we managed our time very well in this project, as we were only a two man team and had to do a bit more than other groups. Both of use constantly took on different tasks and always had our hands full, which resulted in our dish turning out great.