CANBERRA chef Neil Abrahams is at the top of his game having won the high-pressure Chef 2012 cooking competition and pocketed $10,000 prize money.

Despite a 25-year career working in hatted restaurants and 5-star hotels, his proudest moments have been in the competition arena.

The executive chef at Royal Canberra Golf Club has competed in national and international competitions and held a position on the Australian National Culinary team for six years and was co-captain at the 2008 Culinary Olympics.

The Chef 2012 event challenges individual chefs to use ingredients from a mystery box to create three different dishes for the judges in an hour.

“It’s about pushing yourself to do the best you can in a given time with the ingredients available,” Abrahams says.

“But I think what I gain most is that in one spot you get to see what the best are doing, otherwise you’d have to visit 50 restaurants.”

Abrahams says his long experience on the Australian Culinary team helped him when he competed on day two of the event at the Foodservice Australia trade show in Sydney last month.

“It’s a tough competition,” says Abrahams. “You have to come up with three dishes in one hour and you’re doing that for 12 people, and with the judges standing over you, it’s pretty full on.”

He was initially taken aback when he opened his mystery box to reveal the ingredients he had to use in each dish – hoki, Jerusalem artichokes, spinach, and samphire.

“I hadn’t used samphire a lot, maybe three or four times, and one of those times was when I was in Europe where I used fresh samphire and it was quite salty, so you had to wash it off,” he said.

“But this one was in a jar and had been washed through a brine and had pretty much been pickled so I thought: ‘That’s great, I can use it in a salad or could cook with it or sauté it’. So I was pretty happy about it then.”

His dishes featured hoki in three different ways – wrapped in prosciutto, cooked sous vide and as a ceviche.
As well as being the executive chef, Abrahams manages food and beverage operations for the golf club, where he has worked for 10 years.

“We do all facets of food,” he says. “We could be making 100 sandwiches in the morning and we might put out 30 fish and chips for lunch and a few steaks and turn it around for an eight-course degustation dinner at night.

“That’s our clientele and that’s what they become members here for – the ability to be casual one minute and to be able to impress and be formal the next.

“I focus on the positives, it mixes up the day and it challenges the staff.”