[music plays throughout]
[Shonah Chalmers] The Iron Chef competition
is all about showing their culinary, their baking, their teamwork skills,
their organization, their sanitation.
We bring everything that we've learned and put it into practice.
[Matthew Fulton] The elements that make this competition the most stressful
are the eyes on you,
having judges come to your station and looking inside your fridge,
watching your work plans,
having five other competitors competing against you
and having timelines, having to have your food up
at a certain, um, point
is something that they don't get to practice all the time.
[Dave Godfrey] The one thing where I think it does prepare them for the real world
is cooking under pressure.
When you're cooking at a restaurant,
no, you're not being judged the same way,
but, I mean, the reality is you are still judged
every dish that goes out by the paying customer.
So I think the fact that you're here, and you're under that pressure,
and the timer is on, and judge's saying, you know,
two minutes to plating,
kind of mimic the reality of what the restaurant service is.
[Thomas Heitz] With the new generation
of young chefs that Humber College is producing,
I love the fact is they're thinking outside the box.
They have that international flair
where they're taking many of Kraft Heinz brands
that are very homogenous to North America,
but then they're applying it to their ethnic cuisine.
So sometimes we're seeing our brand
being used in applications we never even would have thought possible.
So they're taking creativity to a whole new level,
and it's transforming our cuisine and our culture.
Everything is kind of coming in as a sort of fusion,
and Humber College and Kraft Heinz,
I believe, are on the forefront of that change.
[man] The winner is Humberlicious.
[cheering]
[Mariel Quiambao] Well, winning the competition was priceless.
Just to show my skills, not only by myself,
but I can show it to my team.
[Shonah] Easy to answer why our top team won first place.
Their food was flavour first.
And they also used something that they know from inside of them.
So they used their own backgrounds.
They put themselves on the plate for those three courses.
If you take something like that and you're doing a comfort dish,
and then you elevate it with elegance, good cooking, great flavours,
proper seasoning, you are having a winning team.
[Dave] My favourite kind of bite of the entire day was the shumai,
and second was the char siu.
And the dessert they had,
which was the cannoli with purple ube in the middle –
that was brilliant.
Very, you know, high-level skill in that,
just very well executed all, all the way around.
[Yannick Charette] We won, uh, the competition because of our teamwork,
and that comes with the preparation that we put in.
[Quang Bach Pham] I was so confident before the competition
because we prepared all the thing we need.
We have a plan, many, uh, planning.
Everything we did good, and then we just follow it,
and then cook it.
[Shonah] The team was organized.
They had everything scaled and measured.
They worked shoulder to shoulder without hardly any talking
because they already knew what all of them were doing.
So to have yourself know who's on what
and to have your flavours really strong
is gonna create a winning team for sure.
[Zainab Waheed] The fact that everyone knew their exact roles,
we knew that we had to work as a team because that's how we're gonna win.
We made sure to help each other out, pay attention,
and if anyone got stuck, that we were always there for each other.
[Mariel] Everybody was calm when we cooked.
We all know from two years that we're together,
like, we worked, we've been to class together.
We trust each other.
[Alex Fineburg] These are the up-and-coming kitchen managers
and chefs of, of our society today.
And just my observations from,
a couple really, really stood out in the preparatory competition.
So I will definitely be chatting with them.
[Shonah] This type of competition is how industry is.
Their education escalates by being a part of this competiton.
[music climaxes]
[crackling of flames]