Confrerie Saint - Etienne D`Alsace

Last Friday was a very nice day that I will remember and cherish for a very long time, me and Christina was inducted to the brotherhood of the winegrowers association from Alsace the Confrerie Saint – Etienne D`Alsace this is for us a very special thing due to that we love the wines and the gastronomy from Alsace and this is a way for us to be an even bigger part of this beautiful wine district of France.

The day started early in the town hall with lots of happy people and many wine producers that was attending this event al the way from France, and I especially enjoyed  Hubert Trimbach from one of my all time favourite wine houses, he is a very funny man with a witty humour.

After some funny song and the induction we all moved on to the gala dinner with some amazing wines and lots of new friends that share the same interest as we do, we all missed the Alsace region sitting there and talking about experience and sharing good hotels and other information, this is a tiny region but so many things to se and to do, have an urge to go there soon again

Here on this blogg there are some more Alsatian adventures, look for it.

Cheers

Dragan

Chef of the year in Sweden

A few days ago I was attending the most exiting competition when the chef of the year in Sweden was held in Stockholm with the six finalists of 140 applied was competing with great cheering crowd,

All the competitors have to do two dishes each one that was a secret until a few minutes before the started and that was a lobster this year and the other was the rack of beef that they know for a month in advance and was able to train and to figure out the best way of preparing this to be on the highest culinary level.

The pressure was enormous as you can expect due to that the chefs in the Nordic countries are considered to be on the top in the world right now and that is very exiting for all of us.

The winner and the Swedish chef of the year and who received the price from His majesty prince Carl Philip is Klas Lindberg a great guy and well deserved winner.

As always is the dinner and the after party something that everybody are looking forward  to and this year was the best so far with great food and amazing music.

Klas is also a member of the Swedish culinary team who is in hard training for the culinary Olympics in October this year.

More about the Olympics to come and
here are some pictures I took with my phone, not great but better than nothing :-)

Hola Argentina como estas?

Considering that Argentina is the fifth largest producer of wine in the world I took a challenge and ordered in some 98 samples from seventeen different wine producers with the focus on the most famous malbec grape but some cabs and syrah appeared in the blends.

This massive tasting was a great way to understand the recent development in the Argentinean viticulture and to see what is going on over there and let me tell you that I got one hell of a surprise with most of the wines, there where terrific to unforgettable wines with some massive rating from the well known people (no names) we hade a very hart time to decide our favourites (mine is at the pictures below)

The idea of this tasting is to find producers to work with on the Swedish and Danish market and so we did after wild and heavy discussions, I sure look forward to show of the wines on this market and the horeca sector.

But you have to remember that wines from here in great quality will never come cheap but always great value for the money.

Looking forward to visit Argentina

Can you compete in cooking ?

The first sponsor dinner of the year for us went very good and I could notice that all the invited guests where very impressed of the food and the presentation of the new team, now is our focus on the cold table display that we will compete with on the culinary Olympics in October this year in Erfurt Germany.

The Skåne culinary team is really on the toes to do perfection and the team is in good spirit and doing the best even if there are some more months to go but we all know that time moves fast and we will soon be there.

Another thing is that we have the team captain Martin Hansen who will represent Sweden in the Nordic chef of the year and Pi Nghi Thanh Le for the junior chef of the year great guys with enormous talents.

My myself and I will go judge the kitchen work and my great pal Tomas Gustafsson will judge the dishes, only people from Skåne here now, great achievements from all.

Sebastian Gibrand are at the same time competing in London for the Hans Bushkens trophy with Magnus Johansson as the following judge, a very strong Swedish team.

Here are some pictures from the sponsor night.

A proud president of the Swedish chefs association of Skåne who missed to take pictures of the first dishes.