Warrior Chefs do their berry best creating raspberry recipes

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Joshua Smoot
  • 341st Missile Wing Public Affairs
MALMSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, Mont. --  Six teams from the 341st Force Support Squadron, representing the fitness center, dining facility, missile chefs from the alpha, bravo, and charlie flights, and one team from the 120th Airlift Wing of the Montana Air National Guard, battled for the honor of winning the quarterly Warrior Chef competition.

Teams competed at the Elkhorn Dining Facility Sept. 4 and had 60 minutes to prepare and present their dishes to the judges for scoring.

Judges included Maj. Karen Dayle-Horsley, 341st FSS commander, Denis Miller, Air Force Association representative, and Lynne Henryford, cookbook author.

The objective of the 341st Missile Wing's Warrior Chef competition is to recognize and reward chefs for their performance, while enhancing their proficiency.

This quarter's theme was raspberries. During the competition, contestants had to prepare food from scratch on site.

"The highest quality food program is paramount in the missile field and the dining facility," said Senior Airman Shari Blackburn, 341st FSS food service journeyman. "This is our way of recognizing our chefs beyond the satisfied parallels of the customers both in the missile complex and on the support base here at Malmstrom."

Competitors were judged on taste, appearance and creativity of their dish, as well as honoring the theme ingredient. Teams were also judged on their dress and appearance.

Some of the dishes that were prepared included raspberry glazed salmon, raspberry wild wings, raspberry cobbler, bacon raspberry parfait, chocolate raspberry cupcakes and raspberry chicken tacos.

In the end, the fitness center team won the competition. Staff Sgt. Ricardo Thenor and Senior Airman Justin Ruiz won the judges over with their raspberry salad, raspberry wild wings and a raspberry lime smoothie.

"It felt good to win," Thenor said. "It felt good to be recognized as the best. We had a good time making the dish."

This was Thenor's first time competing and Ruiz's third time.

"It feels good to finally win," Ruiz said.