Is theirs a recipe for success?
Five Quebecers compete for national food prize
One is a glazed shortbread so bursting with delicious lemony flavour that nobody ever wants to share. Another is an aromatic date cookie that came to Côte-St-Luc all the way from Iraq, via a Jewish grandmother. And then there’s the meltin-your-mouth sucre à la crème, an old Québécois favourite from a long line of bakers in the little town of Mont-Joli.
These are some of the recipes that propelled five home cooks from Quebec into the national television spotlight as finalists in Food Network Canada’s popular show Recipe to Riches, which is in its second season. In the competitive reality series, home cooks enter their best recipes and compete for $25,000 in their category. The winners from each category become eligible to win a $250,000 grand prize — awarded by public vote, and announced during the final episode — and their dish becomes part of the Loblaw President’s Choice brand. Divided into seven categories, recipes are evaluated by an expert panel of judges based on taste, presentation, originality, their backstory and the likelihood that the recipe can be made in big batches and be successfully marketed.
In the show, bona fide drama and tension come from a couple of stages. The contestants are put in an industrial kitchen and given a team to help them “batch up” their recipes to see whether the recipe is too complicated or labour-intensive to be made in commercial quantities. Funny things can happen in the batch-up stage: Custards don’t all set at the same time, chocolate doesn’t cool fast enough. Cooks fret. Their angst is palpable.
The survivors of this stage then have to organize a product launch, and are paired with marketers to come up with a name that will sell the sizzle and generate buzz by branding the dish one way or another.
When the show’s cross-country search came to Montreal last winter, Dianne Tynes-Sitholé, of PointeClaire, at the suggestion of her oldest daughter, Keikanne, brought a cookie tin of the Lemon-Glazed Pecan Shortbreads she’s been baking for decades.
The hotel room where the auditions were held was crowded with contestants who had come bearing goodies for the judges to taste.
“Really, I just went along to have a day with my daughter,” Tynes-Sitholé said. “But the cookies had a great effect.”
Now she’s a finalist on the show, in the cookies and squares category. That episode airs Wednesday. She is facing off against another Montrealer, Chantal Bekhor, and a woman from Toronto.
Tynes-Sitholé says her little pecan shortbreads look like plain shortbreads, but they pack a lot of flavour. The recipe was handed down from her Nova Scotian grandmother, who never served a meal that didn’t include homemade dessert. Tynes-Sitholé tweaked the recipe and made it her own by adding lemon to the dough and brushing the baked and cooled cookies with lemon glaze. They were the Christmas gifts she gave to teachers, crossing guards and the custodial staff when her four now-grown children were in school.
“Some years, I’d make at least 30 dozen of them to bundle up in ribboned bags as thank-you presents.” Chantal Bekhor can’t help letting out a shriek when she sees herself in the Food Network commercials for Recipe to Riches. She had never baked her Mahbooz Date Cookies for anyone but her friends and family. But when she was chosen as a finalist, she felt like a celebrity, being flown to Toronto to film the show.
“It’s all been exciting. You have a camera on you 24/7. A car picks you up from the hotel and takes you to this fabulous industrial kitchen. Every so often someone pops out with a brush and lipstick. It sounds glamorous, but it’s really stressful, especially the part where you are in an industrial kitchen with all this enormous equipment, and a team, baking giant batches,” she recalled.
She says she can’t imagine what her grandmother, Hadiya Bekhor, would say about all this hoopla. It’s a far cry from the quiet after-school hours in her grandmother’s Côte-St-Luc kitchen, when the two would bake a batch of the thin and crisp fennelscented cookies and play cards together. Quebec’s bumpy roads were Lucie Dion’s biggest worry in the lead-up to the competition. The 32-year-old Mont-Joli native had packed up her delicate sucre à la crème squares for the judges to taste. But it’s a six-hour trip to Montreal, where the auditions were held, and the whole family, kids and grandmaman included, had booked a hotel and jumped into the car for the drive.
“There was a snowstorm forecast and the roads were a mess. I kept telling my husband to slow down, to avoid the bumps. I was terrified the sucre à la crème would crumble,” she said.
“After my wedding day and the days on which my children were born, this had to be the most nerve-racking day of my life.”
Dion’s entry, her family’s rendition of the popular Québécois fudge-like squares, made it there safe and sound. And it won over the judges, who’d never quite tasted anything like sucre à la crème and selected her as a finalist along with another Montrealer, Robert Armatta, who entered his Dark Chocolate Treats in the candies and chocolates category. They will appear on the show on Nov. 21.
“This was an experience of a lifetime for someone from a small town,” Dion said. Now everyone in MontJoli is rooting for her — especially her Oncle Martin Fillion, who taught her the secrets of mixing and boiling that deliver perfect sucre à la crème.
Recipe to Riches airs on Food Network Canada Wed- nesdays at 9 p.m. Another Montreal finalist to watch is Benjamin Greenberg, competing in the Nov. 7 hors d’oeuvres show with his Curry Crab Sticks. You can find the recipes from each episode on the show’s website: bit.ly/qkxQV7. The winning recipe in each category will be available at select Loblaws banner stores, and can be rated and reviewed at pc.ca.