Street Food Championships interview

WIth Santa Maria Challenge winner, Paul Human from Signature Brew...

Congrats on your win! Tell us about you winning dish please…
“I got the list of ingredients, and my expertise isn’t so much in South American food, but I do love Asian food and I saw the Korean barbeque sauce. Then, when I tasted it, it didn’t need anything doing to it, it was great.

“So, I literally put it on my standard chicken wing recipe, which is soaked in buttermilk overnight. Then I fried the wings once at a very low temperature, in a secret mix that I can’t share with you. Then I tossed the wings in the sauce, added the garnish and that was it. The sauce, though, was the hero.”

So, do you think this will find its way onto your menu?
“Absolutely – I’ll put it on the menu tomorrow.”

Have you competed before?
“I’ve done the odd thing like Wingsfest, and weirdly I came second in a croquette contest a couple of months ago.”

Do you enjoy it then?
“Actually, it’s terrifying! It’s like… cooking is one of those things that had to be intuitive. You have to do it on the fly and, no matter what the recipe tells you, you have to adapt to the situation.

“So the extra factor of people watching you, it adds so much. And at one point, I threw everything away and started again, because I wasn’t happy.“

Really, at what stage?
“Pretty close to the end! I’d done too much sauce and it just looked terrible, so I threw it in the bin and started again. I’m glad I did! But doing that in front of people was horrible.”

Was that with one dish or more?
“For the first two rounds.”

I think I know the answer to this then, were you expecting to win?
“No! But it was great, of course. I do place when I enter things, and I’ll only enter if I think I’ve got a chance, but I’m still a bit bewildered. I didn’t expect to win at all today.”

You may also be interested in…