TORONTO — The 2017 Gold Medal Plates (GMP) competition began working its way through Canada last week — kicking off the annual cross-country competition in Edmonton.
So far this year, competitions have taken place in Edmonton, Regina and Montreal. Chef Shane Chartrand of Sage won the gold medal in Edmonton with his dish of pheasant terrine and foie-gras torchon with red plum sauce, almond-and-parsnip custard, red-wine-poached pear and beet-stained, salted rutabaga. David Vinoya of Wild Sage Kitchen & Bar won the night in Regina with his dish featuring chilled chicken-liver mousse, chicken tuile, beetroot soil and cured egg-yolk ice cream. At the Montreal competition, Eric Gonzalez of L’atelier De Joël Robuchon-Montréal won the night with a torchon of foie gras and Alberta bison loin served with haskap berry and blackberry coulis, marinated butternut squash, squash purée and black-truffle purée.
Each of these chefs, along with the winning chefs from competitions in the remaining cities, will go on to compete at the GMP Finale — the Canadian Culinary Championships — in Kelowna, B.C. in February. Eight regional competitions remain on the road to the finale.
New to the 2017 competition, GMP has launched Gold Medal Pints — an invitational beer competition highlighting Canadian lagers and ales. The inaugural edition of Gold Medal Pints will see local breweries hand-selected by international beer authority and GMP national Beer advisor, Stephen Beaumont, working in consultation with a cross-Canada team of local beer experts. These breweries will be invited to pour a beer at their local Gold Medal Plates event and also enter that same beer into a nation-wide competition to determine the Gold, Silver and Bronze medal beers for Canada.
In total, five beers will be poured in the distinct Gold Medal Pints area of each city’s Gold Medal Plates event. Those 50 top Canadian beers will be entered into a single, nation-wide beer competition that will see a team of top independent experts, led by Beaumont, judge pilsners against stouts and IPAs against wheat beers in order to determine the five top beers that will be poured at the Canadian Culinary Championships. At the final gala, the names of the Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winning beers will be announced.
The annual GMP competition raises funds for Canada’s high-performance athletes, while celebrating Canadian excellence. Funds raised from these GMP events go to the Canadian Olympic Foundation to support athletes through programs facilitated by national sport organizations and the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network. To date, the competition has raised more than $12 million for the Canadian Olympic Team and the next generation of high-performance athletes.
Further information on the regional competitions is available at goldmedalplates.com.
