Category: General Interest

“I saw that when you are a cook, you have a direct contribution to a person’s well being through your work which is food.”

In Dumaguete City, Philippines is an unsuspecting Chef with a heart akin to that of a lion.  Chef Carlo Baroa has been instrumental in shaping the way young local chefs are sought after because of their passion, drive and determination to excel in all they do.  Chef Carlo is the embodiment of quality and commitment to an industry seeking to rebuild after almost a year of strife and heartache.  The Story of Chef Carlo is simple yet focused.

At the age of 14, he began his journey into cooking, working in small local dinners and eateries across the Philippines.  His passion grew and at age 16 he enrolled in the  Hospitality Management College and like many young chefs his real learning and skill started to take shape when he began his learn-from-work program in 2004.

Unknown at the time, his passion, understanding and skills would be rewarded through this program as it allowed him to gain his first professional job as a Commis Chef after just three months.  His journey had truly begun.

Fast forward a few years and his experiences have now taken him across a variety of different sectors including high volume catering, Fine Dining restaurants, Casion’s, American style Bistor’s, Coffee shops, Airline catering, Resort and hotels and even hospitals.

His skills have been noticed by some of the major hospitality groups in the country chasing him such as The Bistro Group, The Chef’s Quarter Group, The Sumosam Group and The Moment Group.

Currently serving as Corporate Executive Chef for the YLO Group of Restaurants, Carlo manages Cafe Racer American Diner, Moon Cafe Mexican-Inspired Restaurant, and Lantaw Native Filipino Restaurant.

One highlight for Chef Carlo was also to stage (work for knowledge) with one of Gordon Ramsay’s protégé’s Jason Atherton at the Pig & Palm.

With an adventurous spirit, his passion for motorbike and the great outdoors has always driven Chef Carlo to seek out new experiences, to try out activities that might seem daunting to many, and to reach for the stars.  This is what has led this inspirational Chef to start a new chapter in his life as the owner of his own restaurant.  Life has now brought Chef Carlo to this point, where just several weeks ago he opened his first 22 seater Spanish inspired restaurant called “Sobremesa” – which means is the Spanish tradition of relaxing at the table after a heavy meal.

Chef Carlo has also now taken on the mantel of Country President for the World Association of Master Chefs (WAMC), a title that brings with it a level of respect for the knowledge he has to offer others.  His passion and drive are what allowed the Executive of WAMC to know their choice for the Philippines was the right one, and they have not been proven wrong, with the Philippines chapters growing every day.

Couple this with a partnership between Chef Carlo and WAAMC to establish WAMC education programs in Dumaguete City and the industry in this small part of the world is in good hands.

The world of cooking is bright in the Philippines and we wish Chef Carlo every success as he begins the next stage of his journey.

To find out more about Sobremesa please visit

https://www.facebook.com/sobremesadgt

Sobremesa Restaurant, E J. Blanco Dr,

Dumaguete, 6200 Negros Oriental, Philippines

+63 956 057 2633

The first thing that you have to know about is where do these delicious treats come from? Most of you may already know the answer. Chocolates are made from the beans of cocoa. 

From the trees to the chocolate makers, how such processes really evolve? Through time, there have been many developments regarding chocolate making. Technology has benefited a lot of life’s endeavors. This also applies to the process of chocolate making.

But such advancement only applies on the harvesting part. The processing basically remains the same, the old conventional way. As what’s been said, do not fix a thing if it’s not broken. Maybe the same rule is being applied to this venture.

It feels good to eat chocolates. But do you want to know about the different methods that go behind such concept? Here are some.

Roasting

It takes a good amount of roasting as well as cocoa seed fermentation to come up with the quality of chocolate that you are looking for. In the pre-roasting stage, the beans are directed to infrared beaming heaters. This process will take away the nibs of the beans from the shells. The temperature for this part is 100 to 140 degree Celsius. This takes about 20 up to 40 minutes.

Roasting can also be done directly. After the beans are roasted, the shells can be easily removed. This is favored by most chocolate makers because it retains the flavor of the beans. For this part, the temperature is at 150 to 160 degree Celsius.

Fermentation

This is done to decrease the level of sugar, glucose as well as fructose and also amino acids in the beans. This brings in the flavor of the beans that the process of roasting will be able to enhance. But not everybody can do this. It takes a master to hone this craft. Beans can rot if something goes wrong with this process.

Shelling

To be able to remove the shells from the beans, it takes more processes than you could ever imagine. This includes milling, then sifting and lastly, winnowing. Every step is important so as to come up with the grains that have the right size. 

Tasting

If you think that this will be an easy task, well, that seems to be not the case. This involves skill and expertise. One must have studied every taste of the different kinds and variations of chocolates to be able to proclaim that they can perform well on this and be a judge as to what varieties should be presented to the market.

These people can be compared to wine experts. Just a bite from a chocolate treat will tell them what processes it went through, what kind of beans was used or where it was actually made.

And there are yet different kinds of chocolates available in the market. Imagine what all those have to go through just to be able to reach your favorite grocery store so that you can purchase them for your own consumption.

You don’t have to be an expert in making chocolate. But you can start following some techniques in the tasting part. If you are treated with a filled chocolate, let it linger on your mouth until it melts and you can taste all its flavors. You can then chew it for about five times, enough for the flavor and the coating to blend in.

Enjoy and savor your chocolate tasting experience.

For almost as long as there has been TV, there have been cooks on it – from 1940s original Philip Harben to the Sainted Delia – but it was around 1999 that TV producer Pat Llewellyn, in a blaze of genius, brought Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay to life on our screens, in sweaty whites and clogs, but repositioned as sexy. These weren’t TV presenters with some distant history of cooking or food writing, these were real chefs and we were going to share their lives and love them like rock stars.

Celebrity chefs with one foot in the kitchen and one on the studio floor became the dominant phenomenon of British media and for a couple of decades, the overwhelming ambition of many young cooks was to break into TV, while the image – mercurial, driven, invariably male, perfectionist, a Marco Pierre White filtered through his scion Ramsay – became a template. All that, though, is suddenly up for grabs. We’re witnessing a change in the peculiar relationship between chefs and celebrity.

The death of Anthony Bourdain, who first glamorised the grimy cook’s life and created the possibility that it could be interesting, felt significant. As did restaurant critic Marina O’Loughlin’s recent takedown of “The MasterChef Problem” – the sometimes reactionary influence the programme has on the UK restaurant world.

Outside of the fashionable postcodes of London, MasterChef and The Great British Menu cast a long pall. The definition of the highest quality dining used to be a sneering sommelier and a waiter who set fire to your dessert at a tableside cart, but to an audience hammered by the enthusing of Gregg Wallace and John Torode, it became foams, smears, a tasting menu and a chef who could be heard bellowing at his staff from the dining room. Competitive chef contests all but created a fine dining industry outside London, prescribing a house style and then advertising it on primetime TV every week.

But now, chefs outside London are having to question how far this can be sustained. The real spenders, the local gold shoes and blazers customer base, don’t seem all that interested in no-choice, blind-tasting menus any more – in the personal vision of some local cook who’s not on the telly and now looks like he never will be. So they are having to reassess what draws the locals in. It must feel very uncomfortable. The original seductive promise was that tall and tiny food on custom-made plates elevated you above banging out steak and chips and Sunday roasts to the local worthies – but now a whole cohort of regional stars is buying up local pubs to do exactly that, and quite possibly make a living.

The problem is that TV, the medium that created the chef as celeb, is not bringing new talent to the screen. The last few commissioning cycles have seen the major channels making programmes with people who were big at the start of all this. Rick Stein, James Martin, even more Ramsay – safe-hands presenters who are now a long way from soiling their hands in a professional kitchen. I spoke to Melanie Jappy, who produced shows with Heston Blumenthal, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Raymond Blanc before launching The Wine Show, and asked her how she saw the scene.

“While there probably was a glut at one point, that market has thinned massively, leaving the big hitters,” she says. “The real reason these guys survive is that they connect on multiple levels with a very broad range of people. Connectivity is what we always look for in great presenters. The feeling that they are just talking to me and no one else.”

It’s almost as if that kind of genuine enthusiasm, ability to share and communicate, that level of emotional intelligence is the diametrical opposite to the obsessive archetype that the media has created for its chefs.

In the last dozen places I’ve really rated critically, if you even offered the Brilliant Young Chef a TV slot, they would laugh at you. Can you imagine the chefs at Sabor, Bright or Lyle’s doing a series on “15-minute Family Suppers”? Who wants three months of being yelled at by somebody with a clipboard in a hot studio for “the exposure”? It’s almost as if the new generation seems interested in old-fashioned notions – outstanding food, hospitality and maybe, just maybe, building a decent restaurant business that’s sustainable through whatever the economy is about to throw all over us in steaming buckets.

The bigger picture suggests an industry in transition. For many years now, the high point of the chef’s year has been the 50 Best Restaurants awards, with its red carpet, paparazzi and all the fol-de-rol of international celebrity. But last year there was a backlash against the absence of women, of entire cuisines and a list of “usual suspects”. This year commentators warned that the awards were losing significance by failing to engage the #MeToo generation. Meanwhile, the Michelin system itself, the original gold standard of top-quality international cuisine is losing its appeal, increasingly dismissed by restaurant-goers as turgid and unable to reflect the reality of a dining scene that crosses cultures seamlessly.

So I feel confident in predicting that the worlds of restaurant cooking and TV celebrity, which for a couple of decades were mashed into a single job, are drifting apart again. Formats – both “stand-and-stir” and faked jeopardy “competitions” are dying as general viewers turn to other flavours of reality show. Meanwhile, hardcore food lovers turn to Netflix and YouTube for helpings of Ugly Delicious and Samurai Gourmet. There will always be cooks on telly and there will always be brilliant chefs working quietly, but the days of the old-fashioned celebrity chef, bestriding both worlds like a dyspeptic colossus are numbered.

Tim Hayward is a restaurant critic and food writer