MAUI, HAWAII — Despite its rich soil and tropical, year-round growing season, Hawaii actually imports about 90 percent of its food. To promote a growing trend toward locavorism, the Maui County Farm Bureau has hosted its Maui County Ag Festival for the past eight years.

For the fourth time, I was lucky enough to be invited as a guest judge for the event by the Maui Visitors Bureau.

The all-day event on April 4 drew hundreds to the Maui Tropical Plantation to eat, drink, and mingle with chefs and farmers. A lively farmers market gave folks the chance to buy Maui-grown strawberry papayas, avocados, apple bananas and even hand-pounded poi.

An assortment of food trucks made sure there was no shortage of food. In fact, I hate to admit that my day consisted of: Pigging out at Chef Kyle Kawakami’s Maui Fresh Streatery Gourmet Food Truck, which changes its menu according to the local ingredients available each week; followed by judging 12 dishes prepared by chefs in the live cook-off; then judging another 12 dishes in the Grand Taste event, where each chef had to make a dish spotlighting an ingredient grown by a local farm.

My eating didn’t end there, either. Even though I vowed I was done after that, I somehow ended up at the chefs after-party at Chef Sheldon Simeon’s Migrant restaurant, where plate after plate descended upon the table in a non-stop parade.

The festival featured the talent of local chefs such as Simeon, Isaac Boncaco of Ka’ana Kitchen, Jeff Scheer of Maui Executive Catering, and Mike Lofaro of Humuhumunukunukuapuaa (yes, the Grand Wailea restaurant, the name of which everyone always stumbles over), who worked with Michael Mina in San Francisco for years.

This year, it also included three chefs from the mainland: Oscar Torres of Acabar in Los Angeles; Seakyeong Kim of Charlie Palmer at Bloomingdale’s in Costa Mesa; and Richie Nakano, late of Hapa Ramen in San Francisco, who enjoyed some tropical tranquility with his family here after his recent controversial jettison from the establishment he founded.

The visiting chefs and local chefs participated in the live cook-off, where three teams of four chefs had to cook in tight quarters in front of a crowd. Each team had only 30 minutes to make three dishes, using a pre-selected pantry of local ingredients.

As each dish was finished, my fellow three judges and I would have to dash into the cooking area to immediately taste and score the dish. Toward the end, the dishes were coming out in such a flurry, that at one point we were told we had all of six minutes to finish tasting the remaining nine dishes. Talk about chewing fast.

In the end, the Green Team of Simeon, Lofaro, Scheer and Torres emerged victorious.

While only the judges had the chance to sample those dishes, the public got in on the act a few hours later for the Grand Taste, in which 12 chefs set up stations to create tasty morsels featuring a specific product raised by a local farm.

Yours truly was a judge for that, too. The public also had a chance to vote for “Fan Favorite.”

When all the votes were tallied, these were the winners:

• Scheer for “Fan Favorite” for his dish of panisse topped with 200-day cured pepperoni made from Beef & Blooms beef.
• Scheer again for “Best Overall by the Judges”
• Charlie Owen of Hula Grill Kaanapali for “Best Use of Proteins” for Kurobuta pork musubi atop bamboo sticky rice with pork from Malama Farm.
• Boncacao for “Best Veggie Dish” for “Ulu Popocorn & Opelu” made with taro and breadfruit from Nohoana Farms.
• Lofaro for “Honorable Mention” for Surfing Goat Dairy goat cheese cornets with radish sorbet, fennel pollen and ginger.

 

More: A Taste of Paradise on Maui