On a mild winter’s Friday night we had our first, non-internal beta test of our cooking competition app, FoodFu. It was a controlled test so we were in our own kitchen and I was the emcee using my iPhone 6 with FoodFu installed. We invited our friends Carolyn, a photographer, Emily, a food blogger, and Kyle, a brewer, over to cook and judge some great food using Potato as the featured ingredient. Carolyn had some beautiful potatoes of several different varieties from her CSA that she brought over for everyone to use.

Who participated in Battle Potato?

As soon as the 45 minute battle started the kitchen was exciting! You can see Carolyn and Kyle cooking and judges Emily and Lisa discussing how the chefs were doing.

What did the chefs make to highlight potato?

Chef Carolyn Stokes decided to make a pureed potato soup with a mix of Swiss Chard and ground sausage, topped with some freshly made crispy, purple potato chips. Can you believe she made those potato chips in the short 45 minute time for this battle! Amazing and very tasty too! Their crispiness and saltiness paired nicely with the warm, comforting flavor of the potato soup. What a perfect dish for a cold winter evening!

Chef Kyle Kotaich created a potato and fennel pork sausage with a side of pickled potatoes. At first we were worried that the potatoes would get overpowered by fennel and pork in the sausage but Kyle found a way to make it work. We had also never heard of pickling potatoes and wondered if you could do it without the potatoes getting mushy. Kyle had a technique that worked really well and the pickles were great!

Watch the chefs talk about their dishes:

The plates for FoodFu Battle Potato:

Look at these beautiful plates! On the left, chef Carolyn plated a creamy potato soup with crispy purple potato chips. On the right, Chef Kyle dished up a pork and potato sausage with yummy quick pickled potatoes.

The judges had a very hard time deciding which dish was the best and show-cased the featured ingredient, Potato, the most. I have to say I was glad I was not in one of those judge’s seats! Lisa and Emily had their work cut out for them.

In the end the two dishes finished very close but Kyle’s potato and fennel pork sausage with a side of pickled potatoes ended up on top because of his creative use of potato.

Since this was our first external beta test we learned a lot from having outside users. For instance, we kept calling the ingredient the “secret ingredient” and it isn’t secret at all! So now it is the “featured ingredient.” This type of feedback was great and we plan on adding a lot of the suggestions to make the FoodFu app stronger.

Thank you to Kyle, Carolyn, and Emily for a wonderful evening, some great cooking and an experience we will all remember!

To see Carolyn’s photography visit Photography in Bend and to read Emily’s food blog visit Tinker & Taste.