Korea-India Food Culture Festival: All India Korean Culinary Challenge 2021comes to an end

New Delhi: Korean Cultural Centre India and Banarsidas Chandiwala Institute of Hotel Management, New Delhi (BCIHMCT) hosted the grand finale of All India Korean Food Cooking Contest which was done in hybrid mode, a combination of online and offline contest. Yashasvi Yadav, Manohar Kumar and Aniket Jadhav bagged 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd position in professional category and Isha Bajaj, Esther C pottakkal and Deepti Nair took 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place in open category respectively.

Korean Chef Kang Dae Han was surprized by the popularity Korean food in India.  The interest on K-food was felt through creativity on dishes. The curiosity on Kimchi was unexpected. He added that he would like to see India again through Korean food that can communicate with the world and health.

Korean Chef Lee Ju Been thanked the centre for inviting and said, ‘India is a beautiful country where a long history and mystical nature coexist. The love for Korean food was evidently visible from the sparkling bright eyes of participants. I was deeply moved by it. I hope that food and cultural exchanges between the two countries will develop into a stronger friendly relationship in the future as well.

The event was conducted in two phases: online round, registration which started on 26^th August to 11^th September in which the Participants shared their own cooking video of any one Korean cuisine by using authentic recipe or innovative fusion cuisine.

Participants were allowed to choose any Korean culinary with authentic recipe or innovative fusion with Indian cuisine. The best 20 videos based on the criteria, creativity, performance, authenticity (recipe, ingredient, etc.), cooking skills, final dish demonstration, video editing, etc were selected for the 2^nd round.

The best selected 10 videos from both the categories, (1)professional(Hotel management & Culinary school students included) (2)open to all based on the criteria(creativity, performance, authenticity, cooking skills, final dish demonstration, video editing, etc.) by BCIHMCT`s professional faculty members was selected for the next round. 5 videos from both the categories were selected for final round on basis of counts of likes and views of the video till 30th September.

The grand finale, offline round was hosted at BCIHMCT campus where the finale participants presented authentic Korean or progressive Korean fusion cuisine which underwent the scrutiny of eminent judges