Restaurant Recipe Competition Highlights the Versatility of Sprouts

Six leading Christchurch restaurants recently proved that sprouts can add an exciting touch of texture and flavour to almost any type of dish by competing to create the best new recipe with sprouts as the central theme.

Indochine, The Gondola Restaurant, Rydges Hotel, The Viaduct, Cook `n’ With Gas, and Merrin Street Café all accepted the month-long Sproutman Superfood Challenge, held from November 4^th to December 3^rd, to create something fabulous with Sproutman Sprouts. The result was a wide variety of dishes incorporating almost everything from seafood to duck.

The winning recipe was an intensely tasty sprout omelette created by 2005 Cuisine New Zealand Restaurant of the Year finalist, Indochine. Featuring sango sprouts, mung bean sprouts, asparagus and a Japanese egg sauce, the omelette was selected by the judges for its simplicity and flavour.

According to Indochine chef, Stuart Langsford, “Sprouts are really nice to use, and we use them a lot in our stir fry dishes and some of our salads. In the omelette the mung beans added another dimension to the dish with their really refreshing flavour and crisp crunchy texture.”

The second place getter in the competition was The Rydges Hotel with their `Special’ pan fried scallops with mung bean and tomato chutney salad, and Merrin Street Café received a highly commended for their crunchy bean risotto with three sprouts and lemon consume, served with parmesan and sango wafers.

Sproutman Superfood Challenge organiser, Sue Knowles of Flourish says, “The competition aimed to highlight the versatility of sprouts and the many different ways you can use them, and the wide variety of dishes that were entered definitely helped us achieve that. The dishes ranged from very simple to very creative and multi-flavoured, and the use of sprouts was really great.”