Carmel High School officials and alumni have devised a different answer to the age-old question of what to serve for dinner.
After deciding to turn the annual class reunion dinner into a school fundraiser that would be open to the community, they thought they should have something more exciting than hot dogs and hamburgers.
Their answer? The First Carmeltown Block Party Pig Roast Competition. The pig roast would have the tender, loving 10- to 17-hour care that only serious cooks would be happy to give. And participation would call attention to Chicago area culinary schools and food professionals.
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Held last weekend on the back parking lot of Carmel High School in Mundelein, the roast was sponsored by the National Pork Producers Council and Open Pit Barbecue Sauce. The council provided six roasters and six 130- to 135-pound pigs. The pork was to be creatively served in a formal table presentation using Open Pit as the sauce base.
Three Chicago area teams took the challenge: the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, popularly known as CHIC; the Culinary School of Kendall College in Evanston; and the Kraft Food Service division of Kraft General Foods, headquartered in Deerfield, which makes Open Pit.
And pork roasted during the day was featured at the block party buffet dinner that evening.
“I’m very pleased to have had such terrific people involved in our very first year,” said Joe Sweeney, Carmel High School development director “It’s great to see the culinary schools in the Chicago area get a little recognition. This will be an annual event.”
“Good pork is hard to describe. You know it when you taste it,” said state Rep. Al Salvi (R-Wauconda), one of the three judges.
Pork tenderness and a honey-mustard sauce drew compliments at the Kendall table. The judges congratulated the CHIC team for creativity, presentation and its smoked ham with honey cilantro barbeque sauce.
But when the tasting was over it was a fall-off-the-bone, melt-in-your-mouth dish of ribs that won the event for the Kraft Food Service team.
“It was very close,” Scarpa told the other two teams.
“We’re going to win next year,” promised Kendall College special events coordinator Luci Bagnall.
The roast and block party drew about 600 people and raised more than $15,000 for the school.