#EatDrinkFestival Kitchen Battle: Chef Zoey Blaq vs Chef Jeff

At #EatDrinkFestival, we finally got us a main stage. This year we put together a little Iron Chef style battle. 

“We’re excited to announce the Maggi Kitchen Battle, which is probably our single best idea ever after the Festival.

Formally trained chefs will be meet facing off against bloggers/hobbyist chefs. It’s such an intriguing topic of discussion in the local culinary scene and you know we like things like this.”

We had our participants work on the following themes:

• Rice
• Pottage
• Soup

These were chosen because the key ingredient were the all-new Maggi Naija Pot cubes. We also didn't want to limit the contestants so we just gave them a general theme or one ingredient they had to incorporate into their meals. The really great part is that we kept the themes a secret until about a day when we told the chefs. We're excited to expand on the challenges in our 2018 Festival and really throw the chefs some curve balls.

Our first match-up saw @chefzoeyblaq take on @chefjeff3000. We cheated a little bit on the match-ups though. Zoey Blaq is a chef too.  We challenged Chef Zoey and Chef Jeff to create something interesting with rice and the Maggi Naija Pot. Initially, rice may seem boring but given how prevalent it is in our Nigerian cuisine, we felt it was relevant and at the same time challenging. 

Chef Zoey came into the match-up as a slight underdog and gave us our first upset of the day. It was so unexpected that Henry wasn't too sure if he was supposed to announce a winner. In the video below, you'll catch the lil' awkwardness.

Thanks to our amazing judges, Banke of Lost in Lagos and Hadiza of WovenBlends, who co-judged this round. 

We always felt it'll be weird if people just got to watch and smell the food without tasting, so part of the plan was to get some audience members to try the food too. The audience tasters were also very aligned with the judges in this round, a couple people tweeted and tagged us in their verdicts. LOL!

We'll be releasing the recaps of the two other battles throughout this week. It only gets more exciting...

Sorry, the sound in the video is a bit dodgy at times, technical difficulties and what not. We'll be better next time.