Will spices that originate outside of Vietnam be allowed in the Golden Spoon contest?

From Food Expert Suong Thi Bui: From the last two seasons most contestants use Vietnamese spices. In the next season, the preliminary round will have a theme called “Hometown Taste”, so its contestants should use only Vietnamese spices. The second round will have a theme called “Golden Dish”, which allows the teams to showcase the signature dishes from the outlet they represent. It may very well be a Western styled dish, so this is an opportunity for cultural exchange. There are many restaurants that will prepare Vietnamese food, but will still use foreign spices. The theme of the final round is “The Secret Black Box”, in which the ingredients will mainly come from Vietnam. We tried to limit as much as possible the ingredients that come from Europe. Wines are usually the bulk of these.

The key objective of the contest is to honor Vietnamese cuisine, so we are very concerned about this. We can control this and also expect that the Vietnamese spices used not only be fresh, but can also be dried or preserved. Realistically this is how international diners and chefs will come across and utilize such Vietnamese spices.

Mr.Sang Huy Ly: A perfect example to answer this question refers to coffee. Vietnamese coffee is very well known, but it is not an indigenous ingredient to Vietnam. It originates from France. If we insist only on using Vietnamese foods then would alienate ingredients like coffee.

That is about Vietnam, but it considers other countries. Take Italy, for instance. If Italians do not accept imported dishes from other countries then they wouldn’t have the Italian noodle which originated in China. If we don’t accept new and strange dishes, then the Italian noodle would have never become a culinary symbol of Italy. So we think that we should honor what we have and improve or upgrade them to be better.

Therefore if we don’t care too much about the words we use and see where they come from then we will go further. I believe that by continuously improving things we should open our door to welcome new and good things as well as maintain them to make them become our own products.

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