By Jenny Neyman
Photos courtesy of Robert Love. Carla Anderson, right, of Soldotna, and her daughter-in-law, Allison Anderson, of Anchorage, work on a dish in the 2011 World Championship Dutch Oven Competition from March 17-19 in Utah. The Anderson team was Alaska’s only representatives in the cook-off.
Redoubt Reporter
The dishes presented in the final round of judging March 19 were fitting of a world-class cooking competition — prime rib with garlic bleu-cheese dressing and twice-baked potatoes artfully arrayed on a bed of crisp greens; lightly golden braided bread with flecks of dill and yielding hunks of softened-but-not-runny feta cheese nestled within; mocha mascarpone cake enshrouded in a shiny chocolate veneer studded with buxom, vibrant berries and frothy dollops of cream.
The level of flavors, preparation and presentation of food was already at a gold standard of culinary arts, for any kind of cooking competition. Then take into account that the dishes were prepared in nothing more than simple round, lidded pots with smoldering coals as the only heat source and it becomes an entirely different standard of cooking — the cast-iron standard.
“The caliber of competition was so high. We learned a real lot of stuff going and participating and seeing how people do things at the top level,” said Carla Anderson, of Soldotna.
Anderson and her daughter-in-law, Allison Anderson, of Anchorage, were Alaska’s representatives in the 2011 World Championship Dutch Oven Competition, put on by the International Dutch Oven Society on March 17, 18 and 19 in Sandy, Utah.
To participate in the annual world championship cook-off, a two-person team must have
Carla Anderson, of Soldotna, lifts the lid on her roast brisket with Portobello mushrooms, Craisins and a cranberry reduction sauce, the main course she and daughter-in-law, Allison Anderson, prepared for the preliminary round of the Championship Dutch Oven Competition from March18-20 in Utah. The Andersons placed eighth overall.
won a regional competition or be nominated as the representative of a regional Dutch oven cooking club. Dr. Nels and Carla Anderson founded the Last Frontier chapter of the International Dutch Oven Society and organized the first Alaska Dutch Oven State Championship last July as part of Soldotna’s Progress Days celebration.
Coming from a nearly lifelong involvement with the Boy Scouts, where cooking in cast-iron Dutch ovens is a staple of camping trips, Dr. Anderson has been keen to expand the popularity of true iron-chef cooking in Alaska.
“If you’ve got a fixed base camp there’s no excuse for bad food. You can cook anything you can cook in an oven at home in there. I eat better on camp trips than I do at home,” Anderson said of his efforts to draw participation in the club. “It really is a lot of fun. It’s designed to have good friends, good fun and good food. That’s what it’s really about.”
The 2010 Progress Days competition drew 10 teams in the youth division and eight in the adult division, and a hearty crowd of spectators to sample the dishes after the judges gave them a taste. Carla and Allison participated but exempted their dishes from judging, not wanting novices to have to compete with their longer history and wider expertise. Winners were named, but neither the first- nor second-place teams were able to attend the world championships in Utah in March, so Carla and Allison were given the opportunity to be the Last Frontier club’s designated team.
Though they are not new to Dutch oven cooking and were aware of the World Championship competition, this was their first time seeing it in person, much less competing. Despite the learning curve, they made it past their preliminary round March 18 and into the finals March 19, and placed eighth out of 23 teams in all. Out of a possible 300 points, they were only 12 points out of second place and less than 25 points away from first.
“We felt — for our first time, from Alaska and not really having any idea how they do them
Allison Anderson lays out the sour cream Saskatoon berry pie she and Carla Anderson made in the preliminary round.
on a big level— we did really well,” Carla said. “It was a real learning experience and it was very intense. I was absolutely exhausted by the end of both days.”
Their problems — and resultant education — began immediately upon signing up. They registered in December and planned out the three dishes they would prepare — a main dish, a bread and a dessert.
“About the middle of December we decided, ‘I guess we’re going to go,’ then we realized that we had to have six dishes — three in the preliminary round, then three different ones in the final. I said, ‘Oh, we’ve got some time before the competition (in March) to come up with six dishes.’ Then we found out we had to have them turned in by Dec. 31. So we literally had a week and a half to come up with three more dishes, and that was just really a challenge,” Carla said.
Guests at the Andersons’ annual Christmas Eve party were conscripted as taste testers.
“I was cooking in December out on the deck in the Dutch oven. I did a couple of different kinds of recipes to get people to vote on which ones they liked the best,” she said.
Strategy plays a role, as well, she said: “Do you cook your best dishes the first day to make sure you make it into the final? Or save your best dishes for the second day and hope your first dishes get you through?”
They decided to pair what they thought was their weaker main dish and dessert with their
Carla and Allison Anderson prepared several scrumptious-looking dishes for the 2011 World Championship Dutch Oven Competition. Above, is crab-stuffed halibut empanadas. Following below are jalapeño cheese rolls, double chocolate bread pudding and multigrain herb-braided bread with chevre herb butter filling.
strongest bread for the preliminary round, and save what they thought was their best main dish and dessert with their weaker bread for the finals. Their preliminary round menu was roast brisket with Portobello mushrooms, Craisins and a cranberry reduction sauce; multigrain herb-braided bread with chevre herb butter filling; and sour cream Saskatoon berry pie. For the finals they made shrimp and crab-stuffed halibut empanadas; jalapeño cheese rolls based on a recipe from the Double Musky restaurant in Girdwood; and double chocolate bread pudding.
They soon learned the judges didn’t necessarily agree with the Andersons’ idea of their strongest dish.
“When you get to that level where everybody is doing so well a lot of it becomes judges’ preference,” Carla said.
She thought the herb bread was their strongest, and it turned out perfect in taste and texture, though just a little brown on the bottom from differences in high-altitude cooking to which they hadn’t quite adjusted. When the judging cards came in, it turned out their jalapeño rolls were voted the best bread in the entire competition.
But even that wasn’t unanimous. Each dish is scored with a maximum of 30 points from each of the five judges, with the highest and lowest scores dropped.
“The top score the judge gave us 29 out of 30 and said, ‘Best bread in the competition by a 
mile, everything about it was so nice.’ The bottom judge gave us 17 and said, ‘Undercooked and tasteless.’ So it was like, ‘What on earth were you eating?’” Carla said. “One judge said, ‘Perfectly browned,’ another said, ‘Unevenly browned.’ One said, ‘Wonderfully mild jalapeño taste,’ another said, ‘Needs to be hotter.’ It was just all over the place.”
They attended a preliminary round March 17 to get a feel for how the competition worked, and quickly realized that visual appeal was more important in all aspects of the competition than the Andersons at first realized.
“I said, ‘We’ve got to go to the grocery store and buy a whole bunch more garnishing stuff. 
They were garnishing everything all over the place,” Carla said. “The rules said it was not a garnishing contest, but I can tell you right now if you didn’t have a garnish, you were marked down.”
Judges also unofficially tended to favor dishes that could be removed from the cast-iron pots and displayed on the lids for service. That’s no easy feat for some dishes. Allison and a friend engineered a metal trivet with strips of aluminum to get their Saskatoon pie out of the pot for judging, but the Andersons’ brisket cooked in sauce and their bread pudding just weren’t firm enough to be removed and displayed.
“You could can tell that people who have been in these things for a long time, they monitor what they make by whether they can get it out and put it on the lid or not,” Carla said.
Even the cooking stations and the cooks themselves were finely arrayed. People wore matching outfits and decorated their stations with regional flare. A Louisiana team next to the Andersons had their spices and utensils organized in an ornate wooden cabinet topped with an alligator skull and had Mardi Gras beads to hand out. Another team had a vase of flowers and their menu in a frame like a five-star fancy restaurant, rather than a Utah convention center.
“Oh my goodness. Nobody told us about this stuff. So we hadn’t taken anything at all, other than matching tablecloths,” Carla said.
They did have aprons, hats and T-shirts with the Last Frontier, “AK” logo.
“At least we looked like we were a team. But the first day everybody kept thinking we were from Arkansas,” Carla said.
The friends they were staying with have visited Alaska, so for the finals the Andersons raided their collection of Alaska souvenirs to decorate their station, including a strip of baleen, a fish-shaped tin wall hanging, a piece of moose antler and a carved moose figure — “anything so people would know we were actually from Alaska,” Carla said.
Even though the competition was fierce, it was more from a fierce love of the tradition of Dutch oven cooking than it was fierceness among the teams. Three teams represented three generations of one family. On a mother-daughter team, the mother had competed in about seven world championships, and the daughter, just turning 11, was in a wheelchair recovering from cancer treatments, yet cooking right alongside her mom.
“She was just the happiest little thing. She said she had been cooking in Dutch ovens with her mom since she was 4 years old,” Carla said. “Everybody was really supportive. There wasn’t anybody trying to undercut anyone or anything like that. Everybody spoke positively about everyone else, and if you had a problem, there was always someone willing to help you.”
The Andersons are planning another Dutch oven cook-off during this year’s Progress Days event in Soldotna, with separate divisions for novice and experienced Dutch-off chefs. They also hope to see a competition as part of the Alaska State Fair in Palmer in August. In May, the Andersons are planning to hold Dutch oven cooking classes for anyone interested.
“Hopefully we’re going to get more people interested in cooking. I know there’s people hiding out there that are good Dutch oven cooks already that we can maybe get involved,” she said.
For more information or to sign up for the cooking classes, call the Andersons at 262-3280. For more information on the International Dutch Oven Society and the World Championship Dutch Oven Competition, visit www.idos.org.
