UW-Stout junior Michael Choronzy loves the experimentation cooking offers.
“Cooking is a way of answering questions,” said the hotel, restaurant and tourism management major. “What flavors are possible? What textures are possible? I enjoy bringing a dish to somebody they would have no other way of experiencing.”
Choronzy, head chef at Menomonie’s Duke & Dagger, 120 6th Ave., was one of eight Wisconsin chef finalists in the 2019 Wisconsin Pork Association Taste of Elegance competition. The competition, held Jan. 31 at the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells, encouraged chefs to develop creative and innovative entrees using pork. Choronzy did not finish in the top three.
For the competition, Choronzy created the dish Isabella’s Stuffed Pork, a westernized imagination of a Korean ssam, a type of dish in Korean cuisine where leafy vegetables are used to wrap meat. The name was inspired by 19th century English explorer, writer, photographer and naturalist Isabella Bird, who traveled to Korea in the 1890s and was the first woman ever accepted into the United Kingdom Geographical Society.
“At that point in time this was a dish only eaten by women in Korea,” Choronzy explained. “I like to imagine in some alternate universe she would have tried it there and brought it back with her to the western world.”
The dish is a pork loin filled with a mixture of pork, sausage, apples and cranberries that is then wrapped in bacon and served with fried rice, lettuce and naan to create individual wraps. He picked the ingredients because they were readily available and he could concentrate on creating Isabella’s Stuffed Pork.
Choronzy has been head chef at the Duke & Dagger, a British pub and restaurant, for eight months and has worked there for two years. He learned about the competition online. It was an honor to be chosen the first year he entered, said Choronzy, of Sturgeon Bay, noting he heard another chef had entered five times before being chosen as a finalist.
The chefs had three hours to prepare and cook their dishes at the Kalahari Resort kitchen for the judges. Two of the judges were chefs and another was an educator at culinary school, Choronzy said.
“The judges definitely had a lot of great feedback,” Choronzy said. “That was probably one of the best parts of the competition to get that. I got some pointers on how I could have done better, which is hard to hear. But if you don’t hear it you can’t fix it. They really enjoyed the explosion of flavor.”
Choronzy started attending UW-Stout in 2009 for game design and left school in 2012. After working at Perkin’s Restaurant in Menomonie as a server, shift supervisor and assistant manager and loving the food industry, he returned to the university in 2017. He loves cooking and spends his time going to school, listening to podcasts of other chefs being interviewed and works on creating recipes at the Duke & Dagger. “I can’t get enough of it,” he said of cooking.
Andrew Mercil, degree audit coordinator at UW-Stout, owns the Duke & Dagger with Sifia Jevne. “We are so thrilled Chef Mike was chosen from chefs across Wisconsin for this competition,” Mercil said. “It is a huge honor for us. It’s a huge accomplishment for Mike.”
“It’s a really fun dish,” Mercil said. “You get a taste of the Far East. You get a little salty, sweet and tart. It’s really tasty. Putting the lettuce on the wrap gives it a little crunch. It demonstrates the kind of innovative and creative thinking we do with all our products at the Duke & Dagger. From food to drinks to events, we are always striving to think of new and creative ways for people to enjoy our establishment and learn about British culture.”
The restaurant plans to have the dish on the menu periodically and will announce it on the website and through social media.
Choronzy plans to graduate in May 2020. His goals include working work with a more advanced chef as a mentor to improve his skills even more.
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Photos
Student Michael Choronzy, chef at the Duke & Dagger in Menomonie, made a Korean-style pork dish when he competed in the finals of the Wisconsin Pork Association competition.
Michael Choronzy’s dish was a version of Korean ssam. Leafy vegetables are used to wrap the meat.
