Winner will appear in Taste of Home magazine, cook with Carla Hall, and take home $25,000
My cuisine is pure love an fire: technique, heritage, and flavor. Winning is the key ingredient to opening my restaurant and making history.
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My signature dish is "tigrillo bouillabaisse" because it blends part of my Ecuadorian and Spanish roots. It consists of pork belly cured in a 12-hour brine, seared on the grill, caramelized in a pan, and glazed in the oven. It's accompanied by a "majado" (an Ecuadorian technique that involves activating the starch of green plantains until it becomes a creamy puree) of green plantains and semi-mature cheese, all topped with a creamy bouillabaisse sauce.
Who is your culinary inspiration?My Ecuadorian heritage and taste memory, being able to represent Ecuadorian cuisine in Miami makes me very proud of who I am and what I can share with the world through our native ingredients such as cacao and chili peppers, which had the first traces of their use in the world in our country.
What would you do with the $25,000?While my ultimate goal is to establish my own culinary concept, my immediate vision is strategic: before opening a restaurant, I want to invest in creating an importer of premium Ecuadorian foods and products. Ecuador possesses ingredients of exceptional quality, flavor, and technical sophistication that remain largely unknown to the international market. My objective is to introduce these products to the high-end hotel, restaurant, and bar sector in Miami.
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