A Lone Tree resident combined her Vietnamese past and her Asian cooking skills to create a Chilean sea bass and pineapple curry dish that won the Taste Sensation Award at a recent cooking competition.
Yume Tran received the award on the opening night of the 10th Annual Asian Film Festival, which was held from May 31 to June 3 in Aurora.
"I never dreamed of being in a chef competition," said Tran, who lives in Lone Tree with her husband, Jeff Nghiem, and two children, Tasha and Clara. "What made it extra special was that it was something I created all on my own and I won something for it."
Although neither Tran or her husband are trained as chefs, they do enjoy owning Indochine Cuisine in Parker, which has served Thai and Vietnamese cuisine since they opened it in January 2003.
Tran said she practiced making her dish four times before the competition, asking her restaurant staff and chef to do taste tests.
"I was really shooting for something that represents Indochine well, something that represents Asian fare well," she said. "My inspiration was to use the bold, colorful flavors of Thai cuisine but prepare them in a Vietnamese style, which is more sophisticated."
She said she steamed the Chilean sea bass with a broth mixture that included red curry paste, chicken broth, ginger, garlic, Kaffir lime leaves and pineapple to add a tropical and rich flavor to the dish. The fresh pineapple that accompanied the fish was honey-glazed with ginger. And then she topped the fish and pineapple with a sauce that she pureed from combining coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal, pineapple and red curry paste. Poached asparagus and steamed broken rice completed the dish.
The dish was inspired in part by her past, which she said was accentuated by the festival's opening night film - "Journey from the Fall," which tells the story of a Vietnamese woman who brings her family to the United States after her husband was imprisoned in a Communist re-education camp after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Tran said she has a very similar story, in that her father was a prisoner in a re-education camp and she was only allowed to see him once every couple of years before she came to the United States in 1979. When her family members were granted permission to visit their father, she said they were only allowed to bring him four pounds of food supplies. That is how she learned to reduce food to make it more compact. Reducing many pineapples into small boxes for visits to her Dad was what inspired her to use pineapple as part of her award-winning dish.
The memories and the festival's festivities gave Tran a night to remember.
Tran, who offers cooking classes, is finishing up her first cookbook and takes pride in educating people about Vietnamese and Thai cuisine, said she also enjoyed the 90 seconds she was allotted to talk about her dish on Aurora's public access channel.
The TV experience and the taste award will come in handy as Tran heads to New York this month to film the pilot for her new cooking show - Asian Cooking Made Simple - which she expects to be seen in the future by 22 million households nationwide.