Truffle Berries the Competition in Festival Event

Strawberries were not just for dessert when hundreds of amateur chefs nationwide entered their favorite recipes--from hors d’oeuvres to main courses--for the 1997 California Strawberry Festival Berry Off Contest.

They were cooks with imagination, coming up with recipes ranging from Sicilian strawberry-stuffed grape leaves to a strawberry spring roll salad and a chocolate cream puff with strawberry truffle filling.

Once the hundreds of recipes were narrowed to six finalists, about a dozen lucky tasters got to sample the goodies Wednesday afternoon at the Mandalay Beach Resort Embassy Suites in Oxnard.

The event, which kicked off the countdown to the Strawberry Festival on May 17 and 18, took up the entire morning for Mandalay head chef Robert Garcia. His troop of cooks helped prepare the dishes, some of which presented culinary challenges. Garcia had to make sure the meals not only pleased the palate but pleased the eye.

“This is intense,” said Garcia, who has been head chef at the hotel’s Capistrano restaurant for five years. “We want to impress. We strive for presentation but also to be true to the recipe.”

But in the end, gastronomic pleasure won out over aesthetics: The winner was an inconspicuous lone strawberry.

The dessert, dubbed the strawberry truffle and created by Roxanne Chan of Albany, Calif., was a large strawberry dipped in white chocolate, cream cheese and ginger with coconut and pistachio nuts on top.

For food critic and judge Dan Fendel, any strawberry dessert had to be out of this world to receive his vote--and this little truffle was.

“My prejudice walking into this is against the desserts because they are the obvious choice,” said Fendel, who said he was torn between the truffle and the grape leaves. “A dessert has to be much better than the rest to win.”