Utah woman scores spot in world food competition, could win $100K

Utah woman scores spot in world food competition, could win $100K

(Photo Courtesy RaChelle Hubsmith)


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LOGAN — A North Logan woman is heading to a national food competition with her bacon recipe and a shot at bringing home a whopping $100,000.

RaChelle Hubsmith won at the Taste of America Challenge, representing Utah in August. Other Utahns that were awarded at that event were Donna Kelly (dessert) and Kenny Robertson (barbecue).

“I just started crying when I saw that I won,” Hubsmith said. “It was just an honor to actually win first place in Utah and to represent my state and that just felt really cool.” Winners are chosen from each state at the challenge to move on to The World Food Championship, which runs Nov. 9-15 in Orange Beach, Alabama. The total prize purse is $300,000, including $100,000 to the grand prize winner.

For Hubsmith, it’s her first opportunity at the world event — and a step forward in putting herself on the food competition map, which she said she began pursuing this year. She said most of her experience has been making wedding and birthday cakes. Going against competitors from across the world, she’ll compete in a bacon category, but there are also categories for the best barbecue, burger, chili, dessert, seafood and more.

“It’s a huge accomplishment,” she said, adding that the competition field is full of television cooking contestants and winners of all sorts of cooking championships. “It’s a really big honor for me to be competing with people who have been doing it for a long time and have won a lot of prize money.” Each category features 50 competitors. Though the overall top prize is $100,000, the contest’s website states each category winner will receive $10,000.

Each competitor will have a signature dish and one with an infused ingredient to begin with.

Hubsmith plans on keeping her bacon dish for the competition a secret, though she plans on making some sort of a dessert. The opening round ingredient each contestant in her category will have to infuse cornbread into a recipe.

Finalists, she said, will have to infuse chocolate with their bacon dish. While it may seem difficult to infuse a certain ingredient into a recipe, Hubsmith said she finds it easier to cook that way.

“For me, that’s the fun part,” she said. “It actually narrows it down a little bit because my mind is just going to all the possibilities. With my signature dish I could do anything I wanted and probably made 15 different dishes before I came up with the dish I decided I was going to enter.”

While Hubsmith is relatively new to the food competition scene, she is certainly making the most of her opportunity. In addition to her Taste of America Challenge win and invitation to the World Food Championship, she’ll also do a series of videos giving baking tips, published by her sponsor Camp Chef.

She’s also a mother of three and a youth leader at her local church and said the support she’s had from her family and from those she works with has been important to her.

“I’ve had lot of food testers that have been sampling the food I’ve been making to make sure I’m entering a product that can actually be competitive,” Hubsmith said. “The youth that I work with, they’re so excited just to know I’ll be on TV and they’ll get to watch me compete. Everyone’s been super supportive.”

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