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On the second day of The Staff Canteen Live 2017 at ScotHot it’s been another busy and successful day.

The first demo of the day was from Glasgow’s very own Gary Maclean, Senior Lecturer at City of Glasgow College and MasterChef: The Professionals winner 2016. It was Gary’s debut with The Staff Canteen Live and his students have been supporting all of our chefs at ScotHot.

He said: “The pressure of a live audience is probably just as big as being in front of the MasterChef judges!”

He added: “The Staff Canteen is a main hub, and every chef I know has a connection to it or uses it as a tool. I think it’s definitely the main portal for chefs to go to these days.”

On his students Gary explained that it’s not just about them meeting the chefs on the stage, he explained: “Being in public, being able to handle themselves, converse with people and understanding their role is really important. We had 50 students who wanted to do it and we had to draw names out of a hat. They’ve all had a ball and done the college really proud.”

The dish he prepared was a beautiful pan seared loin of roe deer, garnished with raw spiced and caramelised cauliflower, oats and nuts, salsify, brambles, game chips and roe deer sauce.

Next up was William Curley, patissier, who has not only won Britain’s Best Chocolatier just once but four times. A culinary gold medal winner and deemed a master of culinary arts by the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts, William wowed the crowd with his extravagant jaffa cake tarts.

He said: “It’s great to be in Glasgow, the crowd is buzzing, happy and asking lots of questions. As an industry I think it’s really important to try and engage with the next generation, and get young people enthusiastic about what we do as a craft.”

He added: “I’ve been in London many, many years and it’s a huge part of what I do but ultimately I’m Scottish and coming back is fantastic. For young people in Scotland to see chefs from down south coming back up they can relate and see we are the same people.”

The third demo of the day was Ruth Hinks who is the company director and pastry chef at Cocoa Black. From the get go she was all smiles whilst creating an amazing cashew nut praline with roasted white chocolate and vanilla ganache.

She told us: “The Staff Canteen has always supported me, so it’s great to give something back. I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t realise how much work goes into chocolate making so it’s nice to be able to share your knowledge and share what you are doing with other chefs.”

Closing The Staff Canteen Live was Graeme Cheevers, head chef at Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond, who created seaweed confit Loch Etive trout loin with oyster emulsion. After he got off stage he said: “There was a great audience and Scotland needs more things like this. When I was younger there wasn’t anything like The Staff Canteen Live and if I’d have had the opportunity to come to something like this I would have jumped at it. 

“A show like this is inspiring and it helps us to get a greater footfall of young chefs coming through our kitchens.”

Of course none of this could have been achieved without our sponsors; Westlands, Chef Works, Wild Atlantic Prawns, Essential Cuisine and Braehead Foods. Westlands' growing manager, Will Boers and James Seymour, marketing and product development manager, believed they benefited a lot from being up in Scotland.

They said: “It has given us a new audience to what we are used to down south and as always working with The Staff Canteen has brought not only a good crowd but the right crowd.”

Essential Cuisine’s Jonathan Harvey-Barnes, Howard Beasley and Rob Hamilton added: “It has been a great experience. It has brought a lot of people to us and when Gary Maclean was on it was a massive draw for us and we were able to catch up with the chefs that came to see him.”

All of the recipes from today and yesterday can be found here and don’t forget to follow us and keep up to date with everything we are doing by following us on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and liking us on Facebook.

By Morven Fik and Carly Cairns