Heat-ing up this year’s South Beach Wine and Food Festival was an epic culinary showdown between between two of the Miami Heat’s star players, Shane Battier and Chris Bosh, who put their culinary skills to the test with their favorite chefs for the first ever Kitchen Heat cooking competition.
The players got to chose one chef each to team up with for the competition, and Battier chose the Design District’s own Dena Marino of MC Kitchen while Chef Terrance Williams teamed up with Bosh. Each team had five minutes to work on their dish before they had to hand over the kitchen to the other team in a relay style battle.
First up was team Bosh, who made a spaghetti diablo with mussels, salmon and truffle. While the team worked on their dish, the event’s host Louis Aguirre got the onlooking crowd excited with “Go Heat” chants.
Next up was team Battier, who started immediately making fresh cavatelli with Marino’s lead for their “SOBEWFF Spectacular” dish. While this might have been a challenging dish for some in a competition, with Marino’s guidance Battier was making pasta like a pro. Once the pasta was cooked, they tossed it with sausage, kale, fresh basil, plum and cherry tomatoes, and topped it with truffle.
When it was time to pick a winner, host Aguirre tasted both dishes several times and admitted he loved them both and couldn’t decide! So he finally called it a tie. After that he got the excited crowd involved in the action by encouraging them to bid on some Heat merchandise signed by the players, which helped raise dollars for charity during the fun afternoon.
