Amateur cooks battled for prizes and bragging rights at the Brooklyn Casserole Takedown, held on October 21. The Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club (514 Union Street) had hungry contest goers scattered about, as they were eager to name the top six dishes. For a 25-dollar ticket fee, they ate the participating casseroles in an ‘all-you-can-eat’ style and voted for the ‘yummiest’ via ballot.
Matthew Timms, organizer of the nationwide Takedowns, started these food competitions in 2004 after casually inviting friends over to his apartment for ‘food-offs’ in Winter 2003. The first takedown was chili-themed, because he was obsessed with the dish at the time, and was judging competitions after joining the International Chili Society.
“Everyone’s super serious about chili [and] everyone’s got an opinion on it, so I thought I would do a chili competition in Williamsburg, and it went really well,” Timms told us.
He explained that The Village Voice covered it and helped put Timms’ takedown competitions on the map. Soon after Timms started doing other themes/dishes, including the Brooklyn Bacon Takedown in 2009. Since then he has also done cookies, fondue and curry, all of which have taken place in major cities across the United States. Timms has held seven competitions in Brooklyn so far in 2018 alone – with themes of soup, meatballs, tacos, garlic, ice cream, homebrew, and macaroni and cheese.
He emphasized that these competitions are about getting self-taught cooks, all from different walks of life, together in a laid-back environment that encourages passion, creativity and improvisation.
“It’s very unpretentious that way, so it’s more of a party,” Timms said. “I was supposed to be an actor, but then I was throwing these parties and it became sort of this passion project.”
The idea for a casserole contest came about when Timms went to Minnesota eight years ago and held the Hot Dish Takedown. He explained that he was looking for that one dish that people in Minnesota loved to eat, and discovered casseroles were a traditional staple there. Now nearly a decade later, he wanted to bring it to New York, and soon discovered that casseroles come in many different forms and with different names.
“If you Wiki ‘casserole’ there’s like 50 different types – anything cooked in this high-walled, oven-safe dish with a lid on it,” Timms said. “Lasagna counts. Deep-dish pizza from Chicago – people call that a casserole as it’s cooked in a cast iron. If you Google it you can [also] see moussaka, a casserole from Greece.”
Fifteen home cooks, all with their own unique interpretations of the hot dish, went head-to-head against each other at the Brooklyn Casserole Takedown. As per cook-off standards, each contestant made their dishes at home – with at least two trays on-hand for attendees to sample – and brought them to the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club the morning of.
Katherine Anstreicher, who moved to Boerum Hill from Iowa in September, said this was her first time participating in a takedown. She said that her godfather had been in a few food competitions while she was growing up, and that they had always sounded really fun.
“Casseroles are near and dear to my heart because both of my parents grew up in the Age of the Casserole [the height of processed food amalgamations, 1950s-70s] and I grew up eating a few of their favorites,” Anstreicher said, explaining why she signed up. “This is also prime casserole season. There’s something so comforting about pulling out a rich, nostalgia-inducing meal out of the oven when it’s cold outside.”
“Swing State Casserole” was based off a hash brown and corn flakes casserole her father used to make for potlucks and holiday parties. What made her dish special was that she decided to use fresh red and blue potatoes, instead of store-bought frozen hash browns – “to spice things up and to capitalize on Iowa’s political standing in this election cycle.”
Usually a panel of judges votes and awards their favorite dishes to the top three choices, but last month’s Brooklyn Casserole Takedown had a twist. The audience tallied their votes and named six, instead of three, People’s Choice winners at the closing ceremony. The winners received prize packages that included products from Anolon, Cuisinart and Microplane.
Timms’s next takedown will be the Brooklyn Chili Takedown on Sunday, November 18, 5:30-7:30 pm at Murmrr Ballroom (17 Eastern Parkway). For more information or to enter the competition, visit www.thetakedowns.com.
Author
George Fiala has worked in radio, newspapers and direct marketing his whole life, except for when he was a vendor at Shea Stadium, pizza and cheesesteak maker in Lancaster, PA, and an occasional comic book dealer. He studied English and drinking in college, international relations at the New School, and in his spare time plays drums and fixes pinball machines.
