Celebrated female chefs to share grilling tips with women
The “Cowgirl Edition of the BBQ Bootcamp” takes place from Sunday through Tuesday at Alisal Guest Ranch and Resort in Solvang. Another is planned for April 29 through May 1 next year.
For the first time ever, The Alisal Guest Ranch and Resort in Solvang is hosting an all-female “Cowgirl Edition” of the popular biannual BBG Bootcamp.
The event includes three days of cookouts, culinary seminars, cooking demonstrations and tastings galore from Sunday through Tuesday.
It could be the start of a new tradition since the event sold out quickly, but another one is scheduled from April 29 through May 1 next year.
A stellar lineup of award-winning female chefs — Valerie Gordon, Elizabeth Falkner, Katie Flannery, Ellen Bennett, Katelyn Kaney and Michelle Munoz — will team up with Anthony Endy, The Alisal’s director of culinary operations, executive chef and grill master for the inaugural Bootcamp.
The package costs $925 per night for two nights, according to a news release.
Chef Gordon, chocolatier and chef/owner of Valerie Confections in Los Angeles, will demonstrate how to create grilled barbecue desserts. The James Beard Finalist cookbook author “embraces a philosophy of telling compelling stories through flavor.” Her versatile culinary knack includes handmade chocolates, preserves, historic California cakes, savory delights and a “new frontier involving nationally praised grilled desserts.”
A demonstration of wood-fired pizza will be presented by Chef Falkner, television chef personality, activist and cookbook author. She was born in San Francisco, grew up in Los Angeles and worked her way up in San Francisco’s top kitchens before opening her first restaurant, Citizen Cake in 1997.
A decade later, she opened four more restaurants in San Francisco and New York.
Today, Chef Falkner does recipe development and consults on numerous products and brands. An inspiring public speaker, she has cooked and spoken all over the U.S. and in Japan, Europe, Mexico, Canada and China.
Half of the father-daughter team behind California-based Flannery Beef, specializing in high-quality, USDA Prime Holstein Beef, Chef Flannery will lead a seminar on Santa Maria barbecue. She’s a butcher’s daughter who has quickly risen in her role in her family’s trade of three generations. Together with her father, Bryan, the duo have made the Flannery name one of the most respected in the beef business.
Chef Bennett is the author of “Dream First, Details Later: How to Quit Overthinking & Make it Happen!” She will host an evening of cocktails, campfires and conversation underneath the stars.
While growing up, the founder and CEO of Hedley & Bennett, a Los Angeles-based culinary workwear brand, spent summers in her native Mexico learning to cook with her abuelita. Soon after graduating from high school, she attended culinary school in Mexico City. Back in Los Angeles, she put her training to work cooking in two Michelin-star restaurants, Providence and Baco Mercat.
Ms. Kaney, owner of Catteno Bros. jerky and sausage, will host a reception of drinks and barbecue bites. Founded by brothers William and Pino in 1947, Cattaneo Bros. is a legendary San Luis Obispo-based jerky brand known up and down the West Coast for its small-batch goodness.
Today, the company still cuts and processes its meats in the same factory where Ms. Kaney worked after school as a youth and came to appreciate a legacy that would one day become part of her own.
Chef Muñoz, who will lead a meat-smoking seminar, is the chef and co-owner of Moo’s Craft Barbecue in Los Angeles, which Food & Wine and Los Angeles Times critics named Best Texas Barbecue in California.
She is responsible for bestsellers such as the pork verde sausage, which merges Texas barbecue with her Mexican-American-Angeleno heritage, a riff on Mexican street corn and her signature smoked beef cheek tacos.
Participants will also get to enjoy The Alisal’s signature Breakfast Ride, which takes them through the rolling hills of the property via horseback or a hayride to a historic adobe for an al fresco, chef-prepared breakfast.
email: mmcmahon@newspress.com
FYI
For more information about the next “Cowgirl Edition of the BBG Bootcamp” from April 29 through May 1 in 2022 at The Alisal Guest Ranch and Resort, 1054 Alisal Road in Solvang, visit alisal.com/experiences/bbq-bootcamp-at-the-ranch-cowgirl.
