One year from now, elite artistes in the world of food will descend on Erfunt, Germany, for the International Exhibition of Culinary Art, often called the Culinary Olympics.
It's said to be the largest exhibition of championship cooking in the world. As in the sporting Olympics, contestants will march in by nation, carrying their flags, dressed in formal kitchen uniforms, tall, starched, white toques perched on their heads. Top chefs from scores of nations will compete in categories that range from pastries to hot and cold dishes and -- the category that concerns us here -- food art.
Competitors will number in the thousands. The delegation from Taiwan alone could be as many as 200.
The delegation from Alaska will consist of one: Bang-on Roulet. This year will be her second time at the event.
While the world may have to wait until next October to see what she can do, Alaskans can get an eyeful right now by checking out the carved pumpkins decorating the lobby of the Hotel Captain Cook, where Roulet works as a banquet chef and garde manger (pantry chef).
Roulet -- "Mostly people call me On" -- has won a smorgasbord of awards at major food art contests and garnered the attention of America's haute cuisine cognoscenti.
Born in Thailand, she met her husband, Marcus Roulet of Ketchikan, when he visited a friend who had married a Thai. He was staying at an apartment where Bang-on was employed as a nanny and recalled how he happened to be killing time one morning there when she came in to work.
"By the time she took her third step into the room, I said to myself, 'Yep, I will need to marry her,'" he said.
Twelve hours later he proposed and she accepted. "The next day he bought me the ring!" she said. And she was off to life in Alaska.
The couple moved to Anchorage, where Marcus works for the FAA. Bang-on got a job at the Captain Cook kitchen. In Thailand, women did all the cooking and she had run a restaurant while in Ketchikan. But with limited English and no formal culinary school training, she felt she needed to do something to increase her skills and make herself more valuable to her employer.
The answer came on the Food Network.
She was watching television Chef Ray Duey demonstrate food carving when a light went off. "I said, 'I want to be a food carver. We don't have one in Alaska. I'll start carving today,'" she recalled. She took a potato and turned it into something like a flower.
It became an obsession. She bought Chef Ray's instructional videos and ordered carving supplies from him. One day an order didn't arrive on time. Marcus called to double-check the order and wound up talking with Chef Ray himself.
"I explained I thought On was getting quite good and asked if I might send him a few photos for his critique," Marcus said. "He welcomed that and sent a photo of a honeydew melon he had carved. Well, On saw that melon and insisted that we drive to the grocery store immediately to purchase honeydew melons."
As soon as she got home, she sat down and duplicated Chef Ray's melon. Marcus emailed a photo of the finished product back to Chef Ray.
"The phone rang approximately two minutes later," Marcus said. It was Chef Ray. "He strongly suggested On travel to Las Vegas to compete in the 2010 Las Vegas Culinary Challenge."
At the Las Vegas show she won the silver medal for her static presentation, a carving done in advance and presented as a finished piece of sculpture, and gold in the live carving competition, in which participants make their creations on the spot.
Later that year she won gold and silver medals at a competition in France. In 2011 she returned to the Las Vegas Culinary Challenge, winning silver and bronze. She expanded her palette to include taro root and butternut squash. When she went back to Las Vegas for the third time, she won another gold medal and was awarded the Best of Show prize. She made her first trip to the Culinary Olympics in 2012, where she picked up a bronze medal in live carving and, more importantly, learned a great deal.
Her next prizes came in the 2014 Culinary World Cup in Luxemburg, at which her work in taro root earned two gold medals and a silver. Earlier this year she went to the American Culinary Classic, a major international event held in Orlando, Florida, and won gold medals on both days of competition.
The judges, some of whom had been watching her since she got in the game, "were very impressed not only with her current displays but also with how much she has improved over the past several years," Marcus said.
In the process, she said, she's been helped by a host of fellow Alaskans, from her co-workers at the Cook to the local Rotary Club.
Taro root is Roulet's medium of choice. She gets hers at New Sagaya. "The judges like it," she said. It comes in three colors, white, gold and rust. "But you never know what it will be until you peel it."
The carving is done with tools that resemble the ones used in working clay. "Mostly you scrape, scrape, scrape," she said. "But I sometimes use knives to get the very fine detail."
Roulet wakes up at 2 a.m. and checks into work at 4. When she gets home she keeps carving, usually in the garage. It takes three hours to make one of the pumpkins now on display at the hotel. The things that win gold medals in international competitions take a lot longer. A large ring of female figures representing different virtues that won first place at the American Culinary Classic required 30 hours of constant working.
"It's like not sleeping for four days and nights," she said, referring to the big contests. "If you sleep, the work's not being done. Most people do it in teams, but I do it by myself."
A fancy dragon, another medal winner in Orlando, took her five days and five nights, she said. In Taiwan, students wouldn't be allowed to attempt it until they'd completed several years of training.
But for the self-taught Roulet, training means doing, practicing and repeating something until she gets it right.
"The more I do, the more I learn," she said. In her earlier work, for instance, she often had trouble getting noses to look right. They're more anatomically accurate now, she said.
"Now I can see what I was doing. I use the mirror and look at myself," she said.
As a girl in Thailand, she said she'd always had the ambition to "go somewhere, make money to help my family, do something special." She may not have guessed that one day she'd be fulfilling that dream by carving taro roots in Alaska, but she hopes her story helps inspire others to achieve their dreams.
"People say, 'I can't.' But you can try," she said. "It comes out of your brain and your heart."