An amateur chef from Winchester won the Chicory Challenge final which was held in the Netherlands on 22 November.

Susie Carter, who works for Hampshire Fare, won the £5,000 top prize with her recipe for chicory tarts with goats cheese & thyme. The dish was judged by various food writers and VIPs as well as a top Dutch chef, Chantel Veer.

Susie Carter said: “I am so proud to win the competition. I was really nervous about the competition and I can’t believe I actually won.

“The prize money will be donated to Hampshire Fare where it will be used to develop courses to encourage more people to use fresh local produce.”

The two other teams in the final – one from Waddesdon Church of England School in Aylesbury and one from Acklam Grange School in Middlesbrough - came second and third, respectively. The £1,000 and £500 second and third prizes will be spent on the schools’ food technology departments.

The three finalists were originally picked out of the 150 entries which the competition received.

The competitors were flown to The Netherlands for the final and put up in a top hotel with dinner in one of Amsterdam’s leading restaurants. 

The next day they saw chicory being grown and met some of the people responsible for producing the world’s finest chicory.  Then it was off to the kitchen, where the cooks prepared their own chicory recipe for judging.

The Chicory Challenge was a competition, run by the Dutch Produce Association, which aimed to draw attention to chicory’s potential and inspire English cooks to create some great new chicory recipes.

Chicory is little known and little used in the UK but it is a versatile vegetable which can be used raw in salads or cooked in a wide variety of dishes.  In continental Europe, people eat far more chicory than we do in the UK.