If you’ve never seen a competitive cooking show like Chopped, then it might be difficult to appreciate the high-pressure stakes of a cooking competition like Chilkat Chef. 

Teams that participate are given a whole salmon and a basket of five mystery ingredients, then they have just one hour to plan and prepare four plates of food to be judged, or auctioned off during the event. 

“People love these shows,” said Sue Libenson. The competition, which…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...