With a score of the maximum fifty points, Herman Santing won the meatball competition at Café Brinkzicht in Ruinen on Sunday afternoon. He thrilled the jury with his hard work in the Hees family kitchen.
Santing narrowly left two other top players behind, as Roelof Kreeft and Marcel de Boer scored just one point less. All three received the designation ‘gold’. What was striking on Sunday was the large number of younger participants. That may have something to do with the challenging words that defending champion Henk Joosten spoke after his victory last year. He called on young people to also compete in the kitchen to see who can fry the best meatball. Joosten remained stuck in the middle bracket this year.
This year there will be a new call and it is addressed to the ladies: Gea Hidding was the only lady among the sixteen participants. “Next year we should have at least four ladies among the participants,” said Janine Hees on behalf of the organization. “There were at least a few women here who indicated that they wanted to participate,” she added hopefully.
Taste buds
The jury again had a difficult task to assess all entries. Hennie Hees, Adri van der Vaart and Henri van der Zee let their taste buds work at full power and subjected the submitted balls – four participants per round – to an almost surgical examination. The question is always what the jury likes: a ball with an onion, a bit more peppery or just plain.
One participant was lucky that he sent the smallest of his four meatballs to the jury, because the larger ones were not fully cooked. The little one was quite popular with the jury, but there was no prize this year. Another had made a meatball with chocolate in it, but that was not such a success in the eyes of the experts. There was also a lot of discussion about it in the pub itself, where everyone could watch live from the kitchen again thanks to Bart Kiers, the very first meatball champion in 2013. One bite is fine, but a whole ball of chocolate? No.
People from the reserve list
Janien Hees, together with brother Jos, proved to be a satisfied organizer. “The shop was pleasantly full and we had the sixteen participants together in no time. In the end we had to call people from the reserve list, but everything went fine.” With Herman Santing as – according to insiders – a surprising winner, the hall of fame has been expanded with an additional name. Only one person won twice and that was Jan Pikken in 2019 and 2020. Just like Henk Joosten, he now had to make do with a place next to the podium.