Adé Carrena is not a competitive person. The Durham-based chef and owner of suya spice company iLéWA Foods works hard on “staying within myself.” She plays by her own rules, she says, cooking intuitively rather than following a rigid “classical” approach, focusing on her internal compass instead of chasing accolades or validation.
“I don’t feel like I have to fight, in the sense of, ‘I need to show you how good I am or that I’m better than you,’” Carrena tells the INDY. “I am not better or worse than anyone, I just am what I am. I think we’re too distracted about external factors when a lot of it is about you and yourself.”
But she accepted the opportunity to compete on Chopped, the popular Food Network reality cooking show in which four contestants compete in three rounds using surprise ingredients. She competed not with the goal of winning but to challenge herself and to uplift West African food and particularly the flavors of her birthplace, Benin—which is also the West African country Carrena sources her spice business ingredients from.
“I saw it as a beautiful opportunity to tell people who you are, what you do, and about your spices,” she says. “I saw it as a chance to showcase what I’m doing in North Carolina and in Benin.”
And that’s exactly what she did.
In the sixth episode of the show’s dizzying 60th season, which premiered July 15, Carrena strove to create three winning dishes that incorporated surprise ingredients thrown at the contestants, like what she describes as the “diabolical” inclusion of piña colada mix. Carrena found a way to make it her own, substituting the available cashews with peanuts to make a suya (frying the nuts because there was no time to roast them) and somehow deftly folding the colada mix into the sauce in a way one judge described as creating a bottle-worthy result.
Carrena cut her hand while chopping ingredients in the second round, and struggled to keep her Band-Aid from falling off, which easily could have led to her elimination had her dishes been contaminated. She burned herself and repeatedly burned some required guanciale. She fought her way through the dessert course, a particular challenge for her because, she says, “we don’t really do desserts” in Benin.
And she won.
“I think the biggest challenge for me in this entire experience was ‘How do I stay true to myself and telling the story of my home?’” says Carrena. “I am a Beninese chef, and nothing in that pantry was ‘Here are some ingredients that are local to your home country or anything you cook with.’ I said, ‘May the ancestors be with me, because I don’t know what to do with this basket.’”
Yet she found corollaries, as in the first round when given smoked oysters and realizing she could parlay their “funky and umami-like” taste into something akin to sandwiches with sardines, a common street food in Benin. Despite never having cooked rabbit before—a key ingredient in the second round—Carrena made it her own with the suya sauce.
“It does feel nice that I didn’t have to be anything but myself to win this show,” she says. “I could show up in the authenticity of me and still win.”
Carrena is no stranger to winning, having claimed the N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association’s 2023 Chef of the Year award in the group’s multiround cooking competition. Local filmmaker Brad Herring’s short film Bite of Benin, which follows Carrena’s recent journey to reconnect with her family and roots after she was adopted by a Puerto Rican family in Connecticut at age 10, has won numerous awards, including the People’s Choice Award at the North Carolina Film Festival. Plus, she’ll be featured at Charleston Food + Wine later this year and recently appeared on the industry-leading Cherry Bombe podcast.
Like Chopped, these experiences taught her that there’s always more to learn.
“The takeaway is that I know nothing,” the always humble chef says. “You gain more in this life [by] being a student. Challenging myself has been the way I’ve grown in almost everything I’ve done, and I welcome it.”
She also learned that, while she may be skilled at it, competitive television is not her jam. She’ll always welcome the opportunity to teach people how to make West African food, though—on TV or otherwise.
Carrena’s episode re-airs July 29 at two p.m. Her West African flavor–infused macaron pop-up at Little Blue Bakehouse in Raleigh runs through the end of this month, and she’ll be there in person on July 20 from 11 a.m.–2 p.m. Find her on Instagram.
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