Ingenuity keeps Aloha Plate going strong

"The Great Food Truck Race" airs 6 p.m. Sundays, Food Network; repeats throughout the week

With a "thin-to-win" strategy and the attitude of a champion, neither rain nor geoduck nor potato harvesting has been able to stop the Aloha Plate food truck team in the "Great Food Truck Race" competition. The Hawaii group is a finalist for the big win next week in the conclusion of season four of the Food Network series.

On Sunday’s episode in Chicago, it was revealed that the three remaining trucks — Aloha Plate, Tikka Tikka Taco and Philly’s Finest Sambonis — are all contenders to take home $50,000 and their own food truck. The winning team will be decided during next week’s finale.

As for the stint in the Windy City, teams were required to make a deep-dish pizza and sell classic Chicago dogs. Tikka Tikka tore ahead for the first time to win both challenges. Their pizza was filled with tikka chicken in raita sauce, a dish guest judge and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said reflected the "new Chicago."

But Aloha Plate was nipping at their heels, having made a classic deep-dish pizza with sausages and pepperoni, buffalo mozzarella, mushrooms and three cheeses; hot dogs were dressed with mustard, grilled onions and peppers.

Last week, brothers Lanai and Adam Tabura were back home to tape a couple of cooking demonstrations for the Cooking Hawaiian Style website, a recipe site created by family friend and Hawaii expat Frank Abraham. Lanai Tabura hosts the videos featuring isle personalities such as chef Kimi Werner and singer Melveen Leed.

Upcoming episodes will feature the Tabura brothers, former newscaster Mahealani Richardson and Star-Advertiser columnist Betty Shi­ma­bu­kuro. These will air on Oceanic Time Warner Cable’s OC16 starting October.

The brothers will show how to make a loco moco with braised brisket as well as a family recipe of crab spaghetti salad.

"Our house had one pasta — spaghetti — that we used for spaghetti, cold pasta and crab mac or tuna mac salads," explained Adam Tabura.

That ability to be resourceful, developed during their childhood on Lanai, has empowered the brothers to thrive on the show.

"We were poor," Lanai Tabura stated immediately to explain their success.

He and Adam, the chef of the team, grew up eating what was available to them, from the deer they hunted to the vegetables they picked from their grandparents’ garden. These experiences carried them as they sailed through butchering bison and digging up potatoes for the competition.

"If you didn’t cook, you didn’t eat," said Lanai Tabura. "There was no fast food on Lanai."

The team was also able to apply that concept of economy for winning challenges week to week.

"It’s not a food-tasting contest; it’s a sales contest," Lanai Tabura said. "If you can save money, you’re gonna win. Our theory is ‘thin to win.’ "

As chef, Adam Tabura says he’s focused on cooking inexpensive ingredients into tasty, appealing fare. He’s turned hamburger, lettuce, buns and Spam into popular teri and Spam burgers, lettuce wraps and salads. He says the team purposely didn’t attach itself to a specific kind of food, which has allowed it flexibility when challenges required use of specific ingredients, from geoduck to bison. Trucks that defined themselves by a single item had more difficulty.

A dish that has proved to be both flexible and well received is the lettuce wrap. The chef says wraps are a good fit for Aloha Plate because while they’re associated with quality Asian cuisine, they’re also renowned enough to be familiar to customers.

Another lesson on the road: Though teriyaki sauce might be passe for local folks, it’s a flavor that the rest of the country associates with Asian and Hawaii food. The chef admits he initially didn’t want to use teri sauce but quickly realized it would bring in the sales.

"I couldn’t make my own sauce from scratch — it would take too long — so we’ve tried to find the best sauce at the area’s Costco and fix it," he said.

No matter what the challenges, Adam Tabura has kept his nose to the grindstone trying to deliver food that will draw and please crowds. That has kept him away from cameras most of the competition, and that’s OK with him.

"I’m a man of action, not words," he said. "I take our plans and try to make it real. That’s what makes a champion."