People's Choice Heritage Dish - SAVOR 2026

Tucson’s living food heritage came together in the annual celebration of flavor, tradition, and community at SAVOR on January 24, where we proudly congratulate GAP Ministries on being selected as the People’s Choice Heritage Dish winner! With over 60 local food vendors honoring heritage ingredients and culinary craft, the event invited guests to taste, learn, and vote for their favorite dishes.

From wide range of cooking techniques to beverages with profound craft, each participating booth reflected the spirit of the Sonoran Desert. One standout creation, voted by the attendees, beautifully exemplified Tucson’s culinary heritage with a Pork Birria Tamale served with consommé alongside a Mesquite Thumbprint Cookie filled with prickly pear. Featuring heritage ingredients such as mesquite flour, prickly pear, pork birria, dried chiles, masa, traditional spices, and locally sourced Shamrock Farms butter and sour cream, GAP Ministries’ dishes honored both culinary history and the local producers who sustain Tucson’s food ecosystem.

Below, Chef John shares more about the inspiration and story behind these dishes and the heritage ingredients that brought them to life.

“This dish brings together deeply rooted culinary traditions of Tucson and the greater Southwest — slow-braised birria, tamales, and desert-native ingredients — while highlighting how heritage foods continue to evolve through shared community tables, passed-down knowledge, and a respect for time, patience, and craft.

When I think of Tucson food, I think of tamales. I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and when my family moved to Tucson in 1992 and settled in the Flowing Wells area, tamales were completely unfamiliar to us. One of my earliest food memories here is my parents buying tamales from a woman selling them in a Home Depot parking lot. Not knowing how they were traditionally eaten, we didn’t fully understand them at the time. That moment stayed with me as an early lesson that food carries context, culture, and technique — not just flavor.

For this event, I asked our team to create something local that reflected Southern Arizona and the lived experiences within our kitchen. Fernando grew up eating tamales every Christmas and for weeks afterward — a tradition rooted in family and celebration. Drawing from that cultural foundation, and inspired by the comfort of eating tamales on a cold morning, the idea to make tamales at GAP took shape. It marked our first time producing them as this current team-at scale and became a meaningful learning experience for our culinary students.

We chose to prepare the tamales birria-style using pork — a preparation traditionally reserved for special occasions, slow-braised with dried chiles and care. Our culinary students learned how to prepare the birria using modern professional equipment, including the iVario Pro, iCombi Pro, and IRINOX, while honoring traditional flavors and methods. Rather than hand-wrapping individual tamales, students created a roulade using parchment paper to achieve consistency in shape and portioning — an intentional adaptation that balanced tradition with the realities of scale and service.

To further bridge tradition and contemporary presentation, the tamale was sliced on the bias and garnished thoughtfully, treating a familiar food with the refinement of a composed plate.

The dessert followed the same philosophy. Pam Ruiz, whose background is in pastry, created a mesquite thumbprint cookie — a classic pressed cookie rolled in cinnamon sugar with a Southern Arizona twist and filled with prickly pear jelly. Mesquite flour, long used in the Sonoran Desert, brings a naturally sweet, earthy depth, while prickly pear adds bright color and a flavor closely tied to the region.

Prickly pear is one of our favorite heritage ingredients. Each October’ish, we take culinary students to Flowing Wells Junior High School in the 85705 community — where GAP is based and where I am both an alumnus and a Hall of Fame member — to harvest tuna (prickly pear fruit) directly from the cactus. Students learn how to safely harvest and process the fruit, connecting local ingredients, hands-on learning, and desert food heritage.

Together, these dishes reflect what we strive for as the GAP Culinary Team: honoring Tucson’s heritage, using ingredients native to our region, teaching adaptability, and reimagining classic foods in a thoughtful, contemporary way. We didn’t set out to compete — we set out to serve with intention. Winning was simply a reflection of that shared effort.”

We congratulate GAP Ministries on their People’s Choice Heritage Dish win and extend our gratitude to every vendor and guest who made this celebration of Tucson’s food heritage so meaningful.