What I learned at a high school cooking competition

The clicks of gas stoves lighting up, the scraping of heavy-bottomed pots against burners, the heated whispers of a bustling kitchen… one might think one was on the set of a movie. The best chef Episode, but I’m actually at Griffiths Middle School in Downey, California, witnessing 12- to 14-year-olds masterfully navigate their way around an industrial-sized kitchen. It’s the high school’s first cooking competition, and they’re hosting a macaroni and cheese-themed cook-off for three other high schools within the district (Doty, Stauffer, and Sussman). Only one of the four teams will be crowned victorious.

The environment was nothing like the one I remember from high school. When I was 12, home economics (is it still called that?) meant learning how to make basic home-alone food for kids, like pizza bagels and bags of puppy chow smothered in peanut butter, without having to worry about allergens. Large groups of students would gather around a toaster oven to watch our teacher make cinnamon-sugar toast before we were ushered off to our next class 20 minutes later. From what I remember, cooking was a minuscule part of the year’s curriculum—we probably spent a week or two total learning about it. And I was privileged: many of my friends never had access to any kind of cooking class in school.

At Griffiths, which introduced its culinary program in 2016, the situation is different. “To get kids engaged in school, the reality is you have to find something that each student is passionate about,” explains Ashley Catanzano, the public information officer for the Downey Unified School District. There are 24 different career technical education (CTE) programs within the district, ranging from welding to biotechnology to, yes, food science. In these programs, including the culinary arts program, students gain hands-on experience and can even graduate with certifications that prepare them for jobs beyond school. The high school program has been running since 2010 and even has a food truck that students in the advanced culinary classes learn to operate and eventually use to cater events within the community.

But that’s high school. This is middle school, and while students are enrolled in a cooking class, they don’t necessarily see this as a career path — though it can be an advantage if they want to pursue a career in culinary arts. For Maddy, 13, choosing cooking as an elective was a way to get closer to her family. “Three times a week I watch my dad cook, and I want to help,” she explains. For Bristol, also 13, the motivation is similar: “Sometimes my mom is so overwhelmed that I want to be able to step in and help make something,” she says. Addison, 13, decided to study culinary arts because her mother is a baker and she’s inspired by her, while Hannah, 14, became more interested in cooking by browsing food blogs.

Although students move around the classroom self-sufficiently, with washed hands and hair tied back or in nets, the curriculum doesn’t immediately turn them into cooking experts. Kim Silverman, who has been teaching at Griffiths for four years, starts with the basics. “We start from scratch,” she says. “We teach them how to wash dishes, sweep the floor and wipe down a counter. We’re teaching them basic life skills.”

For Silverman, a former Le Cordon Bleu instructor, the differences between working with adults and children were a bit disconcerting. “When I first got there, it was difficult because I assumed they knew everything,” she says.

The curriculum, compared to culinary schools, is very different. “When you teach adults, you start with knife skills right away,” Silverman explains. “Here, I have to start with baking first because I need them to learn how to walk around a kitchen with 30 other people before I give them a knife.”

The students seem to have picked it up with ease, though. It’s not the first time they’ve cooked under pressure: Every Thanksgiving, the class also prepares proteins and side dishes for the staff, using skills they’ve acquired over the course of a semester. I watch them chop onions, grate cheese, deftly peel tomatoes, and even blanch lobster for their macaroni and cheese. They wash their hands meticulously and move around each other as if they’re in a choreographed dance: One person boils pasta and another prepares a roux, while a third makes the cheese sauce and a fourth washes dishes and cleans their station as they go. It’s a lesson I feel I need to be more conscious of: making sure I and my kitchen space are sanitized and clean as we go.

As a home cook, I also feel that cooking is a very unique activity. My kitchen is my domain, which means I don’t typically entertain guests until the food is ready to be served. However, students show me that cooking can be a shared experience and can still be fun. If anything, I should let my guests eat. at least Come on in and help me wipe down the counters and rinse my spatulas and cutting boards.

In addition to the basics the students seem to have learned, I’m also impressed by their thoughtfulness when it comes to nutrition. “We want students to be aware of foodborne illnesses, and to make informed decisions about food choices,” Catanzano says. For this macaroni and cheese battle, they found the recipes and made deliberate choices about how to make each one more nutritious, whether that meant cutting back on butter and heavy cream, replacing traditional pasta with protein pasta, or incorporating vegetables into their dishes.

By the end of the competition, there were four worthy versions of mac and cheese: lobster, cacio e pepe, steak and peppers, and smoked chipotle. And while there was only one winner (Griffiths took the crown with her lobster mac and cheese), the skills the students gained and their camaraderie in the kitchen proved far more valuable than a trophy. That, and their ability to make a cheese sauce from scratch, something I still break and mess up from time to time.

“Students are capable of doing so much more than we can give them credit for,” says Silverman, who coached the winning team to its lobster macaroni and cheese victory. “They just need someone to come along and show them how to do it properly. And at the end of the day, there’s instant gratification of something to eat.”

Additional photo illustration credits: Home economics class photo from Wikimedia Commons