Iron Chef
© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE
It’s project week at Gateway School, a very important event in the school’s academic curriculum. The students are cooking this week’s project in a week-long marathon of Iron Chef competitions and they invited me to participate.
I started the day with a quick plug for healthy eating and the benefits of whole foods over processed ones, to remind the kids how important it is to form healthy food habits now, while they’re young. Next, I reviewed the importance of cleanliness and sanitation in the kitchen. We washed our hands together and made sure to cover or tie back any long hair. This second part was requested especially by the judges, who had found a long hair in one of the competition dishes two days earlier.
Before the competition began, I gave a short demo on how to make and roll out fresh pasta and discussed the differences between fresh and dried. While we worked on this, we talked about how widespread pasta is in culinary traditions. The Thai and Vietnamese have rice stick noodles, the Chinese have egg noodles, the Japanese have ramen and soba noodles and the Italians of course have, well, lots. In the Italian genre, we went over sauces and pairing briefly before the competition began.
All of this, of course, prepared the students at Gateway to tackle their secret ingredient with some culinary . As if this weren’t enough of a challange, the competition took place in the school’s bio-lab, where we were cooking on propane stoves, chopping with steak knives and using pretty low-grade cookware. In spite of this, there was palpable team spirit filling up that room between teams Spicy Hot Mamas and Jumbo Gumbo.
Each team had a chef, several prep cooks and several dishwashers. Flour was everywhere before too long. While one group asked about making ravioli’s, another worked on just getting the pasta to go through the machine. There was a basic cream sauce, tomato sauce, a butter sauce and the biggest surprise–broccoli romanesco. Especially surprising was that no one on that team had eaten or cooked it before! I made a suggestion to cook it in brown butter, which I stand by, but the browning butter let off enough smoke to set off the fire alarm and the entire school had to evacuate! It felt very nostalgic, filing out in a single file like that.
Once we were back in the kitchen, the teams fired the stoves back up and finished doing the dishes. The shrimp fettuccini was finished off with a salad of apples, caramelized pecans and served with fresh squeezed tangerine juice. The ravioli plate came out with lightly seasoned garlic bread. But the clear winner, in terms of originality and taste, was the Brown Sugar Mamas’ Broccoli Romanesco with shrimp, leeks and basil. One of my fellow judges was even interested in the recipe.
Using the Iron Chef competition turned out to be a great teaching tool. If the students hold interest, it would be great to see the kids’ creations assembled in a cookbook. These experiences at Gateway have gotten me really fired up about giving back to the community. If you’re interesting in donating something to Gateway here in San Francisco, you can follow this link. Or get involved wherever’s local to you. You won’t regret it.