They are high school students crafting mouth-watering masterpieces in a sizzling hot competition where culinary talents are put to the test.
On this episode of the Supercast, we join students from four Jordan School District high schools dishing up delicious food in a very impressive ProStart competition. It’s a competition where rising young chefs are on a fast track, turning their love of food service into successful careers.
Audio Transcription
What is it that you're judged on?
So I know we're judged on our knife cuts. We're also judged on safety and sanitation, teamwork skills, and then obviously how your food looks, how it tastes, and then the cleanliness of your cuts.
Teamwork comes into a big play because it really, even though most classes do involve it, it's more of a smaller amount of people. So you get to really personally connect with everybody
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. They are high school students crafting mouth-watering masterpieces in a sizzling hot competition where culinary talents are put to the test.
On this episode of the Supercast, we join students from four Jordan School District high schools dishing up delicious food in a very impressive ProStart CTE competition. It's a competition where rising young chefs are on a fast track, turning their love of food service into successful careers.
We're here at the ProStart competition at Mountain America Credit Union Exposition Center to talk with some of the students who competed today. Introduce yourself and tell us what school you're from.
I'm Keyon and I'm from Bingham High School.
I'm Mackenna York, I'm from Herriman High School.
I'm Grant Ashby and I'm from Mountain Ridge High School.
I'm Ashlee Brixley and I'm from Copper Hills High School.
Grant, tell us what you cooked today.
Yeah, so for us, we cooked an appetizer with marinated zucchini, toasted bread on top of creamy ricotta, with a chili crunch sauce, and toasted hazelnut.
And then for our main, we cooked a petite filet with gochujang carrots on top of creamy mashed potatoes with a chimichurri sauce and microgreens on top.
We cooked a lemon meringue tart with a strawberry coulis and a strawberry brunoise with toasted pistachios on top.
I haven't made a strawberry brunoise in I can't tell how long, so.
Yeah, well, we tried our best today.
Tell me what is involved in the strawberry brunoise.
Yeah, so it's sauced strawberries that are very finely diced.
Okay, cool. And what did you make today?
So for our appetizer, we made a vanilla bourbon glazed vinaigrette salad. It was like a salad in a cucumber bowl.
A glazed vinaigrette salad?
And then for our entree, we made a pan-seared duck breast with an orange sauce with a parsnip puree and a sweet potato rosette with lemon brussel sprouts and garlic butter mushrooms. And then for our dessert, we made a hazelnut, what's it called? A hazelnut tarte with strawberry curd and chocolate mousse on top.
That sounds fantastic. I should not do this interview at lunchtime. How about you? What did you guys make?
So for our appetizer, we made an Asian cucumber salad that was on top of purple cabbage and it was with edamame, carrots, and roasted peanuts. Then for our entree, we made salmon and sauteed vegetables, rice, and the salmon was a miso salmon. And then for the dessert, we made deconstructed cheesecake with a blackberry sorbet. It was like oat and honey crumble. And then we had passionberry curd.
Wow, it's like I can picture all of this. It's such an incredible combination of colors and flavors, that's really exciting. What did you make today?
So today we were really, really focused on having our team create their own recipes and work solely off of those. So we made our own recipe for our crab rangoons and our sweetened sour sauce. Creamy, crunchy, sour, savory, amazing. Our main dish was a miso pork ramen. We team prepared the stock, it took 12 hours to put that together. It took forever. And yeah, we had carrots, we attempted some eggs, they didn't turn out all the way. And we put some pork, some bean sprouts, and some beautifully diagonal cut green onion on top of there.
That's high-stakes cooking eggs these days, because it's $3 an egg, so you–
I know, it was really expensive.
–you can’t mess up on those eggs.
I know, I know. And then for dessert, we did a no-bake matcha cheesecake that was inspired by a riverbed so our first layer has poppy seeds within it to represent the rocks. Our second layer is our matcha layer, and then on top it's shaped like a lily pad and has a carved strawberry to look like a flower.
Good heavens, that all sounds incredible. What is it that you're judged on? What is it that you're competing? What are the criteria?
So I know we're judged on our knife cuts. We're also judged on safety and sanitation, teamwork skills, and then obviously how your food looks, how it tastes, and then the cleanliness of your plates.
So do you prepare in advance, or do you know what you're going to make in advance if you bring all the ingredients, or do they say here's a horse hoof, some cauliflower, and a flavor packet of Wyler's lemonade, and now you need to make an entree?
Well, thank goodness we get the opportunity to create our own menu, which is actually another thing we're graded on here.
Oh, okay, so creating your menu, you talked about the 12 hours of preparation, and then you execute while you're here, and they watch the teamwork. Tell me about knife work. Is it cutting everything the same size so it cooks evenly, or is it just simply not severing a digit? What exactly are you judged on?
So we're judged based on a list of knife cuts that we could choose from originally, and we don't actually get judged on the knife cuts within the dish. We put aside two of the knife cuts, and that's where the judges come in and look over those knife cuts.
So it's the knife cuts in addition to what you've prepared?
Wow. Well, I knew from the first description of the first dish that this is far out of my league. I could eat all of this effectively, but I could not prepare any of it.
Stay with us. Coming up, more tasty tidbits from students competing in the ProStart CTE competition.
Never miss an episode of The Supercast by liking and subscribing on your favorite podcasting platform. Find transcripts for this episode and others at supercast.jordandistrict.org.
Does your student want to become a veterinarian, commercial pilot, programmer? Maybe they want to make a difference as a dental assistant. These are just some of the programs offered as part of Career and Technical Education, CTE in Jordan School District. CTE provides the technical skills needed to prepare students for future employment or a successful transition to post-secondary education. Career and Technical Education provides work-based learning opportunities. We partner with industry experts to offer apprenticeships and internships with students working in the real world at real jobs while going to school. The CTE experience starts in our elementary schools with the Kids' Marketplace and grows through middle and high school. To explore all CTE has to offer in Jordan School District visit cte.jordandistrict.org today and let's get your child started on the pathway to a profession.
Oh wow, this is really nicely put together. Describe where the crab rangoon is, is that right over there?
Yeah, so right here's our crab rangoons.
And I like the smear of, I don't know, the dash of color there that you've got. Very nice. This looks delicious.
What's your favorite of these dishes?
I am the one that actually created the recipe here for the ramen, so I definitely am a natural favorite to the ramen.
Yeah, that looks really good. And I like the little stack of carrots, what would you call those?
Those are julienne cut carrots.
Julienne cut carrots. Gives a nice little pop of color and boy, that is nicely arranged. Okay, let's take a look at the next one.
So, what questions do you have?
What did you do to the cucumber there? That is quite an intricate cut.
Spiral cucumber, when we cut it, we had two chopsticks below the cucumber, and we cut it 90 degrees first, and then we flipped it over and cut it 45 degrees to achieve that kind of look.
Wow, that is really cool. And I can see that you have carefully arranged the salmon here. That is really nicely constructed.
Tell me about that design.
We're struggling with the salmon a lot, especially the rice because it's kind of difficult to shape the rice to where how it looks good.
It looks great right now.
We decided to put it a little well for the sauce. And this salmon filet is actually a little small because it doesn't cover the sauce up there.
And normally it covers it on top, but it's whatever. As you can see, a lot of our dishes were focused on bringing out the color of the dish instead of just like, you know.
Yeah, the colors really do pop, and I even felt that in your description, like I could see what it looked like. Tell me about the latticework here.
So she actually just melted some white chocolate and put some coconut oil in it. And as that melted, she put it back into the cooler. No, she drizzled it just with a spoon. So it was just a spoon.
Wow, it looks really cool and the coconut oil made the difference that it could kind of keep shape like that.
Yeah, it looks really great and it tastes amazing.
And it tastes really good. Well, I'll have to take your word for it. I can't disturb that. Is that a lime rind?
Yeah, that's a lime rind. So that was actually to give some of that lime flavor to the sorbet. I didn't taste it personally, but I think it tastes pretty good. I think the dessert probably tastes the best because there's so many combinations of flavors throughout the dessert, but everything works really well together. And the texture of the coldness of the dessert makes it so good. I just love it.
Well, everyone's probably heard of every ingredient here. It's how you combine them in a unique collection of flavors and colors that can really make something unique.
Actually, our dessert right here is $17, and our salmon is $12 because we have vanilla bean inside our cream cheese.
Dessert’s more expensive. That would make it very enticing. Like, ooh, why is the dessert more expensive than the entree? I must know.
Yeah, good. So it's the vanilla bean that makes it expensive?
Yeah, it's in the cream cheese right there.
Oh, yeah. Very nice. Let's take a look at the next one. Okay. Where's that strawberry you diced up?
The strawberry brunoise is right on top.
You can see those finely diced ones mixed in with the pistachios.
With little dots of-- is that strawberry puree?
Oh, I should have known. Wow, this all looks so nicely arranged. And that petit filet is something that I would love to sink my teeth into.
What did you do to the carrots to make them look actually appetizing?
Yeah, so we peeled them and we made sure they were all relatively the same size as possible and then we boiled them to cook them. And then when we were toasting and cooking our zucchini, we actually put them in a pan fry. And so they are pan-fried on the outside and then they're marinated in a gochujang sauce.
Wow. It looks, they look delicious. They're glistening there on the plate. Are they heirloom carrots or are they Harmon's carrots?
They're just normal carrots. They're fine and they're rainbow carrots. They just, with the sauce, it loses the color a little bit.
Well, no, it looks fantastic. And let's look at the final dish here.
Yes. So these are definitely our ugly plates. I mean, our salad fell apart, but it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be in like a really tight circle.
I mean, there's some structural issues sometimes with this sort of plating, I guess.
But, so this is our vanilla bourbon glaze.
If you hadn't told me it had collapsed, I would think it was exactly as it should be. Tell me about the dessert here. I love the design there.
So this is our chocolate mousse piped around with our strawberry cream. And then this is strawberry curd and under the chocolate mousse on top of the tarte, there's more strawberry curd under there.
It actually looks like calligraphy there on the plate almost. It's, that is a lot of delicate drawing and larger dots that get a little bit smaller along to kind of accent that. It looks delicious and it looks gorgeous all at the same time.
If anyone was served any of these dishes, they would take pictures first for sure and then finally decide to eat. That looks so good.
Well, that is very impressive. Tell me about what it's like being in this ProStart program. What do you like most about being in these classes?
It's a sense of community. It's definitely a sense of home. But on top of that, it really just advances your techniques. I wasn't gonna be going into culinary until about a year ago. So I've truly started square one with this program and now I'm here competing with the best in my class.
I think it really just brings everybody together and it puts you in like a field if you weren't sure if you were interested in culinary, like she wasn't sure. It really shows you all of the fun that it can be, all of the excitement that you can have in it.
I just like being here and talking to people 'cause in most classes you have to keep your mouth shut but I just love talking to people so much. And in this class, it's just a lot of communication and you have time to talk between your networks and everything so.
Lots of interaction, love it.
I think the teamwork comes into a big play because it really, even though most classes do involve it, it's more of a smaller amount of people. So you get to really personally connect with everybody and you work as a team and you can create these dishes like we all did today. It's just something cool to see that even professional chefs do today.
Fantastic, well, you've all done extremely well and it's very exciting to see the final product. In addition to culinary, we also have the management category in which students have competed. So tell me about your competition today. It looks like a menu here and some marketing going on.
Yeah, so in our management portion of the competition, we do a lot of technical work and inventing a new concept for a restaurant. So our restaurant idea was Savannah Roots, which is an African-based restaurant that not only gives back to the community but serves very affordable food for families that otherwise can't really afford it.
What a cool concept and tell everyone your name and what school you're from.
I'm Chase and I'm from Herriman.
Chase from Herriman. So tell us about what the competition looks like. I love this idea. It connects to community. It's something unique. What gave you this idea and then what does the competition look like?
Yeah, so the competition, unlike the culinary team where everybody's watching, we're in a small room. So it's a lot of--
In a booth. In a numbered booth.
Yeah, in a numbered booth. So it's really intense and one-on-one with the judges and we really try to get our point across in what we're aiming for in our restaurant and what our goals are. Our idea with this--
That's the laminated poster that you hear that he's been holding up this whole time and it looks great. You've got the great colors going and the map.
Mapped out restaurant, everything. What's your favorite African dish?
Probably our peri-peri chicken that we have on our menu.
It is ridiculously good and it's like, it's a nice mix between fresh citrus flavors and spicy chicken and it's just amazing.
I've had peri-peri chicken, it is delicious.
And I'm sure yours is very, very good.
So you said that it's one-on-one and you're there with the judge in the small booth. But tell me, what exactly are you judged on? What are the aspects of the competition that they evaluate?
So we go through a number of judging series, ranging from our concept to critical thinking. It's pretty rigorous in the aspect that it's technical and every single detail counts. So we go through a number of times back and forth at making sure we understand what these questions are that these judges are going to be asking us. My team actually had two judges that had absolutely nothing wrong to say with our--
–with our poster and everything.
Two judges with no suggestion?
They had no suggestions, no critiques, and they absolutely loved everything.
That's fantastic. Okay, I wanna ask you all what's next? Is this a hobby where people always want you to cook for family events? Or is this more of a career that takes you beyond your ProStart program?
So for me, it's definitely both. I do get asked to cook for different family events and stuff, but I'm also going to culinary school after high school so that I can continue on with ProStart and continue on with cooking.
I will also be going to culinary school in order to continue my chef's journey.
Yeah, I will be attending culinary school. I definitely see this as a career and a path of life for myself.
This is just a little hobby I have inside. My family doesn't even ask me to cook most of the time and I'm just kinda here in ProStart.
You must have some good cooks around in your family.
My father is a restaurant owner, so.
Oh, okay, well then you're covered.
Well, with the skills I've learned, I definitely wanna take it higher and make a career out of what I've learned here today.
I love it, it's so exciting. However you choose to use these skills, it's something you won't forget, I'm sure, being a part of this. All of you have great careers, great hobbies ahead of you, whatever you choose. So thank you very much for letting me be part of things today. This is so impressive and you guys all, like I said, have great things ahead of you, so thank you.
Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Supercast. Remember, education is the most important thing you will do today. We'll see you out there.
