Cooking classes are a hot ticket


Cooking classes, the staple of public-school education that once seemed on the verge of fading away, are back. And they're cooler than ever.

The Food Network and reality shows like “Top Chef” and “Hell's Kitchen” not only made talented chefs into pop-culture superstars, they opened the kitchen to just about anyone who wants to learn.

Many public schools have responded to the surging interest among young people by expanding their culinary programs or restarting ones that had fallen into disuse.

An example is the evolution of Room 305 in the middle of the campus at Laguna Hills High School. When the school opened in 1978, it had a foods-instruction program, said principal Sean Boulton. But it was discontinued in the late 1980s, and the space was made into a drafting classroom. When the drafting teacher retired a few years ago, administrators decided to build a modern culinary arts academy.

“You need a culinary arts program,” Boulton said. “The food industry's the largest employer outside the U.S. government. There's high interest in the Food Network and how it's evolved over the last 10 years. It's more in vogue now to be a chef. People really value the fact that you can cook and know nutrition.”

Laguna Hills turned empty Room 305 into a shiny new $700,000 kitchen, with one-third of the money coming from Coastline Regional Occupational Program. The 1,900-square-foot facility has eight cooking stations and a pantry. Renovation was completed in time for the start of the school year in September, and the classes quickly filled up.

On a recent Tuesday evening, about 30 juniors and seniors in chef Heather Testerman's advanced class celebrated the end of their five-hour weekly session by tasting the results of their afternoon-long toil: tamales and creamy flan, every bit of them made from scratch. Even without the green sauce, the tamales were scorching-hot, in a good way.

“It was, like, burning in my throat!” said Leticia Walden, a junior.

“Spicy's always good,” said one of her three kitchen partners, Paulina Valdivia, a senior.

Around 7 p.m., a group of students stood at the main demo kitchen. They showed their classmates, seated in rows of chairs in front of them, how to make crème brulee (similar to flan, except the sugar's on top of the custard, not bottom). A camera on the end of a neck was bowed to just over the stovetop, projecting the demonstration on a giant flat-screen TV. It's like something you'd see on Rachael Ray's show.

As a student took out her little hand-torch to caramelize the top, senior Andrew Delbridge walked from the front to a side wall. “I'm standing by the fire extinguisher,” he said.

Kids who cook are more likely to cook for themselves as grown-ups. A study at the University of Alberta last year also showed that children who helped with meal preparation were more likely to consume healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables.

Testerman, who also teaches a ninth-grade foods class, said when the school year began she asked students what foods they hated most. One of the most-reviled was Brussels sprouts. Then their instructor showed them how to bake them with salt and pepper, some pancetta, balsamic vinegar, fresh garlic and lemon juice. “They came back for seconds,” she said.

It's a lot more sophisticated than the home-economics classes their parents and grandparents took.

“The pendulum is swinging in culinary toward more farm-to-table, more organics, more people making food again,” Testerman said. “There's all kinds of people doing crafty, home canning and making their own cheese. We made mozzarella cheese. Why not? People growing their own fruits and vegetables. They're wanting to live farm to table. So I think that trickles down to the kids a little, I hope.”

Other high schools that have advanced programs include Fountain Valley, Edison and Newport Harbor. At Newport Harbor, Sarah Wall Pilon took over the culinary arts program, which rose to national prominence under now-retired Janet Dukes.

Like Testerman, who is a pastry chef by trade, Wall Pilon came from the restaurant industry. She helped put herself through school and pay the bills by working in restaurants. Only later did she get her teaching credential. Wall Pilon said she has tried to make her food lab as close to a real restaurant as possible. When she started teaching at another school several years ago, her seventh-graders were using steak knives to cut produce. “So now, after they learn safety and sanitation, they go straight into knife skills,” she said. “They're scared at first, but now all these kids know exactly how to stand and how to cut safely.”

Although the Laguna and Newport programs are well funded, with strong support from administrators and alumni, other schools aren't so lucky. Kitchens are costly to build and maintain. It's not cheap to buy eight new ovens, or KitchenAid mixers, for that matter. Fridges and cupboards must be stocked with groceries.

Schools make some money by selling what they cook: Laguna Hills recently baked cookies in the shape of playing cards and filled shot glasses with chocolate mousse for Casino Night at the nearby community center. Newport Harbor is making gallons of gumbo (which Wall Pilon learned from her mother, who lives in Louisiana) to sell at an arts gala later this month.

But it's easy for some schools to just do away with kitchens. “A lot of them have ripped them out,” Wall Pilon said. With science and math such big components of standardized tests, school boards can make the case for putting in a science lab or computer room.

“There's no state testing on culinary,” Wall Pilon said. “I'd like to argue that every subject is in culinary: We do math, science, writing, reading, art, health, social studies.”

Wall Pilon said some of her 17-year-old students still don't know fractions, which might come in handy when you have a recipe that feeds six people and you need to make it feed 10.

Testerman throws math puzzlers at her students all the time, involving conversion of pounds to ounces to tablespoons to cups. (For the record, there are 16 tablespoons in a cup.)

“They always ask me, is there a Scantron? Is it multiple choice? I'm like, ‘No, it's in your head.' It's either in there or it's not. This is life math. You have to know it.”

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