Student Chefs Score Victory

Exotic dishes, extensive chopping and grating and a sweetness that had nothing to do with sugar filled the Farmington High School Café Tuesday afternoon. The final competition of the Teen Battle Chef enrichment program, led by Apricot’s Chef Paul Obarowski, was sweet with the taste of hard work culminating in success, skills and gratitude.

The teens, all Farmington High School students in an eight-week Continuing Education afterschool program, faced off against a team of teachers under the guidance of student teacher Tom Kilgus who brought two practice sessions and a good attitude to the table. The teams competed to see which could best execute ethnic menus created by Obarowski for the competition. A flip of a coin got the teachers the Vietnamese menu and left French to the students.

As the battle began, the teams were given a few minutes to review the menus and recipes, then an hour to assemble the ingredients and prepare the appetizers, entrees and desserts. The French menu included Roquefort salad, chicken chasseur and crepes Suzette; and Vietnamese spring rolls, Pho Bo Tai and cassava coconut cake composed the Vietnamese menu.

The ingredients were the first challenge for the teachers.

Holding the woody cassava root, one teacher asked, ‘do you know what this is?’

‘Nope,’ responded another. But the team calmly continued chopping and slicing a rainbow of vegetables for their spring rolls and serenely grating the cassava for their cake.

“That’s lemongrass, not coriander,” Mary Beth Petersen later said as seasoning was being added.

On the other side of the room, the students expertly dissected chickens and speedily minced herbs.

The recipes were new, they said, but their weeks with Obarowski had prepared them. Still, they rushed around the kitchen, worrying and reassuring each other.

‘Does that look okay,’ one would ask. ‘It looks fine,’ another would respond.

When the time had elapsed, the students’ dishes were plated and gorgeous.

“The chef taught us the importance of plating,” Christina Welch said. “It’s a big part of it.”

At the same time, the teachers were furiously composing their dishes.

“Where’s your dessert?” Obarowski reminded Petersen.

She ran screaming into the kitchen. “Thirty seconds!! Bring the dessert!”

The teams took turns presenting the dishes and explaining their cultural significance to the judges: School Superintendent Kathleen Greider, Board of Education Chairman Mary Grace Reed, Act Fresh owner Rose LeBlanc and Nicole Sullivan of the Grist Mill.

The judges duly appreciated each dish, then ruled that the students had won the competition with superior entrée and dessert, as well as excellent teamwork and skills.

After thanking the judges and teachers, Obarowski, began to speak about the students and then to them.

“I’m continually impressed with what they do. I can’t get the bar high enough,” he said. “Every time I try to push you to excel, you nail each challenge. You have certainly exceeded my expectations.”

And he had not gotten through all his thank-yous before a student, Gavin Mcintyre, took the floor to express the gratitude the kids felt for their mentor.

“You helped a lot of people go from just having an interest in the kitchen to having talent in the kitchen. You taught us a lot,” he said.

“Paul is a great mentor because he’s full of energy and he doesn’t hold them too strictly to the recipe. He gets them to experiment and learn to balance the flavors. That’s a skill that’s hard to come by,” said Rose LeBlanc, one of the battle judges and an Avon nutritionist who runs Act Fresh.

The program is particularly important in the absence of the high school culinary program, which was eliminated two years ago.

“Paul has been the key to our success,” Greider said. “He keeps recreating the program and involving not just the students, but now the faculty.”