Cooking class teaches more than cooking

MOSES LAKE — Isabel Duran just wasn’t sure about the lemon curd.

Duran, an Othello High School student, is part of the culinary class at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center. The assignment was a dessert plate, something students could serve for Valentine’s Day in a restaurant.

Duran arranged the biscotti and chocolate mousse to her liking. She tried a streak of the lemon curd across the plate.

“It looked silly because it looked like little ears,” she said.

She tried an arrangement of small dots and liked that a lot better, she said.

If plating is a challenge, so is making chocolate mousse. Sergio Vega, of Wahluke High School, said the skills center curriculum requires mousse from scratch. And from scratch means separating eggs, cooking egg whites – but not too much – cooking egg yolks with butter, and mixing heavy cream with vanilla for the whipping cream.

“It’s a little tricky to get the right temperatures and the right consistency. It took a couple tries,” Vega said.

The skills center includes students from Grant and Adams counties, and some, like the kids from Wahluke and Royal, have to travel a substantial distance to get to class. It gives students the opportunity to learn about a career that interests them, or might interest them.

Danna Medina Martinez, of Wahluke, said she was thinking of two different options: chef or tattoo artist. She’s interested in restaurant videos, not only the cooking, but also the presentation of food, she said.

That led her to enroll at the skills center, something she knew would be a challenge.

“There’s a lot of stuff to learn other than cooking,” she said.

A chef needs to understand cooking temperatures, food storage, proper utensils, even the right pan size for different techniques.

Culinary instructor Nathan Bathurst said cooking has an artistic side as well, and the dessert plate was designed to give kids some practice. He prepared some decorative elements for the kids to use, things like sugar threads and chocolate cookie crumbs. And, no matter what the students thought, Bathurst said he was pleased with the final plates and encouraged the kids to take pictures.

Part of the assignment was to research different dessert plating designs.

Sometimes the design doesn’t survive contact with the plate, however. Vega was not satisfied with his first attempt.

“I’m kind of improvising,” he said.

Vega said he’s thinking of cooking as a career.

“I don’t know. I just see myself working in a restaurant,” he said.

Duran said her experiments in the kitchen at home made her think of cooking for a career.

“At home I really like baking,” she said.

The class has provided her with a lot more information and instruction than she could get elsewhere, she said. She’s learning things in culinary class she’d never be able to learn on her own, she said.

“At home, it’s just me, myself. The only thing that helps me is my Google,” she said.

Medina Martinez wasn’t satisfied with her first attempt at plating her dessert either and added decorative elements until her plate came together.

“I feel like it needs more,” she said. “I honestly don’t know what to do with it.”