RECIPE for SUCCESS
CACC students know what’s cooking
BY LAUREN MIERS Columbia Daily Tribune T he third-block bell chimes, and the kitchen begins to bustle. High school students in crisp chef’s coats and white hats collect utensils and ingredients as they begin cooking up the day’s assignment. It’s more hands-on than English class, but every bit as useful.
The Columbia Area Career Center’s culinary program equips today’s high schoolers to be the chefs of tomorrow. Some will take their skills to commercial, restaurant-style kitchen environments around the world. Others will apply the practical life skills, like time management and promptness, in less foodfocused ways.
Chef Jeff Rayl transitioned the then restaurant management and service course to a culinary arts class in 1997. The class met only at Hickman High School in a room with one four-burner demonstration table, similar to the stovetop you’d find at home.
Chef Brook Harlan, the culinary program’s department chair and a chef instructor, graduated from Rock Bridge in 1999. Harlan took Creative Cuisine 1 and 2, both cooking classes in the Family and Consumer Science department, during his high school years. Post-grad Harlan attended the Culinary Institute of America and started classes not knowing basic knife cuts or meat fabrication.
“If I had a fraction of what the students here have now, I would have felt way more comfortable when I got to the Culinary Institute of America,” Harlan said.
Today three campuses — Battle and Hickman high schools alongside the CACC campus — host 150 high school students enrolled in the program, which is led by four full-time staff chefs, Rayl, Harlan, John Minor and Katie Frink, who graduated from the CACC culinary program in 2006.
During Frink’s time in the program, the only professional kitchen was in the basement of Rock Bridge, and the kitchen at Hickman was a family and consumer science class setup. Her senior year, Frink was among the first group to take the Baking and Pastry Arts course — a class she now teaches.
At that time, the program was not as established, and the district was not able to allocate the budget the program has now, Frink said. Students hosted a weekly buffet at the high school to recoup the cost spent on class that week. The curriculum centered on the menu for the week’s buffet.
“It has evolved and grown in a good way,” she said.
Frink’s Baking and Pastry Art class covers new techniques not taught in the Culinary
Arts 1 and 2 courses and centers on skills that are relevant in any baking and pastry kitchen. The year begins with breads, both yeast and quick, followed by pies and tarts. At Thanksgiving, the class works to make mass amounts of holiday pies to sell. Frink said the repetition and scale of the sales helps replicate a real-world experience. Semester Two includes cookies; cakes, both icing and decorating; pastry elements, like mousse and meringues; and finishes with frozen desserts.
Before students can try their hand at making the sweet stuff, they have to pass Culinary Arts 1, a course Harlan teaches. The class covers the building blocks to a successful kitchen, such as sanitation, stocks, knife cuts, and cooking and fabricating meats.
Harlan said not all students in the culinary program have food-focused aspirations. Even so, food-related skills developed in the kitchen translate into everyday life.
“We have to do this thing called a timeline or a game plan,” said Giovanni Bartolacci, a CACC culinary program alum and current Culinary Institute of America student.
“Essentially, we write out what needs to get done and what order to do it in. It’s important to have that skill even if you aren’t in the cooking field.”
In April, Harlan’s Culinary Arts 1 students were in the midst of their egg unit. Students had the duration of the 90-minute class to prepare 10 eggs in 10 different ways — think omelet, over-easy and poached.
Each chef-in-training serves their plate of eggs to Harlan for evaluation. Thankfully he doesn’t have to taste-test the eggs. He pokes and prods them with a spoon and peppers the student with questions about temperature, cook time and visual characteristics.
The following week students took those basic egg skills and translated them into more complex dishes, like breakfast burritos, french toast and egg sandwiches.
At the same time, the Culinary Arts 2 students were preparing for their endof-course exam, which is proctored to American Culinary Federation standards by outside chefs. If they pass, students receive a certification through the ACF as well as a good grade.
In addition to equipping students for real-world culinary work, CACC helps students connect with the community through partnerships with the True/False Film Fest and the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture’s Harvest Hootenanny.
In the case of True/False, festival events coordinator Johanna Cox pitches the opportunity to create appetizers for the festival’s events to each Culinary 2 class. Harlan equates the experience to talking with a client. Students group together and come up with recipes to pitch to the event. Harlan and the staff evaluate the pitches and make final recommendations to True/ False on what to serve.
CACC’s culinary program is more than just teaching high schoolers to prepare themselves something other than microwaveable Ramen post-graduation. For some it’s a chance to get vocational training in their area of interest before graduation.
Current CACC culinary student Rachel Riegel always knew she wanted to work with food, so when she moved from Michigan and saw her new high school had culinary classes, she was excited. She enrolled and knew it would be a focus for her high school education.
Riegel spends every spare moment in the CACC kitchen — she works during her lunch hour and took both Culinary Arts 2 and Baking and Pastry Arts during the 2018-2019 school year. This fall, her senior year, Riegel will complete two independent studies, one focused on culinary and the other on baking. Outside of CACC, Riegel works at the Wine Cellar, a job Chef Frink
helped her get.
“Anyone can cook at home, but being in this environment where you’re in a professional kitchen and using this type of equipment is really helpful both for skills and working in a restaurant,” Riegel said.
In April Riegel won the state title in the SkillsUSA commercial baking competition and represented Missouri at the national competition in Louisville, Kentucky in June. She isn’t the only CACC student to take home the Missouri SkillsUSA title: Riegel is the latest in a long line of winning chefs, who have won both state titles and national championships.
Bartolacci won the 2016 SkillsUSA national championship in the culinary category. Now a senior at the Culinary Institute of America, he enrolled in the CACC culinary program because he likes to eat, but the program led him to his passion and career path.
CACC’s program gave Bartolacci an advantage in culinary school. He remembers being familiar with most of the skills taught in his first culinary fundamentals class at the Institute. His preparedness helped him to hone and refine those basic skills further and focus in on skills he wasn’t familiar with.
“I definitely learned dedication and commitment,” Bartolacci said. “Going into it, I wasn’t dedicated, but by my senior year I was completely committed. I was showing up at the Career Center every day at 6:30 a.m., and I was in the kitchen almost all day until 4 p.m. During that time, it never really felt like work because we were just having fun cooking and figuring out different things.”
Bartolacci’s final semester at CIA will take him to Napa Valley, where he will learn about sustainable practices as part of his farm-to-table emphasis. After graduating CIA, Bartolacci plans to move to Italy to work.