Cooking Up a Culinary Career : Aspiring Chefs Braise for Praise and Scholarships

Wolfgang Puck, chef to the stars, stalked the test kitchens of El Camino College Saturday wearing an impish grin and jotting notes on a clipboard. He dipped into a strawberry sorbet with his fingers, clucked his tongue and turned to the young chef beside him.

“What sugar did you put in there?” Puck asked suspiciously. “It tastes almost like artificial.”

Jenny Sanders, 18 and a senior at South High School in Torrance, trembled slightly and lowered her eyelids.

“No,” she said evenly. “It’s real sugar.”

Puck moved on, snooping in refrigerators and poking his nose in ovens as students from 10 South Bay high schools tried to please some rather discriminating palates in the first Future Chefs of the South Bay scholarship contest.

Garnished and Glazed

Working in teams of three from each school, the students baked, braised, basted and boned. They chopped and creamed, sliced and sauteed, garnished, grated and glazed. They cooked with Belgian endive and capers, baby zucchini and enoki mushrooms. They set out real silver and china on linen tablecloths alongside fresh cut flowers.

In short, they did everything chefs do--and then they sweated it out as the real chefs eyed their creations, peppered them with questions and then, finally, sampled their goods.

The judges said they were impressed, although more so by the preparation and the appearance of the food than by its taste.

“I think the students are tending to perpetuate the rubber chicken syndrome,” confided chef John Sedlar of Saint Estephe in Manhattan Beach. Sedlar also noted a “casualness toward using canned ingredients. . . . Not good.”

Take the strawberry sorbet. An “adventurous” undertaking, said chef Elka Gilmore of Tumbleweed in Beverly Hills. But far too sweet. “They pushed the pulp through cheesecloth and a sieve, and ended up with just juice.”

Organizers, nevertheless, were thrilled.

“The kids have overwhelmed us,” exclaimed Michael Franks of Chez Melange in Redondo Beach. “It’s really exciting. The bottom line is, they can actually cook.”

The competition, which is apparently the only one of its kind for high school students in the Los Angeles area, was Franks’ brainchild. He thought of it last year, after sensing interest among students at several high school career days. He said he hoped the competition would show young people that they can make a respectable career in the restaurant business.

Indeed, one chef--Scott Tojo of North High School in Torrance, which won second place--learned that lesson quickly. He so impressed Sedlar that after the judging, the chef gave the young man his business card and asked if he would be interested in a job.

“The whole point of this,” Franks said, “is to make people aware that this industry needs people. . . . We are looking for talent. We need the talent.”

Franks and Bettylu Kessler, a professor of Food Service Management at El Camino, got backing from various corporations, including American Express, which put up $4,000, enabling the members of the three winning teams to each take home scholarships of $500, $400 or $300.

$30 Budget for Meal

The contest worked this way: Each team had to create a three-course meal for four on a $30 budget. The menu was to include a composed salad (as opposed to tossed), an entree of stuffed chicken breast, a starch, a vegetable and a sauce. Dessert could be anything, but it had to have strawberries in it. And neatness counted.

The winning meal, prepared by the team from Narbonne High School in Harbor City, was served on black plates and included poulet Dijonnaise in filo with baby carrots, white turnips and broccoli; a delicately arranged salad of three asparagus spears, one egg slice and four mushroom slices dotted with bits of red pepper, and a chocolate-rum roll with rum cream, accompanied by strawberries dipped in chocolate.

Puck, by the way, left before the judges’ scores had been tabulated. He had to cook dinner for Barbra Streisand.