Kitchen sync

As the clock ticked down and the team of chefs from Spokane Community College raced around the kitchen, the question was not whether the group would win the 10-state cooking competition last week and make it to the national championship.

It was whether they would finish at all.

“Chefs, you need to get some food out,” calls contest judge Aidan Murphy, national chairman of the American Culinary Federation’s Junior Culinary Competition. “Keep calm, but get some food out.”

He pauses a beat. “Keep calm and panic at the same time.”

Judges deduct a half-point from the teams’ total score for every minute past their 90-minute allotment, and every point lost lessens the chances the chefs will make it to the finals in Orlando, Fla., this summer.

And so team member Elijah Dalager, a 24-year-old cook and recent SCC graduate, fights with some plastic wrap, all the while trying to finish his entrée of cow’s-tongue studded chicken breasts with perfect potato pieces, peeled asparagus and rich, velvety sauce.

And Jocelyn DeWitt, 21, the five-member team’s lone woman, is pleading, “Come on, boys.”

And team captain Kenny Shockley, a 49-year-old who came to cooking school after serving in the military and working as a welder, is fretting: “Come on, chefs. You’re starting to worry me.”

Three minutes remaining. Two minutes. One minute, and food is still cooking, still waiting to be plated and rushed out to the judges.

And then: Beep. Beep. Beep.

Time’s up.

Four minutes after the buzzer sounds, the sweating, red-faced teammates run all of their food out to the waiting panel of judges.

Trudging back to clean up their kitchen space at SCC, they looked tired. Deflated. Defeated.

To understand their frustration at falling behind is to understand the level of preparation that brought them to that moment.

“We started in June,” says Chef Doug Fisher, the team’s coach and one of their SCC instructors. “Every other week over the summer we practiced on this menu. … There’s a tremendous amount of time involved.”

The student competition, which coincided with the American Culinary Federation’s Western Regional Conference last week in Coeur d’Alene, tests chefs on a variety of skills that might be used in a professional setting.

“That’s the idea of this … to make it practical,” Fisher says.

First, the teams need to assemble a cold buffet platter. Then, they’re assessed on a range of kitchen tasks, including butchering a chicken, filleting fish, chopping vegetables, sectioning an orange, making pastry cream and rolling out pie dough.

Finally comes the actual cooking competition in which each five-member team has 90 minutes to prepare a four-course menu to serve four people. All of the entrees are selected from the classical cooking text written by Escoffier more than 100 years ago. (This is fancy stuff, filled with complex sauces and preparations; no Easy Mac here). Students also must whip up a fish-based appetizer, a salad and a dessert.

“Food is art,” Fisher says. “Food is science. Food is craft … You are in competition with every one of those teams. You’ve got to wow the judges to go to nationals.”

That means these dishes can’t just taste good (though that’s certainly important). They have to look like a masterpiece on the plate. And they have to come from recipes so complex they would send most home cooks crying in their stock pots.

Take the SCC menu, for example, which begins with Seared Sea Scallops and Smoked Trout with Apple Fennel Salad. DeWitt, a recent graduate, prepared orange vinaigrette and carrot coulis. She shaved fennel. Sliced apples paper-thin. She whisked balsamic mustard oil and fried thin strips of trout skin. And that’s just the appetizer.

The salad, created by recent graduate David Lee, 25, included a miniature roasted garlic flan resting atop mixed greens beside a fan of cucumber slices. A fresh-baked sesame lavosh cracker arched over the top of the plate.

The entrée from Escoffier was Chicken in the Style of Supreme de Volaille a l’Escarlate – that chicken breast embedded with cow’s tongue Dalager so desperately tried to finish before the buzzer sounded.

And, to top off the meal, 25-year-old team member Jon Smyly created a Poached Pear Tart with Cream Cheese Ice Cream and Red Wine Reduction. Smyly, a recent graduate who works as a pastry chef at Brix in Coeur d’Alene, garnished the dish with caramel glass and pulled sugar. (One judge would later say she “could’ve bathed in that ice cream.”)

If there had been a word of the day during the competition, it would have been “Kenny.”

As in: “Kenny, I’m missing a set of plates.” “Kenny, ready me a board, please.” “Kenny, can I get an ice bath?” “Kenny, pan please.” And, of course, just plain, “Kenny.”

Kenny Shockley, who led the group in removing their chef’s toques and saying a prayer before competition, is the team’s noncooking member. He’s the go-fer, the guy who’s supposed to keep everyone on task, wash dishes, fetch supplies and do anything else that needs doing.

After finally getting the plates out to the judges, the team sits down with Chef Fisher.

“So, what happened?” he says.

“I’m not really quite sure,” says DeWitt.

“I think we just got a little too relaxed,” Shockley says.

And then the team is called and marches into the judges’ room for their critique.

Things didn’t start well.

The scallops were undercooked, one judge complains. There was too much smoke flavor. The portion was too big. The cucumbers on the salad were too raw-tasting, the salad greens underdressed.

But the judges praise Dalager’s entrée. “One of the better ones we’ve had today,” one says. “The flavors were awesome,” says another.

And the judges love Smyly’s dessert.

The team’s mood brightens.

“We’ve got nothing to hang our heads about,” Fisher says later.

In the end, the SCC chefs finished in fifth place out of the 10 teams and took home bronze medals. The California team won top honors and will represent the Western region at nationals.

“We were real happy to accomplish that,” Fisher says. “We’re thrilled we got a medal.”

Simply preparing for the competition, whether they won or not, was a great boost to their culinary education, team members say.

“These are the skills that are building us to be chefs,” Dalager says. “Not just line chefs.”