CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Not all final exams are held in the classroom.
And while top grades might be highly coveted, the exams themselves? Not so much.
However, in the Culinary Program at Carver Career and Technical Center, the final project is the big show. It’s what everyone looks forward to - a prestigious, farm-to-table dinner at the prominent J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works outdoor space, worth 20 percent of their final grade.
A recent Monday Monday, the program’s 10 students proved themselves worthy of chef coats and knives, with an ambitious gourmet five-course meal for 53. Some guests were family members and friends, while others were strangers.
For each table the class delivered a flavorful well-presented meal, proof of what they’ve learned throughout the program.
After drinks and three appetizers - fried green tomato pork belly skewers, spring pea shooters and an apple chicken sausage crostinis - several students formed an assembly line under the direction of their instructors.
“Nice and neat,” said instructor Thomas Grant, placing the first ingredient, a rectangular prism of watermelon, diagonal on a square plate, then passing it to instructor Mandy Gum. “There you go.”
Gum set two hemispheres of the mascarpone panna cotta on each end. Next in queue, a student placed a tiny bunch of lettuce atop the fruit, another sprinkled fennel, then another added chopped cucumber bits. The salad was then topped with a lemon basil vinaigrette.
One person checked the presentation, using a white cloth to clean up stray bits of dressing, before someone else transferred the plate to another table for serving.
They called it “organized chaos.”
Each salad dish was completed under the supervision of students Morghan Camp and Emilee Wehrle. The two completed Carver’s high school culinary program before choosing to participate in the professional class last year.
“The high school program really opened my eyes to cooking and it actually helped me with public speaking a bit,” said Camp, as she thinly sliced fennel to be pickled ahead of the dinner. “I was always a shy one. It opened me up and I also want to travel.”
Camp follows chefs on social media and after graduation would like to move south, possibly to Texas, to broaden her scope.
Wehrle will leave for Air Force basic training after completing the program. While a member of the Air National Guard, she plans to study dietetics at Marshall University.
The culinary program was her introduction to nutrition and fresh foods.
Each ingredient in their dish was to be washed, sliced and prepared according to the recipe.
On Monday, they arrived at J.Q. Dickinson with ingredients prepped and ready to be plated.
“Is there fennel on that one?” Camp shouted before passing the plate back.
“Slow down,” Grant said sternly. “Is anyone counting?”
“Yes, chef,” a few replied. But each had different totals.
They made 68 - 15 too many by accident.
Onto the next: a pan-seared, striped bass atop a roasted tomato coulis and artichoke ravioli, garnished with a garlic crisp. The students responsible were Tevin Gordon and Angel Bee.
Already a cook at Mardi Gras Casino’s French Quarter restaurant, Gordon is experienced in serving large groups of people. He considers himself to be the calmest member of the group.
“I’m the levelheaded one out of everybody,” Gordon said, smiling. “I try to keep everybody sane.”
He worked in home health care before his aunt, a former student at Carver herself, suggested he combine his love of cooking with an education.
“The end goal is to move to a region where food is more appreciated and to truly learn the inside and out of their cuisine,” Gordon said. “Eventually, I would like to have a farm and produce my own fruits and vegetables, grow my own cattle and stuff.”
He and his partner for the course, Bee, 21 years old and a cook at Red Lobster, explained their dish to the crowd as the rest of the team began an assembly line anew.
Then, it was all hands on deck.
For the next dish, a chocolate-salted filet mignon with beet gnocchi, ginger pistachio carrots and sangria sauce, Tanner Boyd and James Campbell took center stage.
“Learning to make everything from scratch has been an awesome experience,” said Campbell, who is 34 and a cook at Paterno’s at the Park.
The two found the gnocchi to be the most difficult part. It required them to dry out poatoes and beets before blending them into a pasta.
They also used a new method for cooking the filet mignon: sous vide, which required them to place the meat in plastic pouches to be steamed in water before it was seared in a pan.
The evening was a little bittersweet, at least for the two apprentices who designed the menu. They are the final apprentices to be accepted into the Carver program. Jessica Painter and Lucyndel Wade both completed the pro-start culinary program while attending Riverside High School.
“I got on the competition team and just fell in love with it,” Painter said. “My mother is a nurse and I always wanted to be a nurse, but then I came here.”
Painter was on a tour of the program when Wade, a friend of hers, was in the class.
“I told her, ’you need to be in here,’” Wade said. “We’ve been together since we were kids.”
Wade’s father always wanted to be a chef, she said.
“I grew up in the kitchen, kind of stepping on his toes,” she said. “I always wanted to cook. In middle school, I took a food class, as well.”
One day she’d like to open a restaurant which combines flavors from several different cuisines. Her former co-workers used to call her “Lucideli,” similar to her name.
“So I’ve always joked that I’m going to open up a restaurant with a deli inside and call it that,” she said.
For now, she and Painter work at Mardi Gras Casino’s French Quarter restaurant.
The two were responsible for the menu and logistics of the J.Q. Dickinson dinner, having completed a similar dinner last year with another graduating class.
They spent hours flipping through magazines and cookbooks in search of recipes, and admit the planning began backward with dessert.
“We knew we wanted to have popcorn on our dessert,” Painter said. “We saw a popcorn dessert with popcorn ice cream caramel and I think there was a brittle on it. We knew we wanted it for dessert, so we started there.”
The apprenticeship program - a way to attract students still in high school - has been discontinued. The other eight graduates found their way to Carver on their own.
The final course was the responsibility of Tierra Mayo and Allison Saunders.
The popcorn ice cream evolved into a roasted peanut butter mousse with chocolate kahlua sauce, banana tarte tatin, peanut brittle and J.Q. Dickinson salted popcorn.
“I want everything to be perfect, but I feel like we’ve got this,” Mayo, 25, said as she began preparing ingredients for the dish. She spread the hot peanut brittle onto a baking sheet. It was to set for five minutes before she began breaking it into near perfect triangular pieces.
As the final course began its descent, Mayo began lining up plates, using a brush to sweep chocolate across each one, set a pre-molded hemisphere of peanut butter mousse on one end, an upside-down banana tarte on the other, then supervised helping members of the class as they piped fresh whipped cream on the bananas, placed a piece of brittle on the plate and carefully placed each piece of stove-popped popcorn.
It seemed complicated, but Mayo had the vision perfectly crafted in her head.
The students were paired and placed on certain dishes based on their experience.
Mayo works as a baker in the Mardi Gras restaurant, but says she came to Carver to broaden her experience in cooking.
“I’m learning to use fresh food more instead of canned or frozen,” Mayo said.
The meal was a step up for each of the students, despite making meals about twice a week for Carver’s staff.
“Logistics are a huge thing in catering,” Grant said.
There were hiccups, like forgetting knives.
For nearly all of the students, it was their first time cooking in J.Q. Dickinson’s kitchen, much smaller in comparison to their own.
They came to rely on their partners for guidance and reassurance.
“They all come in as individuals and I think they learn at some point through the year they have to learn to work as a team in order to succeed for themselves,” Grant said.
This was the third time a Carver class created a meal for a J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works dinner.
“I think their students are getting into the workforce and keeping the food scene here in Charleston interesting and vibrant,” said Nancy Bruns, co-founder at the Salt-Works. “It works with what we’re doing here.”
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Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, http://wvgazettemail.com.
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