Local schools show cooking mettle in Jr. Iron Chef Competition

Once again Champlain Valley Union High School has taken a team to the Jr. Iron Chef Competition and once again the Redhawks have come home with awards.

Teams from across Vermont have come to the Jr. Iron Chef Competition for 16 years. Forty teams came to the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction for the state’s premiere cooking competition this March.

Eleanor Marsh, family and consumer science teacher, is retiring after this school year, her 16th at CVU. She has had teams competing in the Green Mountain State culinary contest since the beginning, except for one year when she didn’t have a cooking club.

Each year, shortly after school starts in the fall, Marsh has started gathering her teams.

“We try to meet once a week and figure out what we’re going to do for a recipe first, then we’ll start meeting after school and practicing those recipes,” Marsh said.

Once each team has decided on what it’s going to cook, for over six months they work on the recipe, practicing on cooking their dishes and working on how they are going to improve on them.

Some years she’s had to engage in the activity that can be so critical to coaches — recruiting. But some years it doesn’t take much recruiting effort on Marsh’s part because the previous year’s team is pretty solid and the returning team members recruit others among their classmates who share their culinarian drive, who believe they can stand the heat and don’t want to get out of the kitchen.

Lots of times, potential cooking team members come to CVU with their gourmet thumbs already, having competed in the Jr. Iron Chef Competition in middle school.

Awards are given in both the afternoon and morning in both high and middle school age divisions in three categories — crowd-pleaser, lively local and mise en place.

The crowd-pleaser award is given to the team that is judged to have done the best job of incorporating “color, texture, and taste for a true crowd-pleaser,” according to the Jr. Iron Chef Vermont guidelines.

The lively local award is given for a team judged to have done the best at highlighting Vermont foods. To be eligible for this award a recipe must include at least five local ingredients.

Mise en place is French for everything in place and “goes to the team that shows exemplary teamwork, order and professionalism.”

Marsh said her teams haven’t won the lively local award because they just haven’t found a recipe that would include five local ingredients.

Over the years, her teams have won several mise en place and crowd-pleaser awards. She’s proud of winning the mise en place awards, but she’s particularly proud of the times when her teams have won crowd-pleaser awards.

“It’s the one that talks most about the food. That’s the one I personally like,” Marsh said. “I mean, it says it’s the crowd pleaser, right?”

Usually, the school year starts with more teammates than Marsh can take to the Jr. Iron Chef competition because the rules say she can only take two teams, and there can’t be more than five cooks on each team, so it’s a maximum of 10 cooks who can go.

Most years she has not had to make hard choices about who will compete. The teams just sort of coalesce around a group of students who are interested and committed enough to work on their dishes for several months.

Last year, Marsh took two boys teams to the competition. A team of seniors who graduated and a group of freshman, who won in the first year of competition with a rice bowl they developed. That team returned to the cooking club this year and went to the competition with a shiitake sushi dish they developed.

Although that boys team didn’t win this year, a new girls team won for the crowd-pleaser award for their pumpkin ravioli with brown butter sauce.

The Lake Champlain Waldorf School “Tofoo Fighters” won the AM Heat High School Mise en Place (“everything in its place”) award, which goes to the team that shows exemplary teamwork, order and professionalism. 

Lake Champlain Waldorf School had two high school teams in the competition and each came home with an award. That school’s Tofoo Fighters team won the mise en place award for the morning heat and the Gnocchi Gnomes team won the lively local award in the afternoon round of competition.