Do you like your food sliced, diced or cut? Here at Timber Creek, students like their food Chopped. Students from the culinary department have teamed up with the broadcast journalism students to create a competition reality show titled Timber Creek Chopped.
Chopped is a student produced reality show, and joint project between culinary and broadcast journalism students. The advanced culinary students will be cooking in the contest, while the broadcast journalism students produce the show. The first episode of the reality show is scheduled to air in May.
Greg Janda, the broadcast journalism teacher, oversaw his students working together and filming the show.
“We are planning three episodes, with three rounds that were entree, dessert and then we ended with an appetizer as the final chopped round,” Janda explained. “We had about four or five teams [competing] per round and then we finished up [with] two teams who were selected from the winners of the first two rounds.”
Sharetha Wheeler, the head teacher of the culinary department, worked along with Janda in supervising the students while they produced and cooked in the contest.
“Mrs. Wheeler did a great job coming up with some unique ingredients [that the students were required to use]. I’d like to see how people react to the kids reacting to this, because for a lot of them, they knew the skills, but coming up with a recipe on the fly seems like it was a really big challenge for some of them,” Janda revealed.
The judges of the competition included Timber Creek teachers, Jared Swart and Amy Goodrich, along with Chef Leo Dorsey from the Sodexo chef program.
“Sodexo is the vendor for our cafeteria, so [Chef Leo] has a lot of experience. She’s culinary trained, so she was aware of all the challenges that these kids would face,” Janda mentioned.
Working behind the scenes, broadcast journalism student and senior, Karoline Austin, captured the chefs’ most stressful and victorious moments on camera, while facing obtacles of her own.
“It got pretty hectic in the kitchens. [The cameramen] weren’t supposed to be in the way of the chefs, and on top of that, we were struggling to find good angles and make sure the audio didn’t sound like absolute garbage,” Austin said. “Editing has been a pain, mostly because we’re trying to squish 20 hours of footage down into 30 minute [episodes for] all three rounds of the show. It’s really time constraining, especially under a tight deadline.”
The reality cooking show would not be complete without the chefs. With only one hour to create a special meal for the judges, and using the required ingredients, the pressure was on. Although they might not have shown it, stress levels increased as the time decreased.
“The culinary students didn’t really seem like they were under pressure – after all, they [cook] everyday. I [got] to try one group’s stir-fry and it was so good it made me cry,” Austin mentioned.
Despite the one hour time limit and surprise ingredients, in the end, all teams provided the judges with a plate.
“Some of the teams worked really well together, some of the teams had a little dysfunction, but all the teams always finished and provided the judges with something to eat, which is really great,” Janda revealed. “There were some hard decisions that the judges had to make.”