By Tristan McCandless, Staff Writer
Chef Lovett’s culinary class has received a brand new space, which opened on September 9th for cooking.
Culinary is a CTE program at Riverside Poly High School. It aims to teach students how to cook in an environment that is tailored to feel like a restaurant. However, the old location made it challenging to teach and learn, due to the small space.
In light of the new space, Chef Lovett highlighted that the greatest advantage to the space is the smart ovens. He stated that the smart ovens “are able to cook 100 hot dogs in 7 minutes.” This makes it really easy for culinary students to prepare for events with hundreds of people.
Other advantages include islands that allow less sharing of space between students. Each island includes a grill burner, sink, dump sink, and water. With students sharing less space, they can have more time to learn to cook by themselves.
However, this new area did not come without a fight. One of the biggest challenges of getting this space was getting funding from the district. However, recently a lot of the CTE programs have been given more funding to allow them to further teach the students. One of these programs was culinary.
Once the space was given to Chef Lovett, he had to decide how he wanted the layout of the place to be. The district gave him three blueprints to choose from, but rather than pick one, he wanted a bit from all three. This gives the space a more meaningful feeling because of Lovett’s creativity.
One of the major problems with the old space was time. This is because there are only 40 to 45 minutes per class that are spent cooking. Some of this time needs to be spent cleaning the area for the next class. While this is still a problem with the new area, it has become a lot easier to clean because of the open space and individuality of the student stations.
The space included a teaching suite where students can watch on a live TV of how a dish was prepared, making it easier for students to grasp the concepts of how to cook difficult dishes.
With this expanded area, plans have been prepared for more complex dishes. One of the dishes they have tried already were crepes. Chef Lovett wants to push for more complex plans near the end of the year.
One event that Chef Lovett is excited for is the annual CTE showcase. This will allow culinary students to show what they are capable of. These events come with a lot of planning. This includes figuring out what theme they want to have for the food, and then sticking to it.
Culinary is a popular class, which means that some people can try their entire four years at Poly to get in and fail. With regards to this issue, Chef Lovett shared that the old class could only hold about 28 students, while the new class could hold about 36 students. Because of this, the number of additional students that can enroll in culinary because of this new space is roughly 50.