Goodbye, Training Wheels: Working Sans Recipes on the Brainfood Signature Sandwich Challenge

 
Recipes are a big part of cooking. At least for beginners, they’re essential tools that provide instruction necessary to get the desired results. But like training wheels, they become less essential with time. We learn to experiment, rely on past experience, and trust our instincts. The transition from following a recipe step-by-step to cooking without that guidance can be exciting, fun, and yes, even a little bit scary.  Here at Brainfood in Kitchen All Stars, we made that leap this week. We started with a versatile, forgiving, and consistently crowd-pleasing food item that we hoped would minimize the “scary” part of this transition: the sandwich. And though it was a dramatic departure from how we’ve been doing things, I’d say the fun and excitement and fun far outweighed the fear.
 
Over the past three weeks, our students have demonstrated their ability to follow a recipe and to work collaboratively in small groups. They’ve done a marvelous job sticking to the instructions given, communicating and compromising with other students in their groups, and waiting patiently to channel their awesome instincts to experiment and innovate. This week, we let them take the reins and work solo on a creative culinary project without group assignments and without a recipe. We call it the Brainfood Signature Sandwich Challenge.

Following a lesson about MyPlate and a discussion about the five food groups, each student was tasked with creating his or her own unique sandwich as a way of applying the MyPlate concepts. The kitchen was filled with pre-chopped ingredients to use: grains, proteins, fruits, vegetables, and dairy, all arranged at stations for students to select from. After reviewing the parameters regarding the number of food groups, colors, and ingredients that should be represented in each sandwich (plus a bonus challenge of including an ingredient they’d never had on a sandwich before) our students got to work. At first there was some hesitation about starting the cooking process without recipes (What if I don’t know how to caramelize onions? Do you think cream cheese blended with chives and apples would be good? Would it work to make a tuna melt on a tortilla? What can I do with artichokes?) but students quickly had questions answered by helpful Weekly Classroom Assistants and teachers and got into the swing of the creative process. After a very busy hour of frying eggs with experimental herbs and spice blends, pureeing ingredients into improvised spreads, and arranging garnish artfully, all of the students successfully met the Brainfood Signature Sandwich Challenge! As they swapped sandwich quarters with one another and sampled the wide range of MyPlate-approved delicacies they had created, the room was full of proud smiles. Striking out on their own without recipes and without groups yielded some pretty impressive results, and we can’t wait to see what they create for Signature Pizza Day next week!