Bainbridge cooking students slip into the frying pan for grilled cheese contest

Published 7:38 am Tuesday, November 24, 2015

If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen, or so the old saying goes.

It’s a bit more complicated at Bainbridge High: If you can’t stand the cheese, stay out of the voting booth.

At least, that was the case one recent Friday afternoon in teacher Ryenn Deitz’s advanced foods class as her students gathered around their Kenmore stoves in a frenzied effort to invent the greatest thing since sliced bread — with cheese.

It was the class’ first-ever grilled cheese sandwich competition. Teams of two to four students sliced, diced, sautéed and sizzled their way in a delicious dash to finish six sandwiches while a crowd of invited judges — a few dozen BHS staff, students and invited guests — hovered nearby, waiting to taste and judge the students’ culinary creations.

The air was thick with the smell of bacon as the teams raced the clock to finish their sandwiches.

Deitz said her class typically does a chili cookoff every year, but decided to mix things up with a grilled-cheese contest this semester.

But these weren’t your grandmother’s grilled cheeses.

“Dude! Less butter!” Ryan Holt pleaded to his teammate as he spread guacamole on a slice of bread.

Gabriel Emert, the man with the spatula, inspected his skillet and his soggy slices.

This bit of butter was turning out to be the toughest part of getting their sandwiches right, Emert said, because the bread needs to be a beautiful brown.

“If it’s too buttery, it’ll be dark. If it’s not buttery enough, it will just burn,” he said.

Emert looked for more ingredients for another sandwich, and glanced at an almost empty plate that held the last lonely bits of a hash brown.

Their sandwich, he explained, was a takeoff on a recipe they had found on a website called Grilled Cheese Academy.

“We kind of put our own style on it,” he said.

The ingredients included hashed-brown taters, a bit of Brie, bacon, eggs and grated cheddar packed into two slices of sourdough. There was also some guac, of course, and a little garlic tossed in.

“We’re hoping that the guacamole and the egg cut through the cheddar,” Holt said.

At a nearby station, Morgan Du Bois and Kenny Dosono were putting together their sandwiches using a completely original recipe.

Built on slices of a French baguette, it included Swiss and Parmesan, sautéed potato slices, bacon, green pepper slivers and onion, with a creamy cauliflower sauce spread on the bread.

Du Bois said he never had to cook under pressure before, and with his next class coming at 3 p.m., the deadline was getting ever closer.

The pair, like many other teams, said they didn’t have time to taste test their concoction.

That, they said, they’ll leave up to the judges.

“We’ll pretty much test it under fire. It’s either going to be good, or ‘Please don’t make this ever again,’” Du Bois laughed.

Deitz said she put only a few restrictions on the recipes. Students had to use at least two types of cheese — but no more than three — and they also had to use something from three different food groups.

Sophie Crandell was putting together a creation using classic French bread.

“We actually have some barbecue sauce, some caramelized onion. We have some turkey marinated in pesto,” she said.

On the other side of the room, Claire O’Neill and her team were putting together a double decker: garlic butter-flavored sourdough with cheddar cheese, pepper jack, thick-cut bacon, a little bit of honey-smoked barbecue sauce and avocado slices.

And in the middle, a huge plop of Annie’s Mac-and-Cheese. (It’s organic.)

“We were on the Grilled Cheese Academy website and we saw one sandwich and we kind of liked the idea of it, so we kind of took it and switched it up a bit and made it our own,” she said.

Students had 25 minutes to make six sandwiches, but O’Neill’s team was a virtual grill-cheese assembly line, and the group cranked out a tableful of samples while other teams were still plating their first or second sandwich.

They called their finished sandwich G-Cheezy.

“The G stands for ‘great,’” O’Neill explained.

Deitz said the idea for a grilled-cheese cookoff came from the growing trend of food trucks sporting the popular standby as a menu mainstay.

“Grilled cheese is becoming very popular for food trucks,” Deitz said, and noted that several are now making the rounds in Seattle.

“The food trucks are everywhere, so we were really inspired by that.”

The contest has a practical purpose, too.

“I really want students to be able to kind of improvise and have that sense of confidence in the kitchen, where they can put things together on impulse, experiment and try new things,” Deitz said. “I think they are all getting that.”

With about 15 minutes left in the class, the students began to clean up their kitchen stations. Deitz, meanwhile, was working the polls and began to tally up the votes.

She stopped a student as he was about to drop his vote into a large silver salad bowl that was serving as the ballot box.

“Is this a fair ballot? How many did you taste?” she asked the student.

He gave her a bloated look.

“A lot,” he said.

When the final ballot was cast, G-Cheezy lived up to its name and was declared the winner.

It was a tasty triumph for the team of O’Neill, Byron Alvarez, Riley Dunn and Marcus Clyde, though O’Neill said she hadn’t actually tasted their creation yet.

It was quite a bit different than the grilled cheeses she grew up on, she admitted.

“I just had cheese in mine. But sometimes my mom got a little excited and put some ham in there,” she added.