Culinary Lab has a hot kitchen this year - they're really cookin'

Jammed. 

That's what C-CAP Arizona's Culinary Lab is.  (Also jammin', but that's another story.)

In only four brief sessions (including the annual field trip), around 20 CCAP seniors have "learned to think outside the box," as Parker says.

Presented in cooperation with the Dairy Council of Arizona, Culinary Lab's instructors began with a simple goal: help culinary students who want to enter the national Dairy Council's Fuel Up to Play 60 annual student recipe contest master the skills needed to create a winning recipe.

As students themselves attest, it's evolving into so much more.

"I've learned time management," says Allison.  "And I'm learning more about how to think in the kitchen.  And that it’s okay to make a mistake - you'll only get better from it."

"We learned a lot from last year," says CCAP Arizona's culinary director, Nicole Swartz.

First, she and her team determined that an introductory session was very helpful, but that it would be best to hold it before lab work actually began.

"That sounds small, but it was a big thing in that, this year, when we held our first lab session in September, we could come in and start right to work," Nicole says.

Space is at a premium in the Dairy Council's test kitchens, so students divide into groups of ten, alternating between testing (and tasting) recipes and hearing more about nutrition, the dairy industry and recipe development.

Terri Verason, MS. RDN, Director of Nutrition for the Dairy Council of Arizona, says, "It's especially gratifying to hear that the students are actually taking our presentations and doing them for their own culinary classes."

She's pleased, too, that the students are showing real progress in nutritional analysis for their recipes, a critical element in the Dairy Council's student recipe competition.

Even better - most of what they've created is both original - and tasty.