The University of Wyoming Food Science Club hosted an Iron Chef competition last week, where students battled it out for the ultimate prize—recognition and $300.
Overall winners Colleen Buck and Karlee Schell beat out six teams. The teams were given boxes with their secret ingredients and then given $65 and an hour to go to the grocery store.
For the appetizer round, the mystery ingredients were avocado, mushrooms and sesame bars. In the entre round, dishes had to include sirloin steak, orange juice, goldfish crackers and tomatillos. Finally, in the dessert round, competitors had to use strawberries, graham crackers and Parmesan cheese.
Kelcey Christensen, the meat lab manager and food science club advisor, picked the ingredients. “I just wandered around Albertson’s looking for ingredients that would be a challenge,” he said.
Competitor Kayla Foster, who placed second in the appetizer round, said the tomatillos were a big surprise in the second round. “We had to taste it to figure out what to do with it. It was really bitter,” Foster said.
As for Parmesan cheese in desserts, Foster said, “You actually couldn’t taste it. It added to the flavor of the [cheese cake] crust.”
Judges were Ron and Susan Maverick, who run several successful culinary operations in Laramie, and Mary Bower, who is a gourmet home cook. Judges scored each dish on taste, creativity and presentation—taking into account aroma, use of ingredients, the creativity in repurposing the curveball ingredients, flavor and texture.
The Food Science Club seeks to promote the many areas of science in use in the food industry.
Warrie Means, animal science professor, said food science is multidisciplinary. “If you are talking about the senescence [the science of aging] of a stalk, that is biology. If looking at leavening in a baking product, that is chemistry. Knowing how to cook a piece of meat to a certain temperature is heat transfer and physics,” Means said.
Mean said the club is a lot of fun, but everything is also educational. The Food Science Club has professors come in to speak on the chemistry of high altitude baking. The club might tour a brewery, but the fermentation process and understanding the reasons for malting the barley would be as important as sampling the end product (for science, of course).
Means said the club is useful for students because food science has a healthy job market. The main reasons for the stable market is that food disappears—meaning food does not saturate the market—and increasing regulation in the industry is forcing the hiring of more educated personnel. More regulation means more jobs like food inspectors and food production specialists.
