Blue Hills puts students at the stove
CANTON -- Shortly before the dining room and cafeteria at Blue Hills Regional Vocational Technical High School open here one weekday morning, the chefs in both kitchens are purposeful as they go about their business. The immaculate rooms hum with productivity. In their white jackets, with their names embroidered on the fronts, the chefs seem like seasoned professionals. In fact, they are high school students.
Blue Hills' culinary students rotate between the dining room and the cafeteria, spending one term in each place. They also rotate between academics and "shop," going alternate weeks to the classroom and their chosen area of concentration. By the time they graduate from high school, these students can run a kitchen, operate a 60-quart Hobart mixer, and feed 900 people every day. They can do the inventory, work the registers, and cater. This 15-year-old program has 65 students who work in spacious kitchens with state-of-the-art equipment. Blue Hills receives federal money for capital equipment and operating dollars from the nine towns that feed into it. The money enabled Jim Hanrahan, who runs the program with a staff of four, to purchase a $25,000 Picard baking oven, a Vulcan range, the giant Hobart mixer, along with another 20-quart version, and two new proof boxes, for bread and other yeast doughs.
About one-third of Blue Hills' graduates go on to culinary school, and many go right into jobs. One graduate attended Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts, worked at Blue Ginger in Wellesley, and is now doing private catering. He also just became certified as a culinary instructor. He helps out in his alma mater's kitchen occasionally and, according to Hanrahan, "the kids love it. He makes his own ice cream and spins sugar for them."
Jamal Irish, a 15-year-old sophomore who lives in Randolph, moved to Massachusetts from Montserrat when he was in the fourth grade. He started cooking as a child in his grandmother's kitchen. As he maintains a steady stream of conversation while showing a visitor around, Irish's pride in where he is and what he's accomplishing shines through. "I've learned a lot of things I never thought of," he says. "I prefer quantity cooking."
In the cafeteria kitchen, getting ready for the first onslaught of students, he says, "It's fun on a day like this. Chef Green lets the kids do the menus over here," he explains, referring to David Green, the faculty member in charge. Drawing on the tastes of his childhood, Irish recently added jerk chicken wraps to the menu. The students, he says, "liked my seasoning. It's really spicy."
"My goal is to give the kids a blank menu and let them fill it in with their own ideas," says Green. One of the challenges of putting together a weekly menu is learning how to use foods that have been prepared for other dishes -- what home cooks call leftovers. "If we didn't use previously cooked food, there would be a lot of waste," Green explains.
A typical cafeteria menu might include cream of carrot soup, meatball or chicken Parmesan subs, egg salad sandwiches, meatballs with sauce, cheese ravioli, and barbecued kielbasa. All of that is made from scratch. Friday is pizza day. The quality and selection are far superior to average cafeteria fare, with a $2 cost.
The menu in the dining room, which is open to the community (but not students), is a little more upscale than in the cafeteria. Most dining room meals are cooked to order, as they would be in a real restaurant. A recent menu featured French onion and cream of broccoli soup; a choice of roast beef with mushroom pan gravy, grilled swordfish with mixed herb butter, or sauteed chicken Florentine -- all with a salad, vegetables, and a choice of rice or potato; sandwiches; and, for dessert, a double chocolate cake roll, ice cream puff with hot fudge, or peach melba. Entrees are $4.95, sandwiches are $2.50 to $2.95, and desserts are 95 cents to $1.10. The dining room also has a bake sale every day, with beautiful pastries arranged in a case at one end of the room.
Just before the midday rush, 18-year-old Samantha Green, from Holbrook, stood at the stove with her long blond hair pulled back, sauteing a pan of green beans in butter, with a sprinkling of sliced almonds. Green, who enjoys cooking more than any of the program's other activities, says she makes dinner for her parents "all the time." A senior who will graduate this spring, she is planning to attend culinary school. She has already been accepted by New England Culinary Institute in Vermont and is waiting to hear from Johnson & Wales.
One recent graduate runs the food concession at the Blue Hills ski center. Another works as a banquet chef for Wolfgang Puck. And a young woman is sous chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.
Recently, the Anthony Spinazzola Foundation added Blue Hills to its Culinary Apprentice Program, for students with limited resources who are interested in the food-service industry. They're eligible to receive up to $10,000 towards tuition at approved culinary schools. "The juniors have really stepped up because of the potential opportunity to go to school," Hanrahan notes.
The culinary students at Blue Hills work hard. "Some people think [the program] is frustrating," says Irish. "I know I need to do whatever they tell me because I have to learn. Slowly, you become what you want to be and achieve what you want to achieve."
An attitude like that is a recipe for success.
