After watching “Culinary Class Wars,” a South Korean reality TV cooking show, we felt inspired to put our culinary skills to the test.
Following the show’s team-style competition, the four of us juniors split into two teams — Ariia Blanco and Claire Chen versus Linh Do and Vedant Sinha — and assigned ourselves chicken as our one cooking ingredient to incorporate in a finished dish.
After each team finished making a list of all the ingredients needed for their dish, we headed to H-Mart in Cupertino, where we quickly realized that despite the various ingredients, most of what we needed could already be found in Linh’s kitchen.
Blanco and Chen’s experience
After scrolling through countless different chicken recipes, we settled on Hainan chicken as our main course. This dish consists of steamed chicken, served on seasoned chicken rice and topped with ginger scallion oil.
Although none of us had ever cooked chicken before, we had high hopes for our dish. The first real challenge began with prepping the chicken. This was the most difficult part as we found the smooth skin of the chicken hard to cut. While Claire cut the chicken, Ariia focused on slicing ginger and green onions, which were later used to add flavor to the chicken as it steamed.
To cook the chicken, we boiled a large pot of water and placed a steam rack inside. After rummaging through Linh’s kitchen, we stumbled upon a plate that would fit all of our chicken and vegetables. The problem was that when it came time to place the plate into the pot, we realized that our plate was larger than our pot.
We ended up placing the chicken on a smaller plate we found and added a bowl in the center to capture the chicken juice. We added the chicken juice to the rice and cooked it together to give it extra flavor.
After 18 minutes of steaming the chicken, we were able to pull it apart. We broke them into bite-sized pieces and started preparing the ginger scallion oil. To do this, we heated up some cooking oil and added large pieces of scallion as it cooked.
After the oil was hot enough, we poured it over minced ginger and scallions. To add a refreshing touch to our dish, we decided to make a cucumber salad.
We then combined the chicken rice and chicken, topped it with cucumbers and extra scallions and drizzled it with ginger scallion oil. During the process of infusing the oil, we thought that adding more hot oil would bring out more flavors, only to realize we had made a mistake: The chicken was too oily.
Team Vedant and Linh
Stepping into the competition, we felt confident. We first envisioned using a chicken thigh, sticky rice and basic seasoning to make teriyaki chicken. However, to our dismay, Claire purchased a chicken leg, a far bonier piece of chicken that made it difficult for us to break the chicken up and know how long we had to cook it. Because of this, we decided not to base our dish on a recipe, but instead on what we knew about cooking as students who cook occasionally.
We first seasoned our chicken with soy sauce, ginger, garlic and brown sugar. Then, we heated up some oil in the pan and put the chicken in. After searing for around five minutes on each side, we still needed to cook the inside of the chicken. Due to the fairly bony piece, it was unlikely that covering the pan would cook it fully without overcooking the skin. So, we wrapped the chicken and put it in the oven, where the inside was fully cooked after around 15 minutes.
To prepare our bowl, we used white rice, pieces of the teriyaki chicken sliced off the bone and chopped cucumber. Additionally, we topped it with some additional soy sauce, which we later regretted as we realized that it was too strong.
Judging
When judging our bowls, we unfortunately had no judges, so we went off our own (completely) unbiased opinions. Based on presentation, we rated Claire and Ariia’s Hainan chicken at 3.5/5 falcons, while Vedant and Lihn’s teriyaki chicken received 4/5 falcons.
For taste, the Hainan Chicken had too little salt and was quite oily. But it tasted really good with rice and was cooked quite tenderly, earning itself a 3.5/5 falcons. The Teriyaki chicken was slightly on the saltier side, but was juicy and seasoned very well, earning 4/5 falcons.
By the end of the night, the overall decision was that Team Vedant and Linh rated as the better cooks.
Cooking without a lot of experience was humbling, but enjoyable. For us, not knowing now how long to cook certain things or how to cook them made us feel uneasy; however, it is also motivating, as the experience left us with inspiration to learn how to cook for our next faceoff.
