Chopped: Res Hall Edition | Photo by Rose Taylor | The Wright State Guardian
During World Mental Health Day, Residence Life and Housing hosted an event in the Honors Dorm in which students could learn to make dorm-friendly recipes. The event featured a live cooking demonstration from a chef on-campus, as well as a dessert competition following the same rules as the famous show “Chopped.”
What is Chopped?
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Chopped is a show that challenges chefs to create a three-course meal with unlikely and unexpected ingredients, which will then be presented to a panel of harsh judges.
“Four chefs call on their culinary skills as they face off against one another to prepare a spectacular three-course meal consisting of an appetizer, entree and dessert. The catch? In each round, they have to use all the ingredients the show provides them, however unlikely they might be,” Rotten Tomatoes website reads.
Chopped is famous for its peculiar challenge that it offers chefs. The chefs never know what ingredients they will be working with until the host opens the basket full of secrets. In recent episodes, chefs have had to make meals out of ingredients like cereal bars, lollipops and even pig snouts.
Calling on this unique challenge, Residence Life and Housing decided to host a similar event, in which students would be given a bowl of random ingredients to make into a delicious dessert.
“Learn to make a residence hall/apartment-friendly recipe and then compete to see who can make it the best,” the Engage page for the event stated.
Cooking demonstrations
Before students could participate in the challenge, Wright State University chef Carlos Reed presented a dish of his own for students to watch and enjoy.
Reed made his special dish: turkey meatballs with a spicy jelly sauce.
He walked attendees through each of the steps required to make the dish, including measuring the ingredients, how to mix them together and the best way to cook them. Reed informed students that they could cook the meatballs in an oven or airfryer.
According to the Move-in page on Residence Life and Housing’s website, air fryers are an accepted appliance to bring to campus, meaning that this recipe is accessible to anyone.
“I [loved] every bit of it,” Reed said in regards to the event. “It was like I was auditioning for my job all over again, [and] so many memories were brought up by participating in this event. I would love to host or participate again.”
With such positive vibes in the air, students were excited to start work on dishes of their own.
Once the meatballs were set away to bake, the Chopped competition could really begin.
Students cook on their own
Due to the amount of attendees, students were able to develop a desert on their own rather than team up with others.
As people sat down at their designated spots, the hosts of the Chopped event– and soon-to-be judges– announced the rules of the competition. Students would have thirty minutes to develop a dish, and they had to use all of the ingredients in their dessert.
Ingredients included graham crackers, strawberry glaze, marshmallows, dark chocolate chip cookies and cherry pie filling. There were also bowls, cups, and plastic silverware so that students had more variety on what they could do.
Students were up and about as soon as the timer started. Many dashed directly towards the microwave to melt down their chocolate or marshmallows, while others diligently worked to crush the graham cracker crumbs and open their cans of pie filling.
While there was a variety of ingredients, many focused on one of two dish types: parfaits or pileups. Competitors worked tirelessly to stack up their ingredients in a way that would taste good while providing an aesthetic meal for the judges to see.
As the meatballs finished cooking, the judges called the time, and students raised their hands in triumph as they let their finished desserts sit.
The judges
The judges sat in a circle in the Honors lounge, where they awaited students to come up and give a presentation on their desserts. Students went individually to do this. Afterwards, the dish would be passed around as each judge took a bite of the dish.
They dutifully noted down their scores as each chef came and went.
When it was time to vote on the winners, they disappeared to a backroom while students got to enjoy the meatballs provided by Reed.
In the end, the winners won a variety of prizes, including a Keurig, cookbooks and more. Students also had the opportunity to win raffles; the prizes were similar to what the winners of the competition won.
Where to find dorm-friendly recipes
While Reed provided one recipe for students to cook while on-campus, and students were shown a variety of desserts that they could make with limited supplies, there are many other resources available to offer a variety of meals to make.
Those interested can visit websites like delish for recipes. It is important to research different websites and options to find what works best for you in terms of time, ingredients and what type of food you actually want.
It is important for students to find recipes and other things to cook while in college to help increase their independence and to give them more variety in their day-to-day life.
