A GROUP of home economics students from Great Southern Grammar have been crowned state champions in this year’s McCormick Flavour Forecast Recipe Challenge.
The students also placed second nationwide with their dishes.
The Challenge saw students tasked with creating three dishes based on strict criteria that address predicted food trends.
This year’s competition was all about “Need for Seed” and “Mexicana Vegana” and using ingredients such as basil seeds, lotus seeds, jackfruit and tempeh.
Year 10 student Jonte Eastough was part of the team that created savoury brioche tartlets with fennel seed oil, basil seed vegetable mousse cones and lamb duo with roasted cumin seeds.
Daniel Cosh looked after the jackfruit when his team created the vegan loaded jackfruit nachos and Jasmine Butterworth sorted the ice-cream for the churros tropical mousse cup dish embellished with spice.
The trio agreed the challenge was difficult, but it taught them valuable lessons.
“I could only cook sausages before but now I can cook more,” Jonte said.
“It was pretty nerve-wracking waiting for the result but we really enjoyed participating,” Jasmine added.
Teacher Teresa McAllister was proud of her students.
“It’s a very challenging and involved task,” she said.
“They did it all over eight lessons – ordering the food, designing it, making it, thinking about what it would look like in a photo – and they had to write a comprehensive justification as to why they did what they did.”
The judges said it was inspirational to see how the students used curriculum design processes to come up with innovative use of the set ingredients, particularly as some students had never heard of the ingredients before.
“Students really excelled and exceeded all expectations for their age group,” they said.
“Some stunning thinking and creativity went into their entries … it was clear students used active reflection and evaluation at each stage of the process and acted on these to amend their recipe and presentation to come up with stunning results.”
The students’ prize was $500 worth of spices and $1500 worth of Tupperware for their hospitality classes.