Edgar Sanchez has enjoyed cooking since he was about four years old, when his father, a construction worker named Valente Sanchez, passed on his love of making food.
Now 16, Edgar Sanchez is a junior at Española Valley High School, and one of the seven students that will be the first-ever group from the school to compete in a culinary arts contest.
The smell of onions and freshly-cooked tortillas regularly fills the Sanchez home in Española. Valente Sanchez and his wife Luz Gonzalez are originally from Chihuahua, Mexico.
“My mom is the head chef, but every now and then, she’ll let me prepare dinner for the family,” Edgar Sanchez, who is class president of the high school’s student council, said Monday.
After taking Jesus Maes’s culinary arts class at the high school, Sanchez has started making dishes even his parents don’t know how to make, like Italian pasta and pizza from scratch.
“Cooking is like building something on your own, that feeling of accomplishment, when you make something good,” Edgar Sanchez said. “And then, seeing the person’s face when they actually enjoyed the food, it’s a good payoff. It’s like in math, when you have a complicated equation and you take all the steps to the end result, which is gonna make you really happy.”
Students in Maes’s classes have also learned traditional Native and New Mexican dishes passed on from his grandmother, Juanita Fernandez-Chavez, like horchata, panocha, or torta de huevo. Maes is originally from Dulce.
The event
Out of about 125 students in Maes’s six culinary classes, only seven are part of the team that will head to Albuquerque on March 5 to compete in the 2018 New Mexico ProStart Invitational.
The competition is being hosted in Albuquerque by the Hospitality Industry Education Foundation and the New Mexico Restaurant Association.
Students will be judged on their ability to cook a three-course meal in 60 minutes, without using running water or electricity.
“It seems like it will be similar to all the shows we watch on TV,” Sanchez said. “I’m not really nervous about it, but I’m definitely excited for it.”
The only tools provided at the competition are two butane burners. The teams must bring all the other equipment they need to make the meal. With some creativity, Maes’s students have made ovens out of tin foil.
The seven students on the team have been spending an hour of class each day, two hours after school with Maes, and sometimes a couple hours at home, preparing for the event.
On Tuesday, sophomore Steve Montoya was learning various types of cutting techniques, including batonnet, julienne, and fine julienne.
“I took this class because I need to learn to cook when I go out on my own, you know?” Montoya said.
Later in the day, the entire team learned how to fabricate, or butcher, a whole chicken.
Other students are coming from all over the state, including Deming, Questa, Santa Fe and Taos, among others, to compete for scholarships.
Maes, the high school’s former football coach, majored in physical education in college, but also took 30 hours of culinary classes at Western New Mexico University and another 10 hours at Santa Fe Community College.
Careers in cooking
Aspen Garcia, a junior in one of Maes’s classes, was making fresh tortillas with a partner on Monday.
She said the culinary class is different from her other coursework because it feels like what she’s learning is more applicable in life outside of school.
“I’m trying to just show ’em how you can make a career out of this, if you want it,” Maes said. “If your priorities don’t work out, you can always fall back to anything with culinary, whether it be cooking, waitressing, whatever. There’s always jobs out there.”
He said he has been teaching the culinary arts for 10 years and opened the culinary arts programs in Cuba and Questa, then took over Española’s program after Marcie Davis started it.
“The first reason I took this class was to figure out, do I really want to do this as a profession?” Sanchez, who is currently weighing either culinary arts or engineering as a career, said. “So far, every day, I’ve enjoyed it, so this is something I definitely want to gear me into the culinary profession.”
He is trying to find a college that has a culinary program, could offer him a scholarship for sports, and is in a community where he would want to live.
He is captain of the wrestling team, runs cross country and plays tennis.
Every culinary student in Maes’s classes works toward a ServSafe food handling certification.
The culinary arts program faces its own challenges with funding. In May 2017, High School Counselor Margaret Alire said it was one of the District’s underfunded and crowded classes, according to a previous Rio Grande SUN story.
“We’re still a long way away from getting the classroom upgraded to commercial equipment,” Maes said on Feb. 23. “Davis did a good job, got a Carl Perkins Grant and she was able to buy new stoves, some blenders, and very basic necessities for the classroom. We don’t even have our uniforms in yet. A lot of equipment we’re lacking, but we’re gonna do a simple recipe, we gotta start somewhere.”
Sanchez said the public gives immense support for his school’s great basketball team, but there are tons of other clubs and interests that students have outside of sports.