Among many awesome clubs at Shadow Ridge is the incredible Master Chef Club, a club in which a group of students come together to cook delicious desserts, meals, snacks, and more. This brand new club only just came to the school in the 2nd semester of the 2024-2025 school year, but it has grown very quickly. There are currently 10-15 kids at each meeting, and they are continuing to develop their culinary skills every week.
The Master Chef Club meets every week on Tuesday from about 1:30-2:30 in Chef Schaefer’s room. Chef Schaefer is the Culinary teacher at Shadow Ridge and this is her first year teaching high schoolers. She is currently the only advisor for the club, and she’s enjoying it.
“I enjoy seeing the kids get creative and hearing about what they like to make in their own time,” Schaefer says. “They have liked making dishes from their own culture, for example one time a kid made a Spam Musubi Bowl because he grew up in Hawaii. And someone else made an angel food cake that their grandma was famous for.”
These young chefs are not only using recipes given to them, they are also bringing their personalities into each dish as well. The club is mostly student run, and Chef Scaefer says she’s mostly there to advise. The idea of the club came from a student, Sophomore Andrew Ali Rivera, when he attended a cooking competition.
In February, Chef Schaefer took 9 students to a competition in which the students who were cooking did very well and had lots of fun. After that experience they wanted to start a club, and so Rivera wrote everything up so that the club could be formed and was super enthusiastic about it. Rivera is looking to continue to cook, and hopefully he can be professional in the future.
“I want to be a chef when I grow up,” Rivera comments. “It will help me gain experiences, which can help me teach cooking skills to other students that they never knew that can help them later in life.”
The President of Master Chef Club is currently Rivera and the Vice President is junior Aurora Short. They both love the club for different reasons, but cooking is definitely a common theme. Short appreciates all of the new people she has met since starting the club.
“I really love that it was started on the basis of a friendship- we went to a cooking competition together, and that’s what made us want to start a club,” Short explains.
Meetings usually start with Rivera laying out an agenda, plan, time for the competitions, and then gets everyone cooking right away. Past meetings have included mini cooking competitions, in which members either pair up or work alone to cook whatever they want. They must bring their own ingredients beforehand, but Chef Schaefer usually keeps the ingredients in her room before school to keep everything refrigerated if needed.
Each group or person will then present their finished dish to a panel of judges, which includes Chef Schaefer, Rivera, and Short. Each judge gives the dish a score out of five, and then they ask questions to see the students’ capability of answering the questions and their knowledge of the dish. The winners of each competition get a cookbook for a prize.
Looking ahead, the group is planning on doing a group project of making macarons, which can be super hard to bake. Even though the task might be advanced, Chef Schaefer is very encouraging of the students.
“The French macarons are a very technical and tricky kind of cooking, and I’m proud and excited that they’re willing to take on that challenge,” Schaefer comments.
