by Cassady Sharp    .    photos by Brent Fleury

Anna McClintock has ten minutes left. Twenty-four perfectly polished plates covered with crisp mixed greens and a slice of basil-flavored zucchini await McClintock’s precise placing of 24 spoonfuls of salsa. The clock ticks.
McClintock is practicing with the four other members of the Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College culinary team in a balmy stainless steel kitchen on the college’s Asheville campus. The team started working in the kitchen at 7:30am, slicing, dicing and sweating, preparing for the American Culinary Federation’s Student Team Competition in Orlando, where they will compete against three other college teams in mid-July.

After their regional win against five Southeastern teams in April, the A-B Tech team started training weekly, pureeing carrots, creaming spinach and building little houses of chocolate. The goal: to create 24 four-course plates for a panel of tasting judges—all master chefs, executive chefs or pastry chefs—in four stressful hours.
In the A-B Tech prep kitchen, McClintock, a Philadelphia transplant, worked next to Shannon Ginn, an Asheville native, who used little boxes made from window blinds to create her specialty: dessert. “The dessert is the last thing someone tastes, so it’s really important to put everything you’ve got into that,” Ginn says. Her finished product is a positively sinful lemon cream concoction cradled in a dark chocolate shell and surrounded by a moat of mango and spiced papaya rum.

This year for the national contest, each team member claimed a dish. Ginn and McClintock, both recent graduates of the A-B Tech Culinary Program, chose salads and desserts. Michael Aanonsen created a seafood mousse, Steven Goff sculpted a pork tenderloin entrée and team captain Travis McCloud’s job was to help with finishing touches and watch the clock. At the Southeast Regional competition in April, judges loved the team’s garde manger, a cold platter using every part of a pig, including the feet. The team turned them into stuffed trotters, which are exactly what they sound like—stuffed pig’s feet.

Although the culinary curriculum at A-B Tech can be daunting—aspiring chefs must sit through hours of sanitation, food science and purchasing classes—there is always room for experimentation. Ginn reports that, in a food-science class, a professor stuck a Twinkie in a glass of water, and after an hour-long lecture, the water had turned neon yellow. (The Twinkie was completely intact.)

McClintock is also guilty of playing with her food. “I don’t usually light my food on fire, but if you place a flame under a Twinkie, it glows green,” McClintock says. Let’s hope the only thing that glowed green at the Orlando competition was the other teams’ envy.