This year, Wilsonville High School introduced culinary arts as a new elective students can choose to take. In this class, students experiment with recipes and ingredients to further their knowledge on cooking and take this important skill with them outside of school. 

“I saw it was a class and I was interested in something new and enjoyable,” Hannah Holman comments. The class was first seen as an option late last year, when students first began forecasting for the upcoming school year. “I really like it so far. I feel like a lot of schools don’t have this class and you can use the skills we learn in our daily life.” 

The students in the class work on a variety of recipes with different difficulties and ingredients. Some weeks they will focus on pizzas, making the dough and other important pieces from scratch. Other weeks, they create more complicated recipes, such as gingerbread houses or crepes. They often use trial and error to see how to improve recipes and what changes in the final product. “I really like the difference in this class. There’s a lot of freedom and experimenting. There’s usually a recipe but we are allowed to tinker with things and see how much better or worse it can get,” says Tyler Rayburn, a junior currently taking the class.  Hannah Holman also states, “It’s easy to fail if you do something wrong. We have had a lot of failures in this class and you just have to redo it. Sometimes it takes two or more times and sometimes it takes one. Usually just a hit or miss.”

To all students who have thought about trying something new or have an open slot for electives next year, Culinary Arts is definitely a class to consider!