Owosso High culinary students square off in annual kitchen clash

In addition to gold medals, the team won $2,000 total in scholarship money from Mott Community College in Flint, a personal cake decorating lesson from local baker of renown Jill Davis, and their winning entree will soon be featured at the Wrought Iron Grill.

The three students are in chef Hannah Poyner’s intro Culinary I class, and as Nalley said, were underdogs against two other teams with students from the advanced Culinary II class, including one team of all Culinary II students.

“Honestly coming into this, we were the underdogs, and we just loved winning this competition. It feels amazing,” Nalley said.

Brown said he was “ecstatic” to win the competition — and the perks that came with it.

Ten students participated in this year’s competition, which Poyner said was the first since 2019 in which teams had to make full meals. Last year’s competition was a simpler cookie baking competition due to lingering COVID precautions.

This year, the competition menu included chicken, potatoes, spinach and a cook’s choice sauce to balance the dish. Poyner said while the students had been practicing in their small groups since February, they only found out which entree they would be making — the other options included tilapia and salmon meals — on Wednesday and had 90 minutes to do so.

The competition was judged by John Lowman, owner of Wrought Iron Grill; Matt Cooper, chef coordinator at Mott Community College; and Davis, owner of Drizzle Cakes and Bakes and a finalist on Food Network’s eighth season of “Halloween Baking Championship.” The students were judged on a four-point scale on their plating, protein (chicken), starch (potato), vegetable (spinach) and sauce.

Hanycz, Brown and Nalley narrowly beat a team of three students from Poyner’s Culinary II class who made an entree of Southern feast oven-fried chicken, collard-style spinach greens and mashed potato waffles with hot honey. The third place team made chicken with Italian seasoning and red wine sauce, spinach tart and potato wedges with paprika and garlic seasoning.

Lowman said the three students will have the opportunity will sit down with Wrought Iron Grill chef Brian Pierce in a business-style meeting on Friday, and their entree will soon be featured on the restaurant’s menu for several weeks.

Poyner said especially for high school students, getting an item on a chef’s menu is no small feat.

“It takes a long time for a chef to get anything that theirs on a menu. To be a high school student and get to do that, it’s amazing. It usually takes 10 years in the industry before a chef lets you put something on the menu,” Poyner said.

While Hanycz and Brown said they didn’t plan on contiuing in the culinary arts beyond high school, Nalley, a sophomore, said he planned on attending Mott Community College after high school and launching a culinary career.

“My end goal is eventually owning my own restaurant, wherever life takes me,” he said.