About The Competition

Junior Iron Chef is a premiere county-wide culinary competition for teams of Santa Cruz County middle and high school students. Participants will create healthy dishes that inspire their school meal programs to use locally farmed, healthy ingredients. Jr Iron Chef is organized by Teen Kitchen Project, a local non-profit that brings teens into industrial kitchens to create beautiful nutritious meals that are then delivered to individuals and families that are in crisis due to serious illness.

We believe that one of the greatest benefits of cooking in this competition is the team work, collaboration, and team building that is developed over the months in preparation of the competition.

Goals

The goal of the competition is to promote recipes that use local and seasonal ingredients that could be replicated in a school kitchen. While making fancy dishes is fun and a great experience, our goal is to enable students to repeat their dishes for their home schools and groups. This means using simpler, replicable recipes, using easy to find ingredients.

Teams are encouraged to use original recipes. If the recipe is from a known source, you must credit that source.

Junior Iron Chef Santa Cruz County was inspired by Jr Iron Chef Vermont, a program of Vermont FEED.