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Now they're cooking Gabi Livni, 18, shows of her skills during her cooking class at Ashland High School on Thursday. Daily Tidings / Jamie Lusch Friday Nov 11, 2016 at 7:41 PM Nov 11, 2016 at 7:41 PM Joe Zavala Ashland Daily Tidings @Joe_Zavala99 Rose Eschtruth-Harrison and Gabi Livni knew that whichever wild-card ingredient Ashland Culinary Festival judges had up their sleeve, last Saturday’s big reveal would likely push the Ashland High School students’ cooking skills to the limit. But tuna? Seriously? “Well,” said Livni, an AHS senior, “we at first were like, 'oh gosh, what should we do?' Because neither of us had tuna before — we’re both vegetarians. And we hadn’t practiced making it in class. We practiced making other proteins in class so that we’d be prepared for the competition, but we didn’t think about practicing with tuna.” So Eschtruth-Harrison, a senior, and Livni leaned on their training, tried to recall the pre-competition advice from their AHS culinary instructor Carroll Newcomb and put their heads together to brainstorm options. They had one hour to make an appetizer and an entrée, and both dishes had to include albacore tuna. What they came up with impressed the judges and earned Eschtruth-Harrison and Livni first place in the festival’s first Junior Chefs competition. Ashland High’s other Junior Chefs team, Shea Scott and Eve Kempe, placed second and two teams from South Medford High School took home third and fourth. The event, held at Ashland Hills Hotels & Suites, was the first opportunity for Ashland High’s first-year culinary team to put its cooking skills to the test in a competitive environment, and the six team members proved they were up to the challenge. Besides placing first and second in the Junior Chefs showdown, Ashland High’s Garrick Kosct worked as the sous-chef for eventual Top Chef champion Josh Dorcak of Scarpetta Prima, and Ashland High’s Felix Villagrana worked as a liaison between the team and the festival. Eschtruth-Harrison and Livni will each receive a scholarship worth between $300 and $400 (the exact amount has yet to be determined), and Kosct received something that could end up being more valuable: three job offers. Also, Ashland High’s culinary program received a $1,000 donation courtesy of local winery Platt Anderson Cellars. Not bad for a program that only got off the ground barely two months ago, when Newcomb asked her students if any were interested in a local competition. “When you compete like this it puts us out there,” Newcomb said, “and the whole purpose of our department is to give them job skills, be able to work as a team, be able to problem solve as a team, be able to do the research and take the foundational stuff and move it to a higher level.” Ashland High’s two teams certainly did that. After receiving the tuna shocker, Eschtruth-Harrison and Livni got right to work. Each had their assignments, based on weeks of preparation and planning: Eschtruth-Harrison was the meat and protein specialist, Livni was in charge of vegetables. They decided the starter would be pickled beets and roasted red pepper, goat cheese puree, an Asian style tuna with micro grains and pomegranate seeds, and for the entrée they whipped up a lemon caper tuna dish over a warm salad with spinach, roasted red peppers, honey-glazed carrots and dried apricots. Much of their creation was improvised on the fly, a process which, when combined with clicking cameras, audience members and wandering judges, struck the teammates as simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. “I just started making vegetables I thought would be good with it,” Livni said, “because since I hadn’t had it that would be hard. I just went for what I thought sounded good and things that would bring color to the plate because the judges really like color.” “We knew that soy sauce goes good with tuna,” Eschtruth-Harrison said, “so (I thought) 'we’ll do an Asian style.' And then also, usually tuna’s cooked with lemons, so I decided that I’d do a lemon style and an Asian style, then just while we were going we kind of decided what other things to put on the dish. I think it turned out really good.” Similar to the Food Network show “Chopped,” in which contestants are tasked with making a three-course meal using mystery ingredients, ACF’s Junior Chef competitors are given access to a large pantry of food items and a tight cooking space adjacent to their rivals. Before the competition, each team is given a plastic tub they can fill with whichever cooking aids they can squeeze in. Newcomb advised her Ashland students to work fast and leave plenty of time to fix mistakes and plate, but, well, in the heat of battle, things happen. “We started plating with like five minutes to go and we did the majority of the plating the last two minutes,” Livni said. “The whole competition was super exciting and fun, but the last 10 minutes started to get really nerve-racking.” Kosct, who as a lineman on the Midwestern League champion Ashland High football team knows what it’s like to work under pressure, agreed. “It was like a first game,” Kosct said. “Like the first game I ever played. At times I got mixed up. (Dorcak) told me to find an ingredient and it would take me a while to find it. The placing threw me off a little bit, too. One time, he told me to find ginger and I grabbed something that looked exactly like ginger.” At this, Newcomb chimed in: “It was Jerusalem artichokes, I bet,” “Yes,” Kosct said. “The ginger was actually hidden underneath two other vegetables.” The judges announced the results from last place to first, but the cooks didn’t know they had won until their final point total was announced right before their dish was critiqued. The head judge was impressed with the winning team’s creativity, highlighting the choice to combine beets with red pepper. Ashland's culinary team won't enter another competition until a SkillsUSA gathering in Portland next April. After Saturday's performance, the Grizzlies will enter the Rose city with a perfect record. “It was really exciting,” Livni said. “I was crossing my fingers that they were going in order of tables and not points. Then when they said that the other Ashland team was the first runner-up we knew we won, and it was super exciting. And then all the cameras came so we were just smiling a lot. My first hurt after that from smiling so much.” Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Zavala99.