The smells of sizzling beef, buttery coconut and chocolate cake waft through the Frost Center’s culinary lab on a busy Wednesday morning in February. Inside, about 15 students are hard at work preparing dishes for the Taste of the World event at the end of the month. 

The event, hosted by the International Center, introduces participants to countries around the world through one of the most universal languages out there: food. 

This year, the International Center is partnering with food science and experience industry management students for the event. The food science cohort will prepare and provide the food, and the EIM students will develop materials and activities sharing information on the different countries and recipes for the dishes served. 

The countries that will be represented are Costa Rica, Ireland, Cuba, Thailand, Ghana and Australia.

“We choose the countries based on either study abroad programs that we offer at Cal Poly, or our own international students,” said Jessica Michelsen, study away coordinator at the International Center. Michelsen added that the event will also include performances from the Cal Poly Salsa Club and a faculty member who plays Irish music. 

“We hope that people come out of this event with more awareness about international opportunities on campus, as well as our international students and what they bring to campus,” she said. 

For the students in Verena Alexander’s FSN 344: Food Service Operations II course, the process of researching and preparing authentic dishes provides a hands-on lesson in the sheer amount of work that goes into mass food preparation. 

The students are divided into six groups — one for each of the six countries — and go through an extensive process to select anywhere between one to three recipes per country. It’s a tall order: not only do the recipes have to be authentic and taste good, but the students must make 600 servings of each one for the event.

“I don’t think anyone in here has cooked for 600 people before,” said Matt Hopkins, a third-year nutrition major in the class. “It’s a great way to step outside the comfort zone.”

Alexander said this is the class’s major project for winter quarter. The second week of quarter, the students test out about 18 different recipes before narrowing down which few they want to focus on for their respective country. They then invite students, faculty and staff from the EIM class and the International Center to taste the foods and offer feedback, which they use to fine-tune the recipes.

“They’ve been practicing since the beginning of the quarter,” Alexander said. “They’re learning how to scale up dishes, as well as how to standardize them across multiple batches.”

In one corner of the culinary lab, the Costa Rica group was hard at work mixing the batter for tamal asado, a type of coconut cake made with masa, or corn flour. They plan to serve the dish with coffee from a Costa Rican farm, Finca El Bosque de Don Roberto, where Cal Poly students learn about sustainability and coffee growing. 

“When we started testing recipes, this was our least-assuming dish — but it’s my favorite, taste-wise,” said Paige Armstrong, a fourth-year nutrition major, as she scooped the batter into muffin tins to be baked. “We wanted to make something unique that you can’t necessarily find here.”

Third-year food science student Ella Quale, working with Armstrong on the batter, said that this experience is invaluable to her future career.

“As a food science major, this is exactly what you do in a test kitchen for research and recipe development,” she said. “You make batches of different foods and you keep tweaking it and being creative with it to innovate new recipes and tastes.”

“Even as a nutrition major, I need to know about food service, how things are produced in a mass quantity and what it takes. It’s been a great experience,” Armstrong added.

The Costa Rica group had a practical reason for choosing tamal asado as one of their dishes: in addition to being tasty and unique, it also freezes well. It's a dish they can prepare ahead of time, then heat up and serve on the day of the event. With six student groups each making hundreds or even thousands of servings, the students have to schedule when and how they’ll prepare their dishes far in advance.

“We have to divide and conquer,” said Isabel Ertac, a fourth-year nutrition major on the Cuba team, who was sautéing peppers for a sauce. “There’s a lot of calculating out portions and making sure the dishes are consistent across 600 servings.”

Alexander, the instructor, said the process teaches students about recipe standardization, calculating recipe costs and what it means to implement large-scale food production for an outside group. 

“They gain a very hands-on skillset,” she said. “They learn about creating a production schedule, how to change their production methods and apply everything we talk about in class.”

Katelyn Lee, a fourth-year food science major on the Cuba team, said the class has provided a wonderful hands-on learning opportunity for a variety of skills, including food safety. 

“I’ve never had experience with catering or large-scale food prep before,” she said. “It’s overall been a great experience.”