UVU student chef heads to national cooking competition

Cody Clark - Daily Herald

For a lot of college students, cooking a meal means pouring milk over Cheerios, or putting some bread in the toaster.

On a recent trip to Seattle in early April, Utah Valley University student Victoria Maxfield prepared from scratch and served the following in four individual portions: herb-crusted pork tenderloin, sauteed potatoes with taschetta and thyme, glazed Cippolini onions and an apple-parsnip puree, with a carrot bundle and zucchini and mushrooms on the side. Oh, and she threw in a sherry vinegar sauce. All in just 65 minutes.

Some college students probably couldn't make macaroni and cheese with hot dog slices in an hour and five minutes.

Maxfield, 21, isn't just any student. The UVU junior from Tremonton in northern Utah is a third-year culinary arts major, and preparing the mouth-watering entree described above is what got her chosen Western Region Student Chef of the Year by the American Culinary Federation at the ACF Western Regional Conference in Seattle.

In July, in Orlando, Fla., Maxfield will have a shot to become the National Student Chef of the Year.

"The winners from all four regions will compete there against each other," Maxfield said. She's tentatively planning to stick with the recipe for victory that she concocted for Seattle -- with a few adjustments.

"I'll probably change things up a little," she said. "There were some things the judges didn't totally love."

There certainly weren't very many of them. Certified master chef John Kinsella, president of the American Culinary Federation, watched Maxfield compete in Seattle and spoke to the judges afterward. Kinsella saw with his own eyes, he said, that Maxfield's technique is top-notch, and the judges told him that the results of her hard work were equally impressive. "They said the flavor was phenomenal," Kinsella said

Chef Troy Wilson, an assistant professor of culinary arts at UVU, said that Maxfield's preparation was probably the biggest factor in her success. "There's nobody who practiced harder than she did," Wilson said. "I think that's exactly why she won."

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