Ben’s Beginners is an interactive program and contest that aims to make cooking an activity that bring families together. Offering a cash prize to kitchen-savvy kids, the contest is simple: submit a photo of you and your family making a rice-based dish together to the Uncle Ben’s rice company. Manhattan seventh grader and cooking prodigy Jesse Gunn did just that.
His “Lop Chung Fried Rice” earned him $15,000 and an additional $30,000 for his school. Thanks to Gunn’s creativity in the kitchen, the East Side Community School will now have a lunchroom makeover. Gunn shared his experience with us.
Shnieka Johnson: Who taught you to cook?
Jesse Gunn: My dad taught me how to cook. His favorite thing to tell me is nothing is hard, you just have to try and learn from your mistakes. He is not a chef, just a foodie. We spend a lot time together in the kitchen with me cooking and him cutting onions and cleaning up after me, ha! We work as a team. We get to talk about the day, video games, our next projects, and things like that.
SJ: At what age did you start cooking?
JG: I started helping my dad in the kitchen when I was really young by stirring and mixing ingredients. Later on, my dad got me interested in tasting new things. When I was 8, I used to watch “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” and began to start eating things like chicken feet, tripe, snails, and frogs But I really got into cooking when I was 10. I had seen “MasterChef Junior,” and I saw how good those kids were and was a little sad — I thought I could never be that good. But my dad asked me if I would be interested in trying out. I said “no,” so he said, “ok, well, I can teach you if you really want to do it.” So for the next six to seven months, I was cooking with him three times a week. Each week, it was always something different and harder, reinforcing the basics and learning new techniques. At the last minute, my dad entered me into “MasterChef.” I lasted eight episodes and went out on team challenge. Since the show, I have learned and improved so much, and with cooking you never stop learning!
SJ: Have you always enjoyed it?
JG: Yes, I love trying new things and experimenting, but the most fun is when I do molecular gastronomy. It’s like doing science, which is one of my favorite subjects.
SJ: Who do you cook with now?
JG: I cook with my dad and sometimes my friends come over and they want to learn how to make something. I have cooking play dates, and I show them how to make French macaroons, profiteroles, Chinese food, and other things. Other times I cook with other chefs doing demos or teaching classes.
SJ: What inspired your dish?
JG: We came up with a lot of amazing dishes, like rice pudding, crème brulee, mango sphere on top of coconut rice on a bed of Crème Anglaise, but the rice dish we posted, I think 15 minutes before the contest ended, was Lop Chung fried rice with transformation egg. What makes our fried rice different is that almost every fried rice dish uses a plain scrambled egg. We put umami in ours.
It is based on a Japanese dashimaki tamago-styled scramble egg, which is full of umami, which totally changes the egg to a different flavor — sweet, salty, savory, sour — and plays with your taste buds. The second reason is anyone can make fried rice super easy and every ingredient is interchangeable, so if you don’t have Lop Chung — Chinese sausage — you can use chicken or sausage beef. We really wanted to win to help our school with the cafeteria makeover and help promote healthier eating.
SJ: Do you want to go into culinary arts?
JG: At the moment, I have been asked to do a series of cooking videos called “Recipes from the Studio.”
The guys Manny and Peter are great, I get to cook whatever I want. I am involved in a lot of cool things in addition to cooking. I love music and playing guitar. I am in two bands right now, and we play out in nightclubs like the Bitter End, where Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin used to play. I am also into building and designing drones. I have been building them since I was 8 years old and right now, I am the youngest professional drone training pilot in the world. I have trained more than 700 people how to fly a drone. I do this with the aerial sports league at the Maker Faires across the country.
If you’re passionate about something and put the time and work into it, no matter what it is — sports, science, music, art, writing, school, or cooking — you will see results. Anyone can cook, you just have to get in the kitchen and start!
Shnieka L. Johnson is an education consultant and freelance writer. She is based in Manhattan, where she resides with her husband and son. Contact her via her website: www.shnie
