If it is true that too many cooks spoil the broth, then the dozens of pizzas the culinary class at Makerspace made last week should not have been edible. But the old idiom is not true, because by all reports the pizza was tasty.
Making cheese pizzas was the capstone project of the four-day culinary class, which is just one of the classes offered at Lawton Public Schools’ Makerspace camp this summer at the Life Ready Center. Students started off with simple recipes, such as popsicles and muffins, before ending the week with homemade pizza — including crust made from scratch.
For some students, it was their first time in a kitchen. Others, such as Richard Resler and Samuel Sims, are no strangers to cooking. In fact, Resler said he had made pizza before.
“It was candy pizza with M&Ms and Starbursts,” he said. “It was actually pretty good.”
Did his family try it?
“No, no one wanted to touch it,” he said as he kneaded the dough for the pizza crust in Makerspace class.
Sims was intently watching Resler squeeze the dough through his fingers.
Did Sims like kneading dough?
"I’ve never done it, but I keep asking if I can,” Sims said as he watched Resler.
Payson Abraham, 8, also was kneading dough for the pizza crust. She said making the muffins was her favorite activity so far.
“I got to mix stuff. I didn’t have to get my hands really, really dirty like this,” she said. She said some of the banana-and-chocolate-chip muffins were really big and some were really small.
“I only tried one,” she said. “I’m going to give the rest to my family.”
With more than 20 children trying to help cook, mishaps are likely to happen, such as skipping a step in making the dough; students didn’t flatten the dough before putting it into the oven to bake. The result was something that looked more like biscuits than pizza crust.
This mishap turned into a teaching moment as one of the adult helpers cut the “biscuits” in half, thereby doubling the number of pizzas.
Once the crust was done, students spread the mini pizzas with sauce and topped them off with cheese. Back into the oven they went until the cheese was melted. Then the students were sent off to lunch while the pizzas cooled before being wrapped up and taken home.
Virginia Johnson, third grade teacher at Pioneer Park who was in charge of the culinary class, said she loves to cook and wants to share that with the students.
“I want them to learn that cooking can be fun while learning a life skill,” Johnson said.
Besides learning to cook, students learn about math, fractions, doubling recipes, opaqueness, and physical and chemical reactions. These things may not be so great to learn about in a textbook, Johnson said, but are fun when you are cooking.