Teen Chef on course for career
By Bobbi Mlynar - Special to The Gazette
Monday, November 14, 2011
A Flint Hills Technical College student with a passion for cooking has graduated from a nationally known culinary school and is working in the Dallas area.
Aldo Sandoval of Emporia won the 2008 Best Teen Chef Contest in Dallas on April 18, 2008, when he was finishing up Marie Malone’s Culinary Arts class at the tech college. The win brought a $10,000 tuition scholarship to the Art Institutes Culinary Arts School, as well as the right to go to Las Vegas for the national competition, which involved a $50,000 tuition scholarship and being Intern for the Day in the Food Network Kitchens.
Sandoval, the son of Eva and Eduardo Sandoval of Emporia, had raised money to go to Las Vegas by cooking a mountain of individual omelets — each made to buyer preference — at the Tallgrass Cafe at the tech college. The fundraiser helped supplement the money he earned working weekends as a cook at the Golden Corral restaurant.
The prize for his second-place finish in the nationals in Vegas was a full scholarship valued at $40,000 at the International Culinary Schools of The Art Institutes in Dallas. That brought his scholarship total to $50,000.
He began classes in October 2008, and finished in a little over two and a half years, working three part-time jobs, including a year-long stint at a five-star restaurant in a luxury hotel, Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek in uptown Dallas.
“I was killing myself,” he said. “... You know there’s a rush every night. You’re working fast, fast, fast, and the plating was beautiful,” he said. “I think that’s my favorite part of it. The art side of cooking. How can you decorate and how can you present that food artistically?
“You eat with your eyes first. You see something beautiful, you say, ‘I want that.’”
The Institute courses set him on the path to create foods that taste as good as they look — and to know what wines to serve with them.
“I had to take a three-month class on wines,” he said. “We had to learn all the wines over the world, liquors and spirits. I was 20 at the time when I took it, so I had to spit it out.
“But occasionally I would take sips and not spit it out,” he added.
Now Sandoval is working full-time as a personal chef assistant for a Southern Methodist University fraternity house and working part-time at the Whole Foods Market, which specializes in all-organic foods. He also gives private cooking lessons for small classes — seven or eight students — at Gourmet Galleries in the Dallas area, and occasionally caters events, like Christmas and private parties in offices and homes.
“I’ve been busy,” Sandoval said during a telephone interview on Saturday. “I just got back from catering. They have an SMU tailgating party thing, so we did barbecue for 400. It was not too bad.”
The fraternity house job gives him an opportunity to go beyond ordinary family-style cooking common in many such houses.
“I cook for rich frat boys who can afford their own personal chef,” Sandoval said. “They have a big, massive house, with a commercial kitchen.”
Breakfast, for example, can range from bacon and eggs and waffles to Eggs Benedict and other special orders.
As he gains experience and a reputation, he plans to continue working his way up to his career goal: either being a personal chef for a family or running his own small bistro-type restaurant, where he can be owner and chef.
In the interim, in addition to his jobs, he and a friend are working on recipes they hope to turn into a small business.
“Me and my friend love doing ice creams and gelatos, and we’re coming up with weird flavors,” Sandoval said. “We created goat cheese and black pepper. We also did mango and chipotle. ...”
People who tried those flavors had expected the worst from the sound of the ingredients.
“And then they try it and they say, ‘Wow! I didn’t think it could be that good,” he said. “It’s really, really good.”
Sandoval plans to sell the product at a farmers market next year.
For now, the former Emporian is staying on the course he plotted years ago, and enjoying almost everything about it.
What is it he doesn’t like?
“The thing I hate about being a chef is that you work a million hours a day,” he said, laughing. “All sorts of prep, all sorts of cooking, and then all sorts of cleaning.”