CCC's Chili Champs 

A drizzly day isn't great for fair attendance but it does lend itself to sampling steaming cups of chili. Five competing teams that had been cooking under tents by the grandstands ladled out their wares to hardy chili fans who, like the judges gathered behind the Humboldt County Fair offices (myself among them), tasted, compared and cast their votes.

The field was narrower than the expected dozen entries but the winner was determined by a half point in favor of the Native Sons of the Golden West, which swept the competition last year. Hot on their heels was the California Conservation Corps team, which took home second place, the Mayor's Choice and the coveted People's Choice awards. The CCC crew was comprised of participants in the culinary program, all between the ages of 18 and 23.

The CCC is best known for offering paid training for young people in the areas of forestry and firefighting, along with other outdoor conservation work, but it also trains participants to work in the food industry, from restaurants to industrial kitchens. As part of their training, corpsmembers at the CCC's Fortuna Center also cook three meals a day, seven days a week, for the 100 or so people living there.

Luke Saucedo, who teaches and supervises the handful of trainees, has CCC in his blood. "My family has been in the Cs for 30-plus years," he says. With a food service and management background, including working in small restaurants and cooking for thousands a day at Whole Foods and other grocery stores, the culinary program was a natural fit for him. Also, "Most people start at 16 or 17 in the food industry, so it's not a big shift to work with young people."

Culinary program trainees come from all backgrounds and all over the country, says Saucedo, noting he's worked with ESL speakers, some without high school diplomas and others in graduate school. Many are first-time kitchen workers, but experienced or not, "We start from scratch," he says. That means basics like measuring and getting to know ingredients from vegetables to leavening agents. Eventually, many of those who complete the training go on to work in restaurants or larger-scale kitchens at schools and colleges, hospitals, senior living facilities and other industrial settings.

Allen Mota, 23, says he became interested when a friend joined the CCC and liked it. "I was working at a dead-end job, I was not enjoying my time. ... I was tired of the city." He says he'd been interested in culinary school but couldn't afford it or manage the commute. An early "spike," a trip to a remote worksite that required cooking on site, sealed the deal on pursuing the culinary program for him. "I was making people's day better making food they liked," he says. Since then, Mota's gotten especially into baking, and the crowd in the cafeteria has gotten into the fresh coffee cake he makes for breakfast. "I love people's feedbacks on my food," he says.

Saucedo says the program is a large step for some participants.

"They get to live here, they get fed and they get a paycheck," he says, explaining that not only have some not cooked before, but some haven't had regular hot meals due to food insecurity. "Here we have three square meals a day" and the menu runs from "hamburgers and hotdogs to sushi," he says. Cooking Asian, Mexican, Indian, Italian and other cuisines broadens the cooks' experience, "so they can get a good grasp of what's out there," as well as the palates of the workers eating in the dining facility.

The curry, Saucedo says, "has been a big eye opener for people."

At the chili cook-off, culinary program members Mota, Esmeralda Meri, Oreos Enriquez, Eden Arnold and Arthur Widner handed out squares of homemade cornbread and stirred the enormous stainless steel pot of beef chili. The recipe, chosen and developed by Enriquez and her father, and tweaked by the CCC team, included guajillo and ancho chiles, Korean red pepper and jalapeños, and was thickened with Fritos and cornbread.

For Enriquez, the cookoff was "nerve-racking," since, she says, "I had only really made it with my dad to feed five people." But the trial run at the Fortuna Center provided useful feedback and the team felt good about using straightforward flavors (particularly since last year's experiment with graham crackers and chocolate didn't win over the judges). And the team was more than comfortable scaling up the recipe to feed a crowd, "since they are feeding trailblazers and fire crews and they need a lot of food" every day, she says.

Enriquez, 19, came to the CCC after graduating high school and looking for some experience before heading for college. "I think it's a pretty great program. It's definitely more than I expected," in terms of physical labor, she says, adding that she likes the shifting challenges of feeding everyone at the center with a menu that runs the gamut. Eventually, she says she can see herself working as a chef or a supervisor in an institutional kitchen, maybe something like what Saucedo does.

When the judges' scores came in and the voting tickets were counted, Saucedo says the team was "in awe" at their wins. Then it was back to the Fortuna Center, where they'd have an early start in the morning making breakfast for 100.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.