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Tossing the dough isn’t just for show

Student chef creates recipes for Burnham OIP

By Buffie Boyer 6 min read

BURNHAM -- From flipping pizzas to fine French cuisine, Micah Hetrick has worked his way up the food chain and is now a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.

Starting his journey in the food industry at the meager age of 16, Hetrick began working at the Burnham OIP as a sub maker in take-out to learning the art of pizza making, all with the goal of someday owning his own restaurant and becoming a chef.

"It's the best thing I could have done," Hetrick said. "The experience here helped me with deciding to stick with the food industry."

Hetrick admits he was not interested in going to college after graduating from Mifflin County High School in 2015, but instead, just build from his own experience from different areas, build capital from that and eventually open his own place. However, a fateful cooking class at CIA that his mother signed him up for changed his mind. After the grilling class, he took a tour and fell in love with the campus, went home, applied and got accepted.

He graduated from the Hyde Park, New York school this year with an associate degree in culinary arts, and is going back this month to earn a bachelor's degree in food and business management.

Hetrick explained what the first 15 weeks were like at the school where he had academic and kitchen classes. At first it was learning the fundamentals like knife skills, basic stocks and soups, individual plate ups, meat and seafood identification and fabrication, banquet cookery and a la carte cooking.

During the second term, the students chose randomly from six different menus and would start cooking right away to prepare and complete a soup and entree, from start to finish, within two hours.

From there, he took part in an externship in Colorado for 15 weeks at the Devil's Thumb Ranch Restaurant and Spa. There he worked with the catering team to serve large banquets for customers like Google. During break, he came back to work at the OIP before the second year of schooling.

His second year included training in baking and pastry, garde manger (cold kitchen preparation), learning the cuisines of the Americas, the Mediterranean and Asia, and a wine class. Hetrick said the wine class was his hardest class as he learned how to make wine and pair wine with food.

On campus, he also worked in two restaurants that are open to the public-- a contemporary American brew house type restaurant, and a formal French restaurant. He said the fine dining experience was very professional and gave him experience in both preparation of the food and presenting and explaining the food, as tableside service and presentation is very important.

"I liked the customer interaction," Hetrick said.

When he returns to school, he said there will be less time in the kitchen and more classes about the food industry and business classes. He will be entering the entrepreneurship program, where students compete to run a restaurant in the student commons.

Once he is finished with school, he hopes to travel and gain more experience and find his way from there.

"I can't open my own place right away, but I want to someday own my own establishment," he said.

To celebrate his accomplishments, the Burnham OIP decided to showcase Hetrick and what he's learned and allow him to create a special menu.

Manager Miguel Interiano said the OIP has great cooks, but no chef.

"We do what the industry tells us to do," Interiano said. "We never had someone with this knowledge, and I've even learned from him."

So Hetrick looked at what the OIP had available and worked off of that to create several dishes using proteins like pork, salmon and beef. For his Gorgonzola pasta and braised beef dish, he chose to braise because it breaks up the hard collagens so the meat is nice and tender.

"The Gorgonzola sauce is a great pairing with beef," Hetrick said. "From there I added different garnishes."

For the maple bourbon glazed pork dish, Hetrick did a brine to keep the flavors and moisture after the pork was cooked. When working on a new dish, he said he likes to look at other recipes and ingredients and works off of that.

"I never follow someone else's recipe," he said. "I never measure, and I taste as I go."

He experimented with the maple bourbon glaze and served the pork over an apple chutney puree, and added a starch with roasted rosemary rainbow potatoes as a side dish.

"Maple pairs well with apples and apples are becoming more common with pork," Hetrick said.

The salmon BLT grille sandwich was a huge hit with his OIP family.

"We destroyed that sandwich," Interiano said. "It's amazing."

Hetrick said the sandwich is not your normal BLT as it has bacon jam, spinach, tomato and features a lemon aioli.

When creating recipes, Hetrick said he keeps the customer base in mind and notes that Mifflin County is a meat and potatoes type of place, with nothing fancy and names that can't be pronounced.

"They know what they like, and like what they know," he said.

Interiano said the restaurant has to give its customers what they want, but it's nice to introduce new flavors.

When reflecting on Hetrick, Interiano said the food industry is a forgotten industry, but a great industry. For the young crowd, he sees the food industry as a great career to start in a small town and take it from there.

Hetrick's advice to students interested in the culinary arts is for them to get out there and get experience before heading to college to make sure it's what they really want to do for a living. He said cooking can be very physically and mentally demanding, and they must be ready for criticism.

"The OIP gave me an edge," Hetrick said. "When I started I was very shy. Working out front forced me to work with customers, getting out of my comfort zone."

The OIP family is very proud of Hetrick's accomplishments and happy they are a small part of it.

"It's a proud moment to watch him grow up in front of us," Interiano said. "It's a very amazing experience for us to see."

"I appreciate everything they've done for me, they are like a second family to me," Hetrick said.

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