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HARLINGEN — Isabela Pierce, of Harlingen, and Thérèse Lawrence, of Brownsville, both 12 years old, pay close intention as chef and proprietor Diego Benitez walks them through how to fill piping bags full of pastry cream that make up the layers of the classically French dessert, the napoleon, June 15 in the kitchen at Laurel Park Bistro.
Brandishing a filled piping bag of pastry cream, Benitez — flanked by his two young students — demonstrates the technique to pipe the pastry cream onto the layers of puff pastry.
“So you can go ahead and then right on the border we just start doing little dots. So you just push down and then pull up,” he said, deftly piping a few cream-colored circles onto the pastry before letting the students take over.
Pierce and Lawrence are learning from Benitez as part of the annual Youth Culinary Camp organized by Laurel Park Bistro each summer.
The camp began in 2022 and is part of a joint effort by front-of-the-house manager Julie Ng and chef and proprietor Diego Benitez. It’s designed to give parents a fun activity for their children over the summer and to help further their cooking skills through instruction at the restaurant.
The camp offers a Junior class on select Tuesday afternoons for children 6 to 9 years old and alternates two-day sessions for children 10 to 13 years old and 14 to 18 years old throughout June and July.
For the Junior class, Benitez says the intent is to build familiarity with food and being in the kitchen. As a class, they do projects like filling turnovers or other age-friendly food to help get children interested in trying new things.
“At that age group, if they start to make things with you, they are more inclined to eat it because they made it,” he said.
For the older students, each two-day session splits along a savory and sweet culinary projects. In the sessions of 10- to 13-year-old students, Benitez likes to start them on the fundamentals of proper knife handling and the basic ratios that make up recipes so students can move beyond following a recipe and cook intuitively.
On day one, Pierce and Lawrence practiced their knife skills as Benitez and his assistants, chefs Mathis Schneider and Margaux Loya, helped them to make eggrolls with from-scratch dipping sauces. On the second day of class, they focused on making pastry cream, a basic icing and chocolate sauce while practicing their piping skills to assemble the finished napoleon pastry with storebought puff pastry.
“Honestly, I feel like I am doing better, and I have a lot more skill than I used to. Even though it is just a two-day class, I’ve learned a lot,” Lawrence said as she sat with her mother Diana Cardiel Lawrence to sample the finished napoleons in the restaurant’s dining room after class.
The sessions for 14 to 18 year olds focus on more formal kitchen training with proper knifework, fundamental recipe ratios and culinary science to create more intensive savory and sweet projects. Students can expect to tackle complex culinary undertakings like creating a brine and then trussing and cooking a whole chicken or learning to make an apple pie start-to-finish.
“At that age group, we are looking at who wants to be a serious home cook or go into culinary school,” Benitez said.
Ng says the response from their student’s families has been a great experience, with parents sending photos of the children’s creations at home or stories of them helping with or even, correcting their parent’s cooking after the camp.
“That’s what it is about, to just inspire them, and maybe they don’t go into it professionally, at least they learned something,” Ng said.
The Youth Culinary Camp offers Junior classes for $70 and two-day sessions for children 10 to 13 years old and 14 to 18 years old for $170. For more information, visit www.laurelparkbistro.com.
