This is part of a weekly series introducing readers to individuals who are passionate about our Mid-Valley community.
At the back of South Salem High School, chaos is afoot. But only good trouble, in the form of giggly students weaving in and out of the kitchen. Amidst the delicious aromas, they work together on learning the ins and outs of cooking, rules of the kitchen and other food adjacent topics. Their leader? Culinary instructor chef Laura Hofer, homegrown Salemite who, after almost two decades of cooking in the industry, returned and teaches her passion.
“It’s literally the best job in the world,” Hofer said. “It’s so fun! I get to teach my passion to the students, and my goal is to encourage students that if maybe college isn’t the path, but think about trade school or going straight into industry.”
Cooking over calculus
When Hofer was graduating from North Salem High School in 1996, the college she was looking at attending would require taking calculus, something that left her feeling dismayed. Burnt out from school, she decided she liked cooking enough to go to cooking school instead.
Despite not knowing much about the culinary industry or what being a chef meant, she enrolled at Western Culinary Institute (later turned into Le Cordon Bleu) and loved “every second of it.”
Once she graduated, she moved to North Lake Tahoe with her partner at the time. There she worked for 16 years at the Hyatt Regency Tahoe in different departments, from garnish, pastry, baking and more. At the same time, she helped open a few fine dining restaurants. However, in 2011 she decided to return to Salem when her relationship didn’t work out.
Taking a pivot from working in the kitchen, Hofer did consulting for folks across the industry, learning new things that grew her love of food.
Hofer got into agriculture, learning about the science and research end of growing food, as well as flavor scientists whom dedicated their time to the science of manipulating flavors. On one occasion, she got to fly to a research facility in Woodland, Calif. where flavor scientists grew cherry tomatoes in the morning sun versus afternoon sun — where they found morning sun tomatoes were sweeter.
Geeking out while learning about folks’ other specialties across the food industry was something Hofer did for a year and a half, at the time also doing private cooking for folks. One of her clients, who worked within the Salem-Keizer School District, said they were looking for a culinary teacher at South Salem. Would she be interested?
“I was already volunteering one day a week at a middle school, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’d be fun!'” Hofer said, beaming. “I applied, they offered me the position and now here I am six years later.”
A full course (load of students)
In her six years at South Salem High, Hofer said she averages 325 students a semester and has had approximately 3,575 students go through the program in total.
South Salem High’s culinary program consists of advanced culinary, culinary leadership (management) and IB food science classes, while Amy Bofto, another culinary instructor, oversees the beginner courses and other non-culinary related classes.
South Salem’s IB food science class is the only one offered in North America, and is one of four offered throughout the rest of the IB program internationally.
“There wasn’t a catalog of IB courses I could look through and be able to pick to teach,” Hofer joked. “But I heard about it from someone I know and thought, ‘This is exactly what I want to teach!'”
The IB food science class is a college level academic course focused on the science side of food which “most people don’t think about,” with topics including food packaging, agriculture, digestion and more. In addition to reading books or seeing online lectures on the topics, Hofer often brings in folks from various corners of the industry to chat with students about their work. The class is available to be taken one or two years, and students who test well can earn transferable college credit.
“We started it third quarter last year, and now I’m just helping them prepare for their exam since this is the first time they’ll be testing for it,” Hofer said.
Culinary leadership, one of Hofer’s favorite courses, takes the students who excel in advanced culinary and show a high interest in continuing in the culinary industry into learning more in-depth about procedures plus supporting and managing others in the kitchen.
Prior to the pandemic, Hofer would take students on field trips and competitions for her students in both culinary and culinary leadership, taking home awards for their conduct and skill in the kitchen and business-side. For the last two years, Hofer has not had students take her culinary leadership course due to restructuring the program, which she hopes to finalize and be able to offer in the fall.
Exponential Growth
Starting out as an instructor inheriting the culinary program in 2016, Hofer didn’t have many students. 140 students in all, primarily freshmen in beginner classes. But with Hofer at the helm, students were immediately eager for more classes with her.
“So many kids signed up for the following school year, we hired an additional person to fill a half day (before Bofto was hired),” Hofer said. Once the position was filled, students were “packed like sardines in the classroom because they all wanted to take the class.”
“At one point we were looking at 575 kids in our program,” Hofer said. “Which was more than band, orchestra and choir combined. That year I averaged 40 to 50 kids in my classes, with 30-40 in the (beginner) ones because the students loved our classes so much.”
Even with the pandemic, which forced students to take their classes online, Hofer did her best to make classes fun and engaging, even if most students kept their cameras off.
“I pretended to put on a TV show for 80 minutes,” Hofer said. “So when we got back to in-person it was a bit disconcerting to see all those eyeballs back on me after teaching to black screens.”
Despite the gap in in-person interactions, culinary classes with Hofer and Bofto remain some of the most popular with full classes of excited students, giggling with each other as they weave between each other through the kitchen and classroom.
The kitchen is an updated facility with stovetop ovens, shelving and sinks all lined along the wall , as well as raised steel top tables with a shelf underneath that students transition from taking notes to cooking on. Brand new as of the start of fall 2021, the classroom-kitchen hybrid was “well worth the wait.” Construction for it took all of summer, and it helps with giving students more opportunities to “have as much as we can in every class, safely.”
“It’s a wild ride every day,” Hofer said. “It’s fun and exhausting, but that’s how the industry is too. When it’s service you go fast and push, but at the end, you look back on what you did in awe.”
To find more updates about Hofer and the South Salem High School culinary program, you can follow Hofer on Twitter, (at)cheflaurahofer) or check out the South Salem High School Culinary Facebook page.
If you have an idea for someone we should profile for this series, please email Statesman Journal senior news editor Alia Beard Rau at [email protected]