◆ Molly Matthaei lives in Etna and teaches at Jackson Hole High School.

Molly Matthaei, Chef Instructor at Jackson Hole High School and resident of Etna, Wyoming, landed a spot as one of 11 bakers in Food Network’s Annual Spring Baking Competition, which currently airs each Monday evening at 7 p.m. MDT with the final episode scheduled for April 27, 2020.

SVI visited with Molly about her family, her passion of creating food, her work with culinary students at JHHS and her recent experiences on national television.

Molly and her husband Tony are both professional chefs who have worked in the Jackson Hole resort and restaurant industry for years but are now pursuing careers in education.

“We loved the work, but the hours were tough being married and having tiny babies,” said Molly. “It was a tough gig for us both. When the position came open at JHHS, I applied and got it. This is the job I want to retire from. I couldn’t imagine going back. Working with students and cultivating a love for food and for the industry is pretty remarkable.”

Tony, who is finishing a degree in Special Education, has been driving bus for the Child Development Center in Alpine. They have a son in 5th grade who attends Etna Elementary School and a daughter who is in Kindergarten at Thayne Elementary.

Jackson Hole High School’s culinary curriculum has a professional focus, and the Culinary Team has a successful competition record with juniors and seniors from the program gleaning impressive scholarship awards that go toward funding their post high school studies.

“These students are hoping to enter the restaurant industry,” said Molly. “Some have earned up to $40,000 towards culinary school. I think at the end of the day, that is the best thing we can do to empower students to be able to do what they want to do – to make the changes they want or to pursue the dreams that they have – to be able to provide them with some good money for education. Culinary school tends to be pretty expensive, but $40,000 would definitely go a long way.”

Jackson’s culinary program isn’t just about food. It’s also about science. Students in Molly’s program are working on a project in which they are designing foods that could potentially go to the International Space Station.

“We do a project where we work with NASA food scientists and I’m really excited about this,” said Molly. “We research how to package food to get it to space. How do we make food that is super nutritionally dense? It costs $2,000 a pound to ship anything into outer space, so how do we make every calorie count? We work on problems like how the human body reacts in space. If you don’t have gravity, your sinuses don’t drain properly, so you can’t really taste your food. Let’s say you were to open a bag of Doritos in space and a little crumb got lose and got stuck in an instrument. Those are some of the cooler things that we work on that I think probably have a big impact and can really change the direction a student is thinking about for themselves and for their career. We have students who never considered food science as a career path, but here they are.”

The project with NASA scientists has been cancelled for this year, but Molly and her students have traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to share their findings with the NASA scientists and astronauts.

The Jackson team has not been formally selected to send their food projects to the space station, but Molly believes that they are very close to having great solutions for these challenges and that the team will continue to make valuable contributions in the future.

So, what brought a small-town high school Culinary Arts teacher to a baking competition that airs on national television?

Molly learned about application to the competition from Amy Madera, a colleague who runs the Culinary Arts program at Central Wyoming College in Jackson. Madera received an email from the casting directors at Food Network, and passed it along to Molly, who applied and completed the interview process. Molly knows that the network casting team “looks for people who are articulate and have a lot to say, and who have some solid baking chops.”

Food Network has been running the Spring Baking Competition annually since 2015 and the current host is Clinton Kelly.

There are nine episodes and each episode offers viewers culinary entertainment with a pre-heat bake and a main-heat bake. Pre-heat winners are given a new and unique advantage in the main heat for that episode. Each episode has a theme and contestants must pattern their creations after personalized assignments within the theme.

At the conclusion of each episode, judges Lorainne Pascale, Duff Goldman and Nancy Fuller evaluate each contestant’s performance, determine which bakers will remain in the competition and eliminate one competitor from further participation.

“Competitors come from lots of different backgrounds,” said Molly. “There are homemakers, culinary educators, professional pastry chefs, people who specialize in cakes and plated desserts or cupcakes and cookies. It’s a pretty diverse skillset that comes to the competition, but the one thing that they all have in common is that they are really, really good, and they know their stuff. People tend to think that if you are good at making bread, then you are great at cupcakes or if you are great at wedding cakes, you can do beautiful plated desserts. That definitely helps to have lots of different experience, but there are challenges that come up in the competition that stump everybody, no matter what their specialty is.”

Molly enjoyed her experiences in the competition. Episodes 2 and 4 were her favorite.

She felt that Episode 2 reflected her greatest success there. In the pre-heat, bakers were given 90 minutes to make donuts themed on sunrise or sunset. Orange-passionfruit sunrise donuts were Molly’s pre-heat creation.

Spring’s Starry Sky was the main heat challenge theme, and she had three hours to do something reflecting the Milky Way. She created an Entremet, which was a loose-base almond sponge cake layered with port fig jam, diplomat cream and honey-cardamom mouse. The Entremet was topped with a mirror glaze.

“Around the edges, I made a fondant with the night skyline of the Grand Teton Range going around the cake,” said Molly. “I think that one turned out really nice. It looked good and it tasted good. It was a crunch, for sure. It was a lot to get done in three hours. I think the most fun episode for me was the partner episode, which was episode 4 where we did both heats with a partner.”

After four successful episodes, Molly was eliminated from the competition during Episode 5 which aired Monday, April 6. The theme for that episode was the new animated film, “Trolls World Tour.”

In the pre-heat, bakers were asked to create a tiny troll treat in a specific color. Molly chose green and created white chocolate lime blondies with mango curd, lime buttercream and a merengue top. The blondies were a hit with the judges, but the main heat was not so kind to Molly.

She was asked to design and build a cake within two hours that would be themed around the character and techno musical world of King Trollex. She made a lemon velvet cake with buttermilk raspberry buttercream in the layers and American buttercream on the outside.

“I did my best, but any kind of cake in two hours is pretty tough, and a techno cake definitely got me,” said Molly. “I don’t do a lot of cakes. Some of the folks that are baking on that competition do 30 cakes a week. I do maybe four cakes a year – one for each of my kids, one for my husband and one other bonus cake just for fun. Of course, I didn’t want to be sent home, but if that is what was going to do me in, I’m OK with that.”

Molly is looking forward to watching the remainder of the competition from her home. She has no idea who will win or what will happen next. Having created friendships as well as desserts, she is concerned and nervous for each baker remaining in the competition and is excited to see how everyone does.

One of the most valuable aspects of the experience was the impact of Molly’s participation in the competition on her students.

“I ask kids to do things that are hard and sometimes scary and uncomfortable. I ask kids to do that all the time – even if it’s just making over-easy eggs. I always honor that, of course, but I am proud to be able to show kids that we can all do hard, scary things. We can make mistakes and crash and burn on national television and be totally fine.”

“It was a dream,” said Molly as she expressed gratitude for the experience. “I want to give a big thank you to Food Network for having me on the competition and a big thanks to my husband Tony for being super supportive and always my biggest and best cheerleader. Thanks to my parents who live in Star Valley Ranch. They were more nervous than I was, so that was sweet and fun too.”