All eyes were on Kauai High seniors Angelica Aligado and Romina Castillo in the Kauai Marriott Resort &Beach Club’s kitchen last Thursday afternoon.
They bit into a couple of freshly made, brown pancakes.
Success.
“It tastes like a healthy pancake,” Aligado said. “The color is exactly what we expected.”
Chef Guy Higa looked on from beside the skillet after working for an hour with the duo, mixing ulu flour, green banana flour and taro flour to make the first batch of the newest thing to land on the Marriott’s breakfast buffet — gluten-free pancakes.
“It’s going to work good,” he said. “I’m learning from them. I never see that before. I’ll be using their product after this.”
Aligado and Castillo are part of a trio working together on the project in their culinary capstone class. They chose the project and developed the recipe after considering other options. At one point they thought about focusing on a “freight farm,” a hydroponic system of growing produce in shipping containers.
Instead, the culinary capstone students linked up with Emilo Ruiz-Romero and Lourdes Torres of Sustainable Boost, a company that creates nutrient-dense powders and flours out of local produce and crickets.
It was at a seminar when Ruiz-Romero met up with Kauai High teacher Greg Anderson and realized they could help each other out. Sustainable Boost needed a research-and-development outlet for their products, and Kauai High’s culinary class was looking to do just that.
“That’s been a six-month process,” Ruiz-Romero said. “Once we sell it, we’ll give some of the proceeds back to help the culinary class at Kauai High. We’ll have it at the farmers’ markets, (and) we’ll have it wholesale.”
But, the first place it’s going to land is on Kauai Marriott’s breakfast menu, a development that was quick to unfold after Higa tasted the pancakes developed by Aligado, Castillo and classmate Jolina LaBorte.
They spent months tweaking the combinations of ulu, taro and green banana flour, and ended up with a ratio that was light on the heavy taro flour and had a little sugar to make it sweet. Even bakers from Paradise Bakery came by to help with the recipe.
“This last Thursday, Guy tried the pancakes and liked them, and it exploded from there,” said culinary teacher Johan Nishi. “It’s sustainable and gluten-free. I think Friday at the buffet they’ll eat it up.”
Other Kauai High students are working on marketing and packaging, and will put the Kauai High Sustainable Pancakes logo under the Sustainable Boost’s logo.
And at the end of the pancake prep for Friday, Higa was beaming.
“I’m ordering some different flours so I can experiment myself,” he said. “I’m going to try green banana bread. Nobody’s done that.”
