Aaron Dorman

Sometimes, before eating a sandwich, it's important to know who is buttering your bread; but when I visited the kitchens of the Chicago Pastry Forum, the Hammond Area Career Center students were making sandwiches that didn't require bread at all.

Instead, they were cutting, mashing, and then frying plantains that would become the sandwich layers for jibaritos, one of several Chicago-inspired dishes they were assisting with, including rib tips and kielbasas, as part of the Forum guest dinners.

Although the ACC Hammond students only ended up making pastries at the Pastry Forum by happy accident — salmon was swapped out for brownies due to a delivery snafu — the experience overall is an example of the kind of hands-on field trips that give students a bread-and-butter crash cou

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