I have a confession to make: Before entering college, I rarely lifted a finger in the kitchen. More often than not, I had the luxury of mom’s home cooking at my disposal, so my thought was, Why bother? I even spent my first year of college in cushy dependence on the Segundo Dining Commons where I never had to wash a single dish. But when that bubble burst, I was dumped into a harsh world that required I learn grocery procurement, refrigerator management and stovetop stewardship.

To my surprise I found that I could stay afloat in this new environment—albeit clinging desperately to my crumpled, sauce-stained recipes, which I follow verbatim like a chemistry lab manual. And as soon as midterms roll around, I abandon any pretense of cooking altogether to live unabashedly straight from freezer to microwave.

So imagine what a treat it was for me to discover that there are actually college students at UC Davis who not only are masters of the kitchen but can cook wholly and utterly from scratch. Then again, I suppose that fund-strapped students have a knack for experimentation. It takes a scrounger’s creativity to incorporate a medley of foods like bok choy, phyllo dough, blood oranges and Pepsi into a gourmet-style meal, sans recipe.

That was the challenge of the eight teams that faced off last May in the food science department’s Food Olympics. Given a set of general staples, such as eggs, onions, butter and flour, and a hodgepodge of ingredients like the ones listed above, each team had an hour and a half to whip up something delectable. To spice things up even further, each team unwrapped a “mystery ingredient,” after a white elephant-style exchange, and had to incorporate this item, whether quail eggs, hominy or spam, into one of their dishes.

According to Karen Jo Hunter, a staff graduate adviser for the department, the event started five years ago when some food science students and staff decided to have an informal cook-off—and it turned out to be a huge hit. What was intended as a one-time event came back by popular demand as a competition open to all interested participants and has been held annually every since. Improvements have been made along the way; for example, the cooking and evaluating times for each team have been staggered so that the judges do not have to sample 50 plates of cold food at once. To engage the teams as they wait for their turn in the kitchen, other competition components were added. This year, they included JEOPARDY! style trivia, food architecture—constructing bridges from s’more ingredients—and a host of creative field events that did justice to the competition’s Olympic name. Baffled pedestrians paused to watch participants launch baguette javelins, cantaloupe shot puts and pita discuses on the lawn outside Cruess Hall.

But the heated competition is undeniably what takes place inside the sparkling white-and-blue Cruess Hall cooking lab. Each team has its own station equipped with a stove, oven, sink and plenty of counter space, which they utilize to the fullest extent. I overheard frenzied team conversations amidst the sizzling pans, banging oven doors and flashing knives, chopping, slicing and dicing in every imaginable direction. Mouth-watering smells of onion, garlic and citrus made me wish I was among the panel of three judges appointed to sample all dishes.

Beet cookies, Pepsi-glazed chicken and drink concoctions of blackberries and mint were among the marvels of ingenuity set before the panel to be evaluated on flavor, presentation, creativity/originality and use of ingredients. As a finished team exchanged triumphant high-fives, I got to sample a bite of their Pepsi-almond cake—let’s just say I’m not surprised they were the culinary champions.

Before I left, I asked event organizer Michelle Danyluk the one burning question I had for a food science major: What’s your opinion of frozen food? “I eat it a lot,” she said immediately, and to my relief, “It’s perfectly safe.” Breaking off to demand “OK, who’s burning plastic?,” she went on to explain that the average meal preparation time has been compressed from about three hours in our grandparent’s generation to three minutes in our age of the microwave.

Though I have no intention to stop shopping in the freezer section, witnessing the culinary prowess of my peers was inspiring and encouraging. Who knows—stop by the event next year, and you just might see me sauté, purée and flambé alongside the best.

— Erin Loury