Teaching Kitchen hosts “Healthier Baking” class to teach students cooking basics

(Angelina Wu/Daily Bruin)

By Maggie Konecky
Jan. 5, 2025 5:49 p.m.
“I’ve always wanted to open a bakery,” said second-year business economics student Kayla Nguyen.
Although Nguyen’s current career plans gravitate more towards marketing than entrepreneurship, she got a taste of her dream – alongside seven other students – at the UCLA Teaching Kitchen’s last “Healthier Baking” class before winter break.
The class, led by culinary arts coordinator Julia Rhoton, focused on making bundt-style cakes. Students in the small Straus Clubhouse kitchen mixed flour, sugar and spices with fresh apples and yogurt and learned how to crack eggs, substitute ingredients and tell whether baking soda or powder was best suited for the recipe at hand.
Rhoton said she had been teaching at the kitchen since it opened in 2019. She added that after COVID-19 pushed the program’s first two years online, she is excited to finally see it gain traction on campus.
“We try to support them with the basic skills – knife skills, food safety skills, cleaning skills so that no matter what recipe they’re making, they have confidence to achieve the goal,” Rhoton said.
Students said they attended the class for a variety of reasons, from wanting to save money by cooking at home to connecting with family passions. When the eight students started listing all the other classes they wanted to take, Rhoton said members of the larger community had also expressed greater interest.
Ally Melton, a second-year psychology student who attended the class with two friends, said her goals in the class were to learn about basic culinary techniques, life skills and cheaper cooking in preparation for moving from the dorms into an off-campus apartment next year.
Others used the class as a hands-on break from studying, like second-year bioengineering student Isabella Pascual, who said it was a “side quest” to learn a healthier cake recipe.
The teaching kitchen is supported by UCLA’s Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center, which aims to support health-related innovation on campus, according to its website. The kitchen itself has also contributed to nutrition research at UCLA and provides programming for medical students and faculty.
Dr. Wendelin Slusser, the associate vice provost for HCI, said the kitchen was founded to both provide education and address food insecurity and inequity within the campus community.
“I wanted to see how we could address it in a long-term fashion, not only giving food – which is very important – but how we can get the skills to our students so when they leave university, they’re better equipped,” she said.
A second teaching kitchen, set to open at the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, will provide lessons on apartment and meal-prep style cooking in addition to the smaller classes already offered. Rhoton said that she thinks its proximity to student housing will make it more accessible to the community.
“Learning to cook for myself after school is a privilege that not everyone gets, and it’s one that has created a healthier and more confident relationship with food,” she said. “I want to make sure that everyone gets that, no matter what age they start at.”
Rhoton said the program is already building a community; almost all of the baking students had either brought friends along or planned to introduce others to the class in the future. Students cheered for each other as completed cakes were pulled from the oven one by one.
Between testing the batter and learning how to make a glaze, Rhoton spoke with the students about the confidence and self-assurance that comes with cooking for oneself. While each student left with their own apple cake and sugary topping – Melton said the lesson on self-sufficiency was her biggest takeaway from the experience.
“A lot of things are easier than we think they are to make,” she said. “We have more time than we think we do. We’re more capable of making these dishes that seem very complicated, but oftentimes are very doable – things that we can make on our own if we try.”