BREMERTON — There’s nothing like a little competition and real-world experience to help prepare students for their futures.

Culinary students at Olympic College in Bremerton got a taste of both Tuesday, Nov. 10, when they held a “Food Truck Brawl” on campus.

Seven teams, comprising about 23 students, made dishes that could be food-truck fare to hand out to people between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., after which the diners were asked to vote for their favorite dish.

“It was a fun thing to do, for them to have kind of a different approach to doing something outside the box,” said Chef Chris Plemmons, a faculty advisor for the culinary program. “This is another way of getting students to buy in and to make something that they feel happy about putting their name on, that they say, ‘This represents me.’ ”

Plemmons said that the teams, with between two and four students each, came up with their own dishes and presentations, and the teachers just helped guide them and “kept them in bounds.”

“This is what they came up with, and they did such a great job,” Plemmons said.

The menu included deep-fried oyster po’boys with barbecue coleslaw; five-spice chicken bahn mi; pork and crab shu mai; fried chicken with bacon-maple waffles, with bacon-maple mayonnaise and bacon-maple butter; shrimp rangoons with sweet-and-sour dipping sauce; smoked barbecue pork sliders on a sweet coconut bun with tangy slaw; and caramel-apple cheesecake with carmelized apple topping.

Student chefs hand out their bacon-maple waffles to guests during the Food Truck Brawl Nov. 10. Photo by Michelle Beahm.

Patti Pergakis, one of the student chefs, said, “Nobody thought of the same thing, not even close to the same thing, so I think that’s probably my favorite part.”

Pergakis was a member of the team to make the chicken bahn mi (a Vietnamese sandwich). She said they chose that dish because “We thought it would be something outside the box.”

Christopher James Duncan, another student chef, said he and his team chose to do the deep-fried oyster po’boy because he saw the recipe in a cookbook and thought it sounded good.

“Traditionally, po’boys are with shrimp or lobster, and it’s usually in a hoagie with lettuce and tomato,” Duncan said. “But we decided to make it smaller so it could be (almost) bite sized.”

Aside from substituting oysters, they also opted to use a lighter, airier bread than hoagies.

The focus on food-truck food came about because of a desire some students had to have their own food trucks someday.

Plemmons said, “What we’re finding is that a lot of students today realize that they’re never going to own a brick-and-mortar restaurant.”

“What they’re realizing is that owning a restaurant is not a practical goal,” he said. “But doing a food truck is.”

And the reason they made it a competition was to give students that real-life, hands-on experience.

“This is kind of real life,” Plemmons said. “When it’s time to go, you go. This is what (they’re) paying tuition for, to learn how to do (this), and this is what it’s all about.”

Pergakis said, “I think that this not only teaches us to work as a team, because we’re a team. It also kind of shows us what it’s like to put out food in a hurry. It’s a little bit of pressure, but they kind of ease us into it, so we learn what it is to be a chef or a cook or work in the kitchen.”

Duncan added the competition really gave the students “real-world experience and hands-on interaction with customers.”

“Once we get in the industry, if you work in the front of the house, you’ve got to know how to work with customers,” Duncan said. “Then, the back of the house, you’ve got to know how to work with food and present it properly.

“This is like both. You get two times the experience.”

The dish that received the most votes was team five’s shrimp rangoon. The barbeque pork sliders from team six came in second place.