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Hadley Reese contemplates the origin of her favourite foods while preparing onions for a chicken dish, employing a unique, two-handed chopping technique.
"I like Balinese and Indian," she concludes, banging the knife down repeatedly into a growing pile of strangely shaped chunks. "Anything spicy."
Hadley also likes sports and reading, she explains, tastes that are less surprising for someone who is only eight years old.
But gourmet cooking is the tiny Toronto resident's number one interest, so every Tuesday she takes an hour-long class at High Park's Cookerydoo Cooking & Crafts for Kids, learning to make meals from various cultures using a number of grown-up recipes.
Sophie O'Neill-Latullippe, left, 12, in class with Elle Fulford, 10, Hannah Burbee, 9, and Hadley Reese, 8. (Simon Hayter for The Globe and Mail)
More and more children like Hadley are adding chef school to their repertoire of after-school activities, expanding both their palates and their skills, and causing the food industry to take note.
Cooking schools across the country are adding children's classes to their schedules, and high-end culinary retailers have introduced lines of kid-friendly gadgets in bright colours and lightweight materials. Cookerydoo sells recipe books designed for young eyes, featuring large print and photos detailing each step of meal prep.
This summer, Williams-Sonoma Inc. will add to its WS Kids line, which already deals in kiddy spatulas, aprons and measuring spoons, with a line of child baking pans imprinted with images of princesses, trains and planes. "Three years ago, we weren't a place that had focused on things for kids," said Jonathan Silverman of Williams-Sonoma.
"The speed with which the products have sold is incredible," said Mr. Silverman, who buys cooks' tools and bakeware for the company.
Although some child foodies are nurtured by gourmand moms and dads, most gravitate toward cooking as naturally as they would to gymnastics or T-ball.
Uwe Christian Velden, executive chef and program director of the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts in Vancouver, said they are responding to a pastime that engages each of their senses.
"You work with something alive, or that comes alive or that you can actually eat," he said. "You can't eat your toys."
The institute runs two summer courses in which preteens whip up veggie and cheese strudels, and profiteroles with chocolate sauce. Mr. Velden believes the increased interest comes from children exposed to different cuisines earlier and more often.
"It's another trendy thing to do with your kids," he said.
Vanessa Johns-Webster, the Vancouver-born director of Seattle's Blue Ribbon Cooking & Culinary Centre, said young people today can also aspire to be celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay or Giada De Laurentiis just as they try to emulate David Beckham or Christina Aguilera.
That Food Network effect has also changed the gender makeup of cooking classes, she added.
"Last year we had 70 per cent boys," she said. "That's totally the Emeril Lagasse epidemic."
Ms. Johns-Webster, who is 23, was herself a child foodie -- although for more obvious reasons, having taken over the cooking school from her mother, a chef and restaurateur.
These days it's common for her 10-year-old students to cook dinner for their family every day, she said, or to clip restaurant reviews from the newspaper.
Blue Ribbon instructors do not childproof their menus or their techniques, and students use grown-up tools, including knives.
"We've never had a problem," she said.
Back at the Tuesday evening class in Toronto's Cookerydoo studio, the class is putting the finishing touches on a meal of Jamaican jerk chicken, peas-and-rice and banana fritters. There is only one minor emergency, when a child rubs onion-covered hands in her eyes.
Owner Stephanie Phillips, a former caterer, said she is constantly impressed by her students' aptitude and courage in the kitchen.
"Kids are very picky, but I think that when they're involved they'll try anything," she said.
Eleven-year-old Liam Morantz has tried Cajun alligator, which he says tastes like chewy chicken and is best with lemon.
His classmate Jaimie Adams, 10, has never tried meat of any kind. A fourth-generation vegetarian, she was signed up at Cookerydoo by her mother, Anita, to expand her dinnertime options.
"I had never tried curry before she made it," Ms. Adams said. "I signed her up so she would have more things to eat and now she's getting me to eat more."
But not every child needs a class to develop a keen interest in the kitchen.
Christine Hopkins knew she had a child foodie on her hands when her five-year-old son, Aidan McLeod, tried to take over from a family member carving the holiday turkey.
Aidan, who lives with his parents in Paris, Ont., developed a love of cooking during visits with his grandma, an avid baker.
"He didn't have a butcher's blade when he was four months old or anything," Ms. Hopkins said. "But probably from about a year he knew what he liked to cook and liked to eat. And then he just became a little food monster from there."
In Seattle, Ms. Johns-Webster has seen a four-year-old girl buying olives at Whole Foods, and spurns the notion of junior taste buds, having introduced some of her students to foie gras.
One boy held his bar mitzvah at the school, where 180 guests cooked salmon with blackberry butter sauce, pesto-stuffed chicken and pasta made from scratch.
That child took his love of cooking to an extreme, said Ms. Johns-Webster, but even kids with a passing interest in food can be transformed into miniature Mario Batalis.
"We say to our parents that we guarantee your child will be able to cook dinner once a week by the time they graduate," she said. "I've got kids who cook dinner almost every night. It's what they love to do. The parents do the dishes."
Schools for thought
Cookerydoo Cooking & Crafts for Kids Location 325 Roncesvalles Ave., Toronto, 416-532-2232, contact@cookerydoo.com Classes offered Various daytime, after-school or summer camp courses including Supper Club, which teaches table setting and dinner party etiquette, and Snack-o-licious, where kids
prepare healthy fast food
Age range 3 to 12 Price $50 to $325
Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts Location 1505 West 2nd Ave., Vancouver, 1-604-734-4488, info@picachef.com Classes offered Preteen Two-Day Gourmet Camp and Teen Three-Day Gourmet Camp. Age range 9 to 17 Price $132.50 to $206.70
Blue Ribbon Cooking Culinary Centre Location 2501 Fairview Ave. E, Seattle, 206-328-2442 Classes offered Various programs including After School Kids' Cooking Club, Blue Ribbon Advanced Culinary Camp, Mom & Me Camp. Age range 4 to 17 Price $50 (U.S.) to $800
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