Behind The Major: How Our 5th-8th Graders Are Reinventing Breakfast
This year at Galileo Summer Quest, we’re excited to offer a unique camp experience that will tantalize your taste buds. For an entire week, campers in our Chefology: Breakfast Club major will create tasty flavor combinations and use their creativity to reinvent traditional breakfast staples. Campers will get innovative with pancakes, smoothies, granola, omelettes, and even bagels.
At the end of the week, campers will walk away with more than just our recipes—although they’ll get those, too—they’ll have newfound kitchen knowledge and skills, and the belief that they can create something brand new.
Here’s what rising 5th – 8th graders can look forward to at camp this summer, plus a bonus Q&A with the mastermind behind the major.
A Peek At The Week
MONDAY
The week kicks off by showing our campers how to make a delicious, homemade breakfast muffin batter that serves as the foundation for their own unique recipe. Campers customize their muffins with eight different flavors like blueberry and apple cinnamon. Finally, they’ll top it off with three crumble toppings to finish the recipe.
After the muffins are ready to eat, campers are encouraged to sample their peers’ individual creations and provide feedback on what they liked. They’ll also provide constructive feedback on how to improve the recipe to make their muffins taste even better.
To finish up the day, campers learn how to make yogurt from scratch using live cultures. They’ll start the process in the afternoon so that by Wednesday, the yogurt will be ready to use in the mid-week activity.
TUESDAY
On Tuesday, it’s all about pancakes. Campers practice the fundamentals of creating them from scratch, including the secret to flipping the perfect pancake and fancy plating techniques.
In creating their visionary pancakes, campers will learn about flavor families and chart the course for their own pairings. To spice up their flapjacks, campers will experiment with add-ins and toppings like chocolate chips, coconut flakes, and banana slices.
That’s not all. Next up, campers will make custom syrup and whipped cream from scratch to add new flavor dimensions to their pancakes. We take pancakes seriously at Galileo Summer Quest.
WEDNESDAY
It’s the middle of the week, and campers will chill out with refreshing smoothies of their own creation before tackling a tasty granola recipe in teams.
For the smoothies, campers will start with liquid ingredients like fruit juice or coconut milk and build out their creations with fruits, veggies, much more. The sky’s the limit!
Then it’s granola time. With a pantry stocked with ingredients like dried fruit, chocolate chips, ginger, cinnamon, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, maple syrup, and honey, campers envision and create custom, crunchy masterpieces. The only thing you won’t find in this treasure trove of ingredient is nuts. We’ve taken these entirely out of the equation, so there’s no need for campers with nut allergies to miss out on the fun.
By this time, the yogurt that campers started making on Monday will finally be ready, and they’ll top it with their unique granola concoctions.
THURSDAY
Thursday is easily the most challenging day in the kitchen for the campers. They’ll learn the tricky techniques that go into making their own omelettes and baking bagels using their own dough. Today’s theme is “be determined,” and our campers will practice that mindset in spades to bring these recipes to life.
At the end of the day, campers will reflect on their favorite recipe they created during the week and begin planning their signature dish for Friday, the final day of camp.
FRIDAY
It’s signature dish day! Today, campers have a few different options on how they’d like to spend their last day at camp. They can either mix and match components of different recipes they’ve learned during the week, or develop innovative, brand-new flavors.
Once all of the culinary creations are ready to be enjoyed, campers invite other kids from all different majors at camp to stop by and try their signature dishes.
To close out the week, campers reflect on what they learned, the challenges they overcame, and what they liked most at camp.
ASK AN EXPERT
We caught up with Jamie Diy, the mastermind behind our Chefology curriculum, to ask her a few questions about what makes this major so fun (and tasty).
So Jamie, what do you love the most about this major?
This is a major that’s super accessible because you can take the skills home with you and practice what you learned at camp in your family kitchen. I love how it brings families together and how our campers can enjoy the recipes they learned at camp with their own families.
What are you most excited for this summer?
I absolutely love seeing the signature dish that kids come up with on the final day of camp. I really enjoy watching the campers get creative and come up with their own unique creations. The kids are so full of pride when the recipes are ready to eat and they love to share what they made with the other campers.
Every day of camp has a unique focus on one of the aspects of the Innovator’s Mindset. For example, “Visionary Pancake Tuesday” provides our campers the opportunity to envision a recipe that may not exist.
Peers are encouraged to test, retest, and continually evaluate the final product to make it as tasty as it can be, which are all important aspects of our unique innovation-based culture at Galileo.
We’re not just letting kids run wild in the kitchen, there’s definitely a fun and challenging aspect to learning new culinary skills and watching the campers improving upon them during the week. I can’t wait for this summer!
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Chefology is one of our most popular majors at Galileo Summer Quest. If you’re interested in learning more about Chefology, or our other flavors of summer camp in your area, click the button below to find a location near you.
