Annabella Kumar took up cooking when she was 5 years old, watching with awe as her grandmother prepared meals and baked cupcakes with her.
Following her heart, Kumar has since read books, watched cooking shows and taken lessons to hone her skills. The 11-year-old has already become a prominent chef in her home kitchen, cooking pasta and sauce from scratch and dessert to go with it on Friday nights for the whole family.
“I really like cooking because you’d get to express yourself and do what you want and figure out a creative way to plate everything and make your dish look nice,” said Kumar, who lives in Ladera Ranch.
On Tuesday night, Kumar’s creativity and talent will be showcased in front of a national audience. The sixth-grader at St. John’s Episcopal School is one of the contestants on Food Network’s “Chopped Junior” that pits four precocious chefs against each other for a $10,000 prize each episode.
Contestants must cook a dish within 30 minutes using the ingredients inside a mystery basket. The bottom contestant gets “chopped” after each of the three rounds based on taste, creativity and presentation.
It’s a spin-off of the network’s popular show “Chopped,” featuring adult chefs.
Kumar said she’s been a fan of both shows, sometimes cooking with mystery ingredients used in the show at home.
“I really like to watch the kids and their creative minds,” she said. “Sometime they cook better than the adults.”
In Tuesday’s pre-recorded episode titled “Love you, Mom,” Kumar and fellow contestants are asked to create meals their mothers would love and also impress judges, according to Food Network.
In the first round, the competitors must figure out how to make escargot with fruit pops. For the entree, the mystery basket includes a cut of meat and a gummy candy.
And then “the dessert round promises to be one of the most unusual in ‘Chopped’ history,” the episode’s synopsis states.
During her phone interview with the Register, Kumar was not allowed to reveal what happens in the episode.
Kumar said she dreams of one day running her own restaurant that serves molecular cuisine, a modern style of cooking based on scientific methods and innovations. At the same time, she wants to become a scientist and find cures for cystic fibrosis and peanut allergy, she said.
Her friend suffers from cystic fibrosis, and she Kumar said she has read up on the disease. Also, Kumar has peanut allergy, which she says prohibits her from eating foods like cupcakes at school.
“I started getting really mad so I decided I want to be a scientist and find a cure for it so that I don’t suffer anymore and everybody else as well,” she said.
To find out if Kumar wins $10,000 toward achieving her dreams, watch Tuesday night’s episode at 8 p.m. on Food Network.
Contact the writer: 949-445-6397 or tshimura@ocregister.com