The Atholton students "tweaked" the traditional recipe for their version of a spicy buffalo chicken wrap. The original recipe calls for a deep-fried, breaded chicken breast doused in a mixture of butter and hot sauce with blue cheese. The healthier version uses oven-baked chicken and a whole-wheat tortilla instead of a white-flour tortilla. The healthier version also uses light ranch dressing, a sparing amount of cheddar cheese and lemon juice to cool the spicy hot sauce.
The combination of the ingredients made for a thick, rich sauce with a toned-down heat, Geiser said.
"It goes to show that something healthy can taste great," Geiser said. "I think we knocked this one out of the ballpark. It's restaurant quality."
Finding the perfect mix was a bit of a challenge for the Atholton students, Razik said.
"They had to know how to use flavorings correctly," she said. "That's the tricky part. To make it taste good and be healthy. That is a fine balance."
The students learned numerous lessons during the activity.
"Our biggest challenge was keeping the calorie restraints," Geiser said. "We only had a certain amount of food that we could get. A lot of this was piecing together things with what we had."
The students also gained a better understanding of the work of employees from the system's food and nutrition services department.
"It gave them an appreciation of what they did," Razik said.
"It has changed how we think about school lunch," Geiser said. "There is an assumption that school lunch isn't healthy and doesn't take a lot of thought. [Food and nutrition services employees] have enormous budget and ingredient constraints."
