Fort Mill boy sharpens his skills for ‘Chopped Junior’

Corey Horton Gonzalez will be watching very closely Wednesday night when her son Ryan, 12, competes on “Chopped Junior,” the kids’ cooking competition on the Food Network.

It’s not just because he’s her son. It’s because she’ll finally find out if the Fort Mill middle schooler won. It’s all so hush-hush, even his mother doesn’t know.

“It’s hard-core,” she says. “I don’t even know how he did. It’s a little nerve-wracking as a parent.”

Ryan, who goes to Banks Trail Middle School, has been practicing his poker face since December, when he and his mother went to New York to tape the show, hosted by Ted Allen. The episode airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on the Food Network.

“It’s very difficult,” he admits. “You want to brag, but you can’t.”

On “Chopped Junior,” four young competitors cook for four rounds, each round using everything in a mystery basket of ingredients. In each round, one is eliminated until it comes down to a cookoff between the last two. The winner gets $10,000.

For this season, though, winners also are competing for something else. Ryan’s episode is part of a tournament called Make Me a Judge. The winners of the first three episodes will come back for the fourth episode and act as judges while the celebrity judges do the cooking. So if Ryan wins this week, he could be back on in a couple of weeks to judge Marcus Samuelsson, Alex Guarnaschelli and Amanda Freitag.

Ryan can’t talk about any of that yet. But he can say that the toughest part of the show for him was the clock. They have a limited time to cook each dish.

“It was stressful,” he says. “Every 3 seconds, you were looking up to see if you had enough time.”

In his regular life, Ryan is a typically busy middle schooler. He plays lacrosse, football and basketball, and he’s in the Duke Talent Development program. He does love to cook, though. When he goes out with his parents (his favorite restaurant is Kebab-Je in Matthews), he likes to come home and figure out how to make different things.

“It’s funny, he won’t come home and make grilled cheese,” his mother says. He’ll do things like Cuban-style croquetas (his father’s heritage is Cuban and Puerto Rican) or empanadas.

To get ready for the show, Ryan spent his time practicing basic recipes and he went to Bakers Buzzin’, which does cooking classes for kids, to work on his knife skills. Since getting back, he’s been working on his timing in case he gets the chance to do it again.

Even if he wins, Ryan doesn’t expect his future to be in cooking. His dream is to someday be a neuro-oncologist, a specialist in brain cancers. He wants cooking to stay something he does for fun, he says.

“I don’t want it to get so stressful I don’t even want to do it anymore.”

This story was originally published March 14, 2017 at 8:31 AM with the headline "Fort Mill boy sharpens his skills for ‘Chopped Junior’."