ANTIGO — Nearly everyone in Antigo knows of the city’s Christmastime chili cookoff on 5th Ave., but for the past several years, a chili competition has been a staple at another place in the city.
Antigo High School.
Throughout the day Thursday, teams of students enrolled in the International Foods elective served around 170 students and faculty who stopped by their classroom specially to taste-test — and then judge by secret ballot — their concoctions.
The class — which teaches students not only about foods from foreign lands, but also about cuisines from far-flung regions of America — has featured the competition since its instructor Tracie Frisch began at the high school seven years ago.
“That’s the number one reason they want to be in this class. They’re like, ‘Oh, the chili contest! Are we doing the chili contest?’ It gets packed in here on the tasting day and everyone’s excited,” Frisch said. “When students hear ‘International Foods,’ a lot of them I think are like, ‘I’m not taking that! I don’t want to eat food from other countries!’ But once they hear that’s the class where you do the chili contest, they’re hooked.”
The unique assignment is a carefully-choreographed one. Already the week before last, teams were brainstorming their recipes and putting in online food orders for ingredients, which they chopped and sorted and finally dumped into their pots Wednesday. Advertising was required: teams designed posters at their stations for the purpose, as if they were operating legitimate commercial food stands. Other classes even got in on the action. Tonya Hardin, an art teacher at the middle school, had her students mold the kiln-dried and glazed clay bowls into which the chili was actually served. Shop students made large wooden spoons, each engraved with a pepper and the words “2024 Chili Cook Off Champ” for the participants.
All the activity that surrounds the yearly event has by now rendered some of its participants slightly competitive.
“In my fifth hour class, I heard a lot of people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, those were the best chilis I’ve ever had.’ Kids really did take their time in adding and tasting to get their chilis to right what they wanted,” Frisch said.
In the smaller of Frisch’s two International Foods classes, sophomores Faith Casetta and Ella Koca won for what they called “Six Pack Chili.”
“There are six different kinds of tomato cans in it,” Casetta said. “It’s my mom’s recipe, but we changed it. Normally my family uses venison, but we used beef and then we added an onion and added a little bit more spice.”
Earning the top spot was a slightly tougher prospect in Frisch’s afternoon course with its roughly 20 students. A team made up of sophomores Annalynn Farrior, Caysen Schroepfer, and junior Kaeden Wincentsen eventually prevailed with their cumin-infused recipe cheekily called “Cumin Get It.”
“It was like a buffalo chicken dip,” Farrior said. “It has chicken, cream cheese, Louisiana hot sauce, jalapenos, onions, tomatoes, cumin…”
“We had a lot of people come up for seconds,” Schroepfer said. “We had like a quarter inch left at the bottom of our pot. We had pita bread to go with it. We were the only team that did something like that.”
“Whip Crackin’ Chili,” which earned second place honors, was unique as well: prior to adding the steak they used, the all-sophomore team of Kenai Radtke, Aidan Schacht, Ezra Braun, and Alex Leak cooked it in maple syrup, something Radtke said his family has done in the past with kielbasa.
“I heard someone say it was so good they saw an apparition,” Braun said. “We ran out halfway through so we probably would have doubled the first place votes if we didn’t.”
“We ran out because someone was eating so much of our chili,” Leak said.
“But it was worth it,” Braun said. “It was good.”
A team composed of senior Cory Rustick and sophomores Asher Lundgren and Max Kneeland came in tied for third with their creation, which they called “Oral Arson,” an ode to its spiciness.
When asked precisely what he and his teammates had added to make it so spicy, Kneeland said, “A lot of $1 Walmart hot sauce.”
While several students in the class said their best memory from this year’s International Foods class chili cookoff is the bonding they did with their teammates, it was clear that members of Oral Arson considered the biggest takeaway to be the fact that they got royally hosed.
One blamed the loss on the 8th graders who had warmed up their chili the class period before and burned it. Another claimed it had been an inside job by Ms. Frisch.
“I did not — I wasn’t even in here!” laughed Frisch at their kidding.
“The 8th graders who came in before us and had to warm it up for the contest burned it bad,” Kneeland said. “We had to fix it. They put it on high and charred the whole bottom.”
“We got our shock pedals out and brought it back from the dead,” Lundgren said. “Then we heard a couple of ‘too spicy’s,’ a couple of ‘not spicy enough’s,’ and a lot of ‘This is the best chili here.’”
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