Practice, passion drive teen’s pursuit of TV cooking titles

Fourteen-year-old cooking champion Taliah Dancil will have a chance to win a third title when she competes on “Guy’s Grocery Games” next week.

The 10th grader at La Pietra- Hawaii School for Girls will vy for a $20,000 grocery shopping spree in the July 31 episode of the Food Network show. She’ll be up against three other teen chefs to turn a chicken pot pie into a high-end dinner, and make an international dish chosen at random.

Dancil last won “Grocery Games” in August 2017, just before starting at La Pietra. Before that, she won a “Chopped Junior” title in her first contest, when she was a seventh grader living in El Paso, Texas.

Dancil has cultivated an adventurous set of taste buds traveling all over the nation with her dad, Staff Sgt. Dontavis Dancil, now stationed at Schofield Barracks, and her mom, Jamiah, a food blogger who has her own spice line.

She’s learned most of her culinary skills “just hanging out with Mom,” she said. “We like to cook and experiment a lot.”

To prepare for her two previous Food Network competitions, her mother taught her to accomplish certain culinary basics — like skinning a fish and preparing meat — in 20 to 25 minutes, to be sure she could complete a dish in a 30-minute period. They started practicing several weeks before the shows, “so I naturally moved faster.”

Dancil is working on her baking techniques to become more versatile. Her favorite dishes to make at the moment are macarons, cakes and biscuits. Another specialty is chocolate chip mochi pancakes.

But her mom reminds her that she can’t eat sweets all the time, so Dancil is also working on savory foods, like black bean burgers, and shrimp and grits, Southern-style.

She’s put her childhood dreams of being a geologist aside — although she still finds rocks fascinating — to become a chef, but there’s also a chance she could become a model. Since taking modeling lessons last year, “I make people call me ‘Taliah the Model Chef,’” Dancil said.

“When you’re walking down the runway or posing, it’s like a whole new world. It’s just like when you’re in the kitchen, you’re focused on what you’re doing and not worried about people looking at you, and it’s just a way to express yourself with your poses and personality and facial expressions.”

Dancil doesn’t believe in following recipes too closely. “I wing it a lot. Sometimes when you follow recipes, you don’t like the outcome. Usually I use my preferences and intuition to put my own spin on a recipe.”

What makes a good cook, she said, is “mostly the love and the energy and the time you put into the food.”

The episode will air at 6 p.m., repeating several times through the week.