University of Vermont chef brings vegan kale gnocchi to Sodexo’s 2024 Cook for Change competition

This summer, Ryan Hickey, the executive chef for Harris Millis Dining on the University of Vermont’s Athletic Campus, crafted a new sustainability focused dish. The campus was quiet, as the school year had come to an end, and Hickey had time to focus on a new project. So, he decided to enter Sodexo’s Cook for Change competition, an annual sustainability culinary competition that challenges Sodexo chefs to create sustainable new menu offerings.

After a couple days of work, Hickey created a recipe for homemade vegan kale gnocchi. The gnocchi is made with locally sourced potatoes, dyed green with kale, served with puree and garnished with watermelon radish. This plant-based dish spotlights local Vermont produce—the two main ingredients for his recipe are kale and celery root, which can both be locally sourced in the state. The dish also uses kale rib, a part of the plant that is often not used. As part of the competition, Sodexo asked chefs to use an ingredient that is typically composted, and Hickey got the idea to use kale rib from a cookbook.

“It was blanched kale rib, which I had never used before, and you know, typically when you're dealing with kale, you always end up with like the middle part and that always just ends up in the compost bin or I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it,” he said. “It's using a part of the plant I never thought would have been used before and then it kind of makes you think more.”

Hickey entered the competition as a way to have fun in the kitchen and learn more about cooking sustainably.

“I saw it as a chance to have some fun. And you know, I got to touch base with some of our local farmers and talk to them about kale and kale flowers,” he said.

Sodexo was so impressed with Hickey’s recipe that he won the regional part of the competition. Soon, he will compete in the national competition against seven other Sodexo chefs, representing different parts of the world. The national competition will take place in November in Paris where competing chefs will have 90 minutes to create a sustainable dish and dessert.

This is the third year in which the foodservice provider has hosted the competition, which aims to provide professional development opportunities for chefs while furthering the company’s sustainability goals. Sodexo aims to be net-zero by 2040 with 70% of its menu offerings labeled as low-carbon by 2030 and hopes this competition will motivate and energize chefs to be more sustainable in the kitchen.

Developing the recipe

Chef Ryan Hickey created a recipe for vegan kale gnocchi for the regional part of the competition.

As Hickey prepares to bring his vegan gnocchi to Paris, he is most excited about seeing the recipes that other competing Sodexo chefs have created.

“I’m excited to see what the rest of the world's bringing to the table. To be honest, I want to see like, how they took this challenge and kinda translated it into their regions,” he said.

Hickey’s approach to the competition was to create a simple recipe focusing on foods that are local to Vermont. He landed on celery root as it’s one of his favorite vegetables to work with as it often gets overlooked.

“I love celery root, and I feel like it's slept on. Not a lot of people use it or know what it is, so if I was gonna do something with root vegetables, I'd normally would use celery root,” he said. “I feel like it doesn't get highlighted enough.”

Hickey also likes to dye pasta bright colors to create a vibrant and lively presentation, and that’s how he decided to spotlight kale in this dish. He decided to color the pasta green and was thinking about using parsley to dye it, but he wanted to get more creative.

“Parsley and spinach, you know, typically that's when you see green pasta. That's what it is. But I haven't had kale pasta or seen it very often. So, I was like, I'm just gonna try that and it worked out pretty good,” he said.

And of course, flavor was deeply considered while crafting this recipe. The decision to use a fresh vegetable as a garnish was in part due to presentation and also to provide varying texture in the dish, said Hickey.

One challenge along the way was choosing the garnish. Hickey wanted to keep sustainability in mind and initially was going to use kale flower, in an attempt to use as much of the plant as possible, but he actually learned in the process that kale flowers are quite wasteful to grow.

“So, this thing is an edible flower from the kale plant, but to actually harvest it, you have to let it overgrow. So, you can't actually harvest the crop that it's for. So, it's actually wasteful to have that,” he said.

So instead, he opted for beets, due to the color and its ability to bring varying texture to the dish.

“They're just colorful and I just think sometimes simple colors like that and simple vegetables just help to make it appealing to the eye and also just the freshness of the actual shaved vegetable,” he said.

“There's a lot of richness when you got like a potato pasta and a pureed celery root. You know, that's like all kind of soft and rich. But the tenderness of the fresh vegetable helps to kind of break that up and give you something else, to your palate.”

What sustainability means to Hickey as a Sodexo executive chef

Chef Ryan Hickey.

As a chef, sustainability has always been important to Hickey, however, it has grown in importance to him through his role as an executive chef for the University of Vermont. Hickey came to the university, which is his alma mater, about three years ago. But he got his start in the foodservice industry in high school. After about ten years of working in restaurants, Hickey decided to venture out and landed on college dining. Hickey learned a lot about sustainability during his time in restaurants. That’s actually where he got the idea to create a pasta dish for the Sodexo competition.

“Making pasta for this challenge, that didn't just happen by accident. To make pasta from scratch, it’s very cheap and you can charge good money for it because people are willing to pay for a quality product that's been made from, you know, just flour and some eggs that just takes some time,” he said. “As a restaurant chef, you have to utilize everything.”

But sustainability looks a little bit different when serving food to the scale of the University of Vermont, Hickey has found.

“Being here at this institution where things are just scaled up to, you know, feeding thousands of people a day, you really see how that changes when you change the number from, you know, 100-person dining room that you fill maybe once a night to feeding 4,000,” he said. “Like those little tiny things that at a restaurant you're like, oh, that's just some scrap or whatever— here that's a big deal.”

And so, over time, food waste has become top of mind for Hickey, who said the university donates excess food weekly to the local food pantry. However, as a chef, sustainability has always been important to him.

“Your job as a chef is to try and figure out how to utilize things the best way possible, all the time. That's like, that's like the game, right, and, it's just kind of always been on the brain,” he said.

Communicating the message, both to diners and staff alike, proves to be one of the biggest challenges to cooking sustainably as a college chef, said Hickey. Telling customers why the dining team decided to serve plant-based Impossible meat in its tacos instead of typical beef, for instance, can be difficult.

“That's a challenge from the customer standpoint—making sure they understand what this is and why it's important,” said Hickey.

And training can be a challenge from an employee perspective. The biggest challenge, said Hickey, is teaching the team to think more critically about things like food waste. He wants his team to learn how to think about reutilizing leftover food rather than immediately jumping to compost it.

“For example, we had a bunch of French toast that we cooked off and didn't eat the other day for breakfast and we had someone newer was on and they were gonna compost it. And I'm like, well, why don't we make a baked, you know, French toast thing,” he said.

And reducing food waste can be a good place to start for chefs who are looking at cooking more sustainably, said Hickey.

“Look at what you're wasting, it's pretty simple. Look at the things that you're not cooking while you're cooking, like the trimmings of the vegetables,” he said. “There's more than one way to look at it is I guess is the point and just you know, if you see something that's being wasted, just try and take a step back and think outside the box on how you could use it somewhere else.”