Two Sauces, One Kitchen: Cooking Up Connections, Student-Led Cooking Club Brings Students Together Through Pasta

October 8, 2026, Magnolia Room, Winston-Salem, NC

Pesto without pine nuts? Alfredo from scratch? A Teaching Kitchen in the Magnolia Room put students to work on both, and nobody left hungry.

The night came together through Cooking Up Connections, a student-led club Wake Forest’s Olivia Pinder founded last year. The club collaborates with Deacon Dining to bring campus organizations into the kitchen alongside the chefs, and its mission is to give students familiar faces among faculty, staff, and community members they can turn to later, while introducing them to dishes and cultures they may only know at the surface. Each session is built around a different cultural group, which means the menu changes every time. The Italian Club’s turn brought pasta.

For this one, Cooking Up Connections brought in Director of Culinary Development Jonathan Burns and Chef de Cuisine Levin Funes. Students split the work, and the chefs split the sauces.

The pesto, reimagined
Chef Funes took on pesto and made a few swaps along the way. His version skipped the nuts entirely and swapped in kale, so the sauce stayed rich and green but worked for anyone avoiding nuts. It’s a reminder that pesto is less a strict recipe than a formula you can bend.

Alfredo, the long way
Chef Burns walked students through alfredo starting from the roux, the flour-and-butter base that thickens sauces across French and Italian cooking. From there came the heavy cream and, as Chef Burns demonstrated, more butter than you’d expect. Making it from scratch takes longer than opening a jar, but the texture is the payoff.

One tip worth stealing
Here’s something the chefs passed along that’s easy to use at home: olive oil keeps best in a box, not a clear bottle. Light and heat break it down, so boxed or dark-glass oil stays fresher longer. Worth remembering next time you’re shopping.

The Italian Club’s night
The Italian Club shaped the theme, which is how two Italian sauces ended up on the menu. Their programming centers on Italian heritage and culture on campus, and this was a chance to put that on a plate.

By the end of the night, students were tossing their sauces with macaroni and spaghetti and comparing either others. Judging by the plates, the hands-on approach was a success!