Iron Chef

Setup

In the original Iron Chef format, chefs create a meal around one secret or theme ingredient. In class, it can often work better if you give students three, five or even ten random ingredients that they have to include in a meal.

Either way, you will need to give the students random food ingredients. If you have an Internet connection, use our Random Word Generator. Otherwise, prepare them on slips of paper beforehand and put them in a hat/bag/box.

Students can do this activity individually, but it’s usually more fun if they create a meal as a pair. You also want to set up ‘battles’, such that two teams have the same set of ingredients (with larger classes, set up multiple battles with different sets of ingredients). That way the class can vote for their favourite at the end.

Activity

1. Assign each battle (two teams of students) a set of random ingredients.
2. The students have to create a dish or meal using all of their assigned ingredients. The meal must include at least ten ingredients, including those that were assigned and those that students choose to add.
3. Depending on the target language, students either write a description of their meal, or both a description of the meal and how they created it.
4. For each battle, the teams take turns sharing their meal/recipe with the class.
5. After both descriptions have been shared for a battle, the class votes for their favourite meal.

Target Language

The Iron Chef ESL activity is a great way to practise food vocabulary, adjectives, and cooking verbs.

If you want to practise only food vocabulary or adjectives vocabulary, just ask students to prepare a description of their meal. However, you can get the most out of this activity by asking them to also share the steps they took to create their meal (e.g., “First, we chopped the onion”). That way, you can also practise sequence adverbs , and cooking verbs in the past simple.

This activity is suitable for beginner and intermediate level students. For an activity to practise similar topics with higher level students, try Celebrity Chefs.