A Day with Zach Zalas in the Terra Spice Test Kitchen

One Monday late morning I rolled up to Terra Spice headquarters. I had received a text from Phil a few days earlier, “Zach is home from college, he’ll be cooking lunch on Monday if you want to swing by.” 

Everyone knows you never pass up an invitation to Terra Spice.

In the test kitchen, Zach prepared soup, bread, and cookies for lunch while we chatted about his time working with Phil before he left for college. 

“My mom pulled me out of school early that day so I could come,” Zach said, recalling his first time visiting Terra Spice last February. That day, Phil was preparing a feast featuring meat from Chicago Game, and Zach and his mom were on the guest list. 

“We hit it off. Phil was saying he didn't have enough time to get everything done, and my mom was like, ‘Zach could have come over to help you!’ That’s sort of how it all started.”

At the time, Zach was in his senior year at Saint Joseph High School and was interested in cooking. “My whole family really likes to cook, " he shared, “Enjoying good food and having that taste for it made me want to learn for myself, so during COVID I started cooking myself dinner each night.”

Working for Phil and learning from a seasoned chef appealed to Zach, so he started coming in for a few hours after school or on the weekends. And while he learned operations in the warehouse, mostly Zach spent his time in the kitchen cooking lunch for the staff, experimenting with spices, and preparing for large dinners.

“Zach just has a natural touch with food,“ Phil said. “Literally he walks in, and we discuss prep, recipe or blend testing, and I'll say I need this, this, and this, and I’m thinking this.’ And he’s replies, ‘Cool, got it.’”

Phil worked with plenty of young chefs in his past, and many of them needed constant micromanaging. Not Zach. “There’s no micromanagement. He's got work ethic, intelligence, a good set of hands, and a smile. He's always smiling.”

Once school let out for the summer, Zach spent more hours at Terra Spice, allowing Phil the flexibility to focus on other areas of the business. Plus, Phil loved having someone to bounce recipe ideas back and forth with. In June, Zach was Phil’s sous chef for the Scotch + Spice dinner that Phil hosted.

“There are some fails,” Phil said. “There are fails for sure. We were on our sixth day of testing toffee for the scotch party. It was too soft. We were like, ‘Go higher in temp, go higher in temp,’ and it wasn’t til the day of the event that it worked.”

“It's just fun to bounce off ideas and work together and figure out how we can make something better,” Zach said.

When Zach started, he had no intention of pursuing a career as a chef, and still doesn’t, but the skills he learned from Phil add real value to his life.

“Is Zach going to do this for a living? Probably not. He's thinking about being an engineer, but it's a brave new world. And if you're going to school for engineering and you have skills as a chef, they look at that as well-rounded, it makes you more creative, a better person.”

Zach pulled the bread out of the oven while Phil ladled soup into bowls. “I genuinely had a really fun summer working together,” Phil said.