Forty Acres Duo Cooks Up Recipe for Relationships

By Ella Denena

Reporting Texas

Starting college can be an overwhelming mix of emotions and new faces.

But two Longhorns are cooking up a solution.

Tucked at the bottom of Jester, the University of Texas’s largest residence hall, two first-semester freshmen are turning cooking into connection.

They call it Pumped Up Cooking. It’s an idea started by chefs Piyush Chintalwar and Zubin Sawhney in their senior year of high school. Their goal? To meet as many people as they could.

“Every week, we get a new group of students or just kids in general and we cook their favorite dish,” Sawhney said. “The main point of Pumped Up is usually just to connect with a new group.” 

It now serves the same purpose, but on a larger scale.

“We had a lot of people reach out to us. And that basically proved to us that like, this works, and not only do we again meet people, we also made a lot of friends. Like by the end of the year, I would say I had 100 new friends that I could call, like, not just like surface level, but like people I would reach out to and ask to hang out with,” said Piyush Chintalwar, chef at Pumped Up Cooking.

Graduates of Allen High School, located just outside of Dallas, Chintalwar and Sawhney were among more than 1,700 students in their graduating class.

They said the show helps them learn their peers’ faces before walking across the stage.

“I just think cooking is a great icebreaker, so I don’t even think the people we get on need to have a passion for cooking,” Sawhney said. “But to me, it’s just like making more people feel comfortable with each other. At Allen, what I noticed is as we got more groups, these groups also started hanging out with each other, too. So not only did we expand me and Piyush’s bubble, we expanded their bubble, too. It was kind of fun to see this community grow together.”

And that’s exactly what experts say social media can do — help students find a community on campus.

“Social media is definitely important because it creates the sense of belonging and it’s for everyone,” said Lizzie Chen, Assistant Director of Communications at UT’s Moody College of Communication.

The duo invites their random guest of the week by either door-knocking or scrolling through their Instagram and sending them a message.

“Those platforms are important for creating authentic content, because that’s where students are and that’s where you’re meeting those younger populations,” Chen said.

Tammy Nguyen, a recent guest on Pumped Up, chose to make cream pasta with garlic toast as her side and cookies as dessert. 

“Their whole idea of wanting to get to know more people at Jester and just UT in general, because it’s just a really big school, seemed really fun,” she said. “We were like, we’re so down to cook. Let’s just go and hop on.”

Chintalwar said they wrap up each episode the same way — bonding off camera.

“We try to do a circle time and then if we’re live streaming it, we try to turn it off just so that people are more connected and they’re more in the moment,” Chintalwar said.

The chefs said they plan to keep it going during their time on the Forty Acres, with the long-term hope of bringing big names onto the show.

“Our end goal is to be able to connect to people who you maybe would have never thought of,” Sawhney said. “Our end goal in Austin would be Arch Manning.”