As a pan of baked penne bubbled and browned in a cafeteria oven and fragrant curls of steam wafted from a pot of quinoa curry on a portable burner nearby, Tonya Ward tried her best to keep calm.

It wasn’t working, though.

“I’m a barrel of nerves,” she said. “I’ve been up since three this morning.”

Ward, the culinary instructor at the New Horizons Regional Education Center in Newport News, Virginia, was about to watch two teams of her high school culinary students submit their dishes to a hungry tasting panel at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton. Tickle the panelists’ taste buds enough and one of the dishes could end up being served to astronauts onboard the International Space Station.

“They worked hard on this, trying to get just the right blend,” said Ward.

The tasting at NASA Langley took place Feb. 16 as part of the second High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH) culinary challenge.

A total of 21 high school culinary teams from around the country are competing in the HUNCH challenge. Following tastings like the one at Langley, the field will be boiled down to 10 teams that will travel to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they’ll prepare their dishes for a final tasting in the center’s Space Food Systems Laboratory. The winning team will have its entrée processed and sent to the space station.

So sure, the pressure was on for Ward’s teams. But if the teacher was feeling a bit on edge, Allison Bolton, one of the students on the team making the quinoa curry, seemed cool as a cucumber. She and her teammates had put considerable work into perfecting their recipe — tweaking the spices, adjusting the amount of tomato.

“Trying to balance the right amount of tomato in it was kind of hard, because really, the tomato provided a lot of the substance for the dish,” she said. “It was a little too tomato-y at first and we had to work to find the right balance, but I think we found it.”