"You don't smell that?" chef Shawn Harris demands, turning up his nose at the moldy odor filling the room. "You can't blame the refrigerator!"

When one of the cooks stares at the open fridge for five minutes before declaring that there is no substitute cheese, it's a lesson in putting in a little bit of effort.

"The food doesn't have mouths!" Harris bellows, moving some items around, then pulling out a bag of Parmesan. "It's not going to say, 'I'm over here to the left.' "

In the Camden rowhouse kitchen of Harris and his sidekick, chef Raafat Hanna, food is a metaphor for life. For five years the pair have taught culinary arts with a dash of life skills to teenagers from a nearby juvenile detention facility, and more recently to high school students willing to put in a few hours after school.

Next month, the program will move from the dilapidated State Street building to new digs around the corner where the chefs' charges can develop their skills in professional kitchens.

The facility is being constructed as part of a $4.6 million project to turn a pair of old commercial properties in one of Camden's roughest neighborhoods, at Eighth and Erie Streets, into a 23,000-square-foot job-training site.

Harris and Hanna are thrilled to leave the "hole," where over five years they've run 11 sessions and graduated 118 students.

"This hole has been amazing," Harris said. Some of the baddest kids in South Jersey - teenage boys convicted of drug-dealing, aggravated assault and rape - have been transformed into mini-Martha Stewarts.

One day last week, the students made 7UP Chicken, a can of soda stuffed in the bird to deliver a citrus flavor to the juicy meat. They finished off with blueberry cobbler a la mode.

They learn about food they never knew existed, they take trips to the supermarket to learn about purchasing provisions, and they work with a union to land post-release apprenticeships in Atlantic City casino kitchens and Camden County restaurants.

The boys' transformation process begins in the first class, when Harris - a large, loud man in a black chef's uniform and wearing a black cap backward - reminds his students from the detention center that life "is not over."

In the makeshift upstairs classroom and in the kitchen below, he tells the dozen or so his own story of growing up in Atlantic City, having two children before he was 20 - too young, he says - and making mistakes because of womanizing.

"They relate to that: 'Chef, I got locked up because of my girl!' " Harris said.

The Pennsauken resident never did time, but that's because "I just wasn't caught." Now 38, he is a single father with custody of his two daughters.

Raafat, a quieter, sagely foil to Harris and his huge personality, emigrated from Egypt 30 years ago and lives in Cherry Hill. "They struggle in life," he said. "We struggle like them."

Though the men relate to the incarcerated teens, who wear white chef uniforms over their state-issued khakis and boots, confrontation is part of the process.

"He put me in my place," said Daniel Gilford, 17, of his first encounter with Harris.

"He let me know I shouldn't come in with the attitude I come in with from the outside, and that when I come here, it's a new thing."

Gilford, of Pleasantville, ended up at Camden House, the juvenile-detention facility where he and the other students live, after a conviction for robbery, he said.