The dish

Second strong episode in a row, with almost complete emphasis on the craft of cooking, which is good because next week’s (Instagram users voting?) looks like a trainwreck.

* We start out with lots of scenes of the chatter among the ten remaining chefs, who are driving back up to LA in two vans. Most of it was just small talk, until some of the chefs started ribbing Kwame about his crush on Padma. He doesn’t even flinch: “what guy wouldn’t be attracted to Padma?” I can’t really argue with that, although at 5’9″ she’d tower over me even without heels. I did like his chianti-dry delivery of his supposed date line to Padma, saying he’d show up with flowers … and a Yorkie. “‘Surprise, I got you a dog!’ That wouldn’t be weird, right?”

* Season 4 and All-Stars contestant Antonia, now at Scopa and Black Market Liquor Bar in LA, is back to judge the Quickfire. Each chef gets to choose one ingredient, and thosee ten in total are the only items available to all chefs (although they don’t have to use all ten). We’re also back to immunity rather than sudden death, which is welcome. The chefs go one at a time, each getting twenty seconds to go grab an ingredient.

* Phillip grabs prime beef loin. Isaac grabs … a whole chicken? Marjorie asks (in the confessional) “why are you choosing another protein?” That made no sense to me either. I think only one of the chefs was really glad to see chicken, as it turned out. It’s versatile because it’s pretty flavorless.

* Chad grabs jalapeños, of course. Jeremy gets kosher salt, to which Isaac says, “thank God.” (I mean, if none of the chefs picked salt, would they really have denied that ingredient to everyone? How can you cook anything, especially any protein, without salt?) Marjorie grabs rice vinegar … I might have gone for lemons but any acid is good. Karen gets olive oil. Kwame takes garlic, which he says he can’t cook without. Amar takes cremini mushrooms. Carl gets a big basket of heirloom tomatoes. Jason, picking last, kind of annoys a lot of the other chefs by taking celery rather than an herb or other flavoring agent. I was surprised no one went for black pepper, butter, bacon, or onions. I’d never think to grab celery before onion, for example. I wouldn’t even take garlic before onion.

* Carl points out that this challenge is like “cooking at home” with just a few things in the fridge. Granted, our homes don’t have equipment this nice, but it’s nice for once to see a challenge that at least somewhat reflects the limitations home cooks face – and the common challenge of “I need to make dinner with what’s in the house already.”

* Amar says Charlie Palmer, one of his first bosses, always judged chefs and restaurants by how they cooked chicken. Now that I can see: it’s probably an easy dish for restaurants to half-ass, because if you go to a high-end place (especially a steakhouse) and order chicken, the kitchen is just not going to take you very seriously. I’m not saying that’s right; I’m saying that’s how it is.

* After picking chicken as his ingredient, Isaac cooks steak. I mean, he has the right to do that, but why not pick an ingredient you know you’ll use heavily?

* Jason is unapologetic about the celery and seems to enjoy the fact that other chefs are a little miffed. He’s right about its versatility and I could not agree more with him about the leaves. I buy whole stalks (sometimes called “heads” … sometimes “stalk” refers to a single rib) because I want the leaves and tender ribs in the center, and whatever I don’t use ends up in the next batch of poultry stock.

* Amar mocks Jeremy for yet another raw preparation – tataki style beef, which is kind of like a Japanese carpaccio, usually very lightly seared or grilled just to warm the exterior, raw in the center, and seasoned with vinegar and a paste of ginger. Jeremy just heats the surface with a blowtorch, but Amar is correct that Jeremy leans a little too much on the raw preps.

* Karen says she doesn’t want to complain about the ingredients they had and in doing so manages to complain about the ingredients they had while Padma and Antonia are tasting her dish.

* Least favorites: Isaac’s seared carpaccio with shaved jalapeños and mushrooms and tomato concentrate was both unappealing to look at and underwhelming to taste. Antonia says Karen’s flavors in her grilled steak salad with grilled and raw celery and jalapeño vinaigrette were “beautiful,” but that there was “no focus” to the dish. I’m trying to figure out how a jalapeño vinaigrette would taste like anything but pain.

* Favorites: Jeremy’s tataki-style steak with shaved mushrooms and crispy garlic vinaigrette worked as planned, especially the slight texture change that came from warming the top of the meat (I guess starting to denature the proteins without fully cooking them?). Amar’s wood-roasted chicken breast – that takes stones, serving the most boring part of the chicken in a competition like this – with roasted tomato vinaigrette and mushrooms à la Grecque (with olive oil, lemon juice, and herbs) showed great finesse and technique. Jeremy wins. Amar looks pissed, and why not? He actually cooked. Jeremy just sort of prepared, no?

* Elimination challenge: Ten years ago this year, Top Chef premiered (pre-Padma!). Each chef must create a dish representing who s/he was ten years ago.

* Jeremy was in a metal band … and had hair. Anyone catch what kind of guitar that was?

* Kwame talks about how ten years ago, he was starting high school and it marked the beginning of the end of his relationship with his strict father. Over the rest of the episode he makes it clear that the relationship never recovered and they haven’t spoken in years.

* Jason ten years ago was in his first management job, but says he was kind of awful to staff and used to chew out cooks who screwed up the restaurant’s signature trout dish, which was actually quite difficult to make.

* Marjorie wants to make green curry, but the Whole Foods they visit is out of lemongrass (in LA? Really?). She buys jarred green curry paste instead, which struck me at the time as a colossal mistake, because chefs get killed all the time for buying anything that’s that processed rather than working from scratch. Turned out I was wrong about it, but that’s what I thought in real-time.

* Carl does a pretty good Tom impersonation but we need to see more of this to put a grade on it.

* Chad quit drinking a year and a half ago and has since dropped 75 pounds, which in and of itself seems like a good reward for getting sober, although of course he talks about the improvements in his life too. I would have liked more on how he quit drinking – a good success story needs that aspect too as a way to encourage others, I think.

* So Recipe for Deception premiering last night means we never have to hear that “I just got a culinary boner” dipshit again, right? I do appreciate Bravo warning me that I want no part of that show. If that’s the line you chose to use in the commercial that introduces the show to the audience, it must be all kinds of awful. Also, boner jokes are only funny if your age hasn’t reached double digits yet.

* Jason is dressed like a clown. Yellow pants, red shoes. He’s talking about his look as if it’s some kind of fashion statement, but looking like you bought Ronald McDonald’s hand-me-downs and got dressed in the dark is not a fashion statement.

* Marjorie decides to grill some lemons to pull out the bitter aromatics in the rind and use that as a substitute for lemongrass. The two plants are not related: lemons are a true citrus tree (Citrus limon), while culinary lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) is a flowering rhizome that is typically harvested as soon as its stalks are mature. Both contain the aldehyde citral, also called lemonal, which has the strong aroma of lemon but is only found in small amounts in actual lemons, showing up more in lemongrass, lemon verbena, and other lemony plants. So she might need a lot of grilled lemon to replace what she lost when she couldn’t buy lemongrass, but at least she has that one chemical similarity as a hinge between the two ingredients.

* Michael Voltaggio is one of the guest judges, yet when he asks Phillip how the experience has been, Phillip says right in front of Tom that he has had to “cook food that makes the judges happy,” which makes Tom make that WTF face he makes when someone says something incomprehensibly stupid. Marjorie says in the confessional that she thinks “the kid is delusional.” It’s hard to argue with that.

* Amar makes a dish for his former mentor from ten years ago, Long Island chef Gerry Hayden, who was very sick at the time with ALS and passed away in September, probably not long after the episode finished shooting. Tom gets very choked up as they talk – visibly so, and the editors just let the moment “breathe,” with the camera on Tom while he tried to keep some composure. All reality shows want real emotions like that and end up trying to manufacture them through challenges, false drama, and other silliness. This was one moment that I think will stand out for a long time from season 13. (The episode ended with a brief full-screen honoring Chef Hayden’s memory.)

* Kwame’s dad is half Jamaican. One of the only decent memories Kwame seems to have of that period was going to jerk chicken shacks with his dad, although even talking about that seems to weigh him down further. I don’t know what it’s like to have such a terrible relationship with a parent – I have a couple of good friends who’ve had to sever parental ties, for reasons such as a history of abuse, and I can at least see the shadow it leaves on a person’s soul even after s/he has made the right decision to end the relationship. Anyway, we don’t know exactly what Kwame split with his father over, but it was clearly something worse than we’re hearing, and it’s got Kwame in a bit of a mental tailspin here. In hindsight, he probably should have pulled back for another memory, maybe an earlier or later year – it’s not like the judges know where he was in 2006 – but once he’d committed to this dish he was pretty well stuck.

* Blais is wearing a blue camo blazer for the upcoming war with invading aquatic creatures from Kepler-22b.

* Talk about a table where I’d love to just sit and listen: In addition to the five judges, we get Mei, Antonia, Zach Pollack, and iconic baker/restaurateur Nancy Silverton, who looks like my great-aunt Antoinette in that black and white outfit and with her hair up in clips. (Don’t laugh: “Aunty” was once President of the Amateur Astronomers’ Association of New York and longtime physics teacher who died about eight years ago at age 100.) Chef Silverton’s La Brea Bakery, and associated cookbook Breads from the La Brea Bakery, often show up in discussions of what and who started the artisan bread revival in the U.S.

* The dishes … Marjorie made a seared halibut with grilled and roasted vegetables in green curry sauce; so it turns out the lemon trick worked out great and I had it all wrong. Blais even said her vegetables were so good that maybe she didn’t need fish. (Am I dumb for expecting rice? Probably. Stupid American.) Chad made a shrimp ceviche with tomato concassé, shrimp cracker, pickled serrano, olive, and caper. Both dishes were hits.

* Isaac made a duck gumbo with roasted jalapeño andouille sausage, crispy rice cake, and duck cracklings. Man, I want to make this and then eat it, especially now since I’m still fighting some sort of bad respiratory infection. Jason made poached trout with toasted beets, spring vegetable salad, and goat milk vinaigrette, but he didn’t season the fish correctly before poaching it and had to top it with what looks like an excessive amount of finishing salt before service. Tom clearly does not like it – he turns like he’s debating the etiquette of spitting it out. Volt says the fish is perfectly poached, but it “stopped right there.” I’m very much on board with having him back as a judge more frequently – his comments are very specific and, at least this week, never denigrating. Anyone seen the cookbook he and his brother wrote a few years ago, VOLT ink.?

* Karen made orecchiete with pork ragù and broccoli rabe. She left some radicchio leaves whole, which meant they stayed fairly bitter, but I think the judges liked the concept. Still, it’s fresh pasta in a pork ragu with earthy vegetables – it’s not that novel so it has to be executed better than this. Amar made a butter-poached lobster with sauteed bok choy, tapioca curry, and tempura onion rings. Volt likes the homage to Chef Hayden and everyone seems to agree that the lobster is cooked perfectly. I assumed he’d be in the top three at this point.

* Carl made a fricassee (a meat dish that starts like a stir-fry but finishes like a braise) of California vegetables, burgundy snails, and fried eggs, along with a spring garlic puree. This is a clear hit from plating to tasting. Phillip made a ceviche mixto with tiger shrimp, halibut, razor claims, and pressure-cooked squid. Chef Silverton says it lacks brightness of true ceviche, but then Volt drops the cleaver by saying it was a “not-so-fresh fish taste” per Volt. If someone describes your seafood dish with a catchphrase from a 1980s douche commercial, you should probably log off your knives and go. Instead, Phillip just blames the judges again for not appreciating his genius.

* Jeremy lobster ravioli with a shellfish sauce (looks like a foam to me) and king salmon. The salmon is well cooked but unnecessary, and everyone just seems kind of whelmed – not underwhelmed, but there’s no praise here – until Padma drops this non sequitur “good thing you have immunity” bit. Either they edited out Tom saying it tasted like the before picture in a Febreze commercial or that was a real overreaction. Kwame made jerk broccoli with corn bread pudding and smokey blue cheese, and presents it with no conviction or any emotion other than exhaustion. Tom says “this is just confusing the hell out of me.” Silverton says a dish “has to look visually appealing” and this doesn’t. Volt, with pretty good insight for someone who just walked in, infers how Kwame’s emotional connection to food in general and the specific nature of this challenge probably worked against him. Padma dismisses the two with a curt “see you later,” although “off with their heads!” may have fit the mood more.

* Top three: Marjorie, Chad, and Carl. Chad’s ceviche was very acidic and bright. Marjorie’s was technically well executed. Tom liked her story, liked the dish, and liked the audible she called with the lemons. Carl’s was very classic and timeless, per Gail, although that doesn’t usually win a challenge. Marjorie wins. She kind of does this Eeyore thing when talking to the camera but she’s been fairly consistently in the top 3 just about all season now, other than that weird hiccup in the beer challenge, where Blais loved the dish but the beer she used didn’t come through in the sauce.

* Bottom: Kwame, Phillip, and Jason. Kwame “tried to bring a good memory out of some bad memories” and it didn’t work. Phillip is really acting like a narcissist at this point, saying, “I know this panel likes … really spicy” foods, like it’s just not possible that he’s cooking inferior dishes to those of these other very talented chefs. Tom, with his customary impatience for bullshit, cuts that off with “We just want good food up here.” Simplest dictum there could be. Jason just flat-out underseasoned the fish, which is typically a fatal error on this show. You do not give Tom Colicchio protein that is overcooked or underseasoned.

* Jason is eliminated. I would have preferred Phillip, especially given the whining, but given the face that Tom made while eating Jason’s dish, it had to have tasted pretty bad. Underseasoned fish is atrocious to eat.

* LCK: Take bland ingredients and make something flavorful, using the sponsor Soy Vey’s Teriyaki sauce (soy sauce; sugar; dried garlic, onion, and ginger; and sesame seeds and oil), which, while very sweet – and let’s face it, Tom ain’t using this in his restaurants – does at least include a lot of the base flavors you’d want in stir-fry dishes. I don’t know what will happen if you end up reducing it, though – it could get very sticky, or very salt, or maybe even both. Soy sauce is great but if that’s your only real source of umami you may end up with too much salt by the time you get enough glutamates.

* Angelina made terikyaki shrimp with potato and onion hash and a celery and orange salad. Shrimp a little overcooked. Jason made a salmon fillet with soft-cooked egg with broccoli and grilled sweet potato salad. Tom screwed with him a bit, asking if that’s how he liked the salmon cooked as if it were overdone, but Tom (like me) prefers his salmon around medium. Jason wins, just because Angelina’s shrimp was a tick overdone. I understand the need for sponsorships to pay for the web series, but this is too blatant a product promotion for my tastes (no pun intended).

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Carl, Jeremy, Amar, Chad, Karen, Isaac, Phillip.

Two new Insider posts from Saturday – a draft blog post on Delvin Perez and other Puerto Rican prospects and another post on the Ian Kennedy and Chris Davis contracts.

I thought this was the best episode of the season. The challenges were all well-designed and focused on the food. The dishes on the whole sounded really good – even one of the judges’ least favorites from the elimination challenge sounded like something I’d want to make at home. But there was one moment in the quickfire challenge that absolutely pissed me off.

* First we get some postgame drama from the previous challenge, with Jason killing Phillip in a big group discussion after the judging. Phillip comes off increasingly lacking in self-awareness every week, including his comment to Jason: “What you call gummy, I may enjoy. Does that make me wrong?” He’s shouted down with “yes,” because gummy potatoes are just disgusting (and I think are considered “wrong” by pretty much everybody – any decent cookbook explains that you shouldn’t overwork mashed potatoes for this reason). Plus it’s clear that in a challenge where all the chefs are on one team, they’re embarrassed to have a failure anywhere in the meal, even if it indirectly benefits them in the competition.

* Off to San Diego … their drive down from Palm Springs was totally fake. I can tell because we saw no traffic.

* Chad joined the Navy after 9/11, which is how he ended up in San Diego. He says he joined because he “wanted to kick whoever’s ass did that to us.” That mentality was apt in 1941.

* Javier Plascencia is the guest judge for the Quickfire; I didn’t realize this, but he has a new restaurant in San Diego’s resurgent Little Italy neighborhood called Bracero. Also, I keep wanting to call him Javier Placenta.

* The quickfire challenge is to make fish tacos in 20 minutes, and unfortunately, it’s a sudden death quickfire. I hate these gimmicks.

* In the scramble for ingredients, Jeremy called Wesley a “dick” for taking a lobster from him, which appears to have come because Jeremy was trying to take two and Wesley wanted one. I’m waiting for the inevitable episode where one chef kicks another in the balls over a slab of foie gras.

* And then Wesley can’t seem to hold on to his crustacean, putting it on Marjorie’s station and freaking out when he thinks someone stole it, eventually admitting, “I just misplaced my lobster.” He should be tagged with that in the future; instead of saying where he works, his font should say “Wesley: Misplaced Lobster.”

* Carl says he opened a taco stand in Nicaragua on a whim while staying there with his girlfriend. That’s kind of awesome, and apparently Nicaragua doesn’t have a very high standard covering who can sell food there.

* Chad makes his dish very spicy because Javier “eats habaneros like they’re apples.” More importantly, Chad says it correctly, with no tilde on the n. (Jalapeño, but habanero.)

* Is it really a bad idea to do your own tortillas? Marjorie is. I’ve never had a packaged tortilla that could come close to the worst fresh ones I’ve made. They start to dry out the moment they touch the air. Meanwhile, Wesley is doing a taco without a tortilla, more like a sushi roll, which does not strike me as something you can eat with your hands.

* And then, this happened: Angelina plated right on her cutting board, not on the plates, so she can’t serve anything to the judges. Is that not ticky-tack? If the dishes are done, they’re done, and they’re just a few inches away from the plates themselves. I don’t see any good reason why she couldn’t have served from there. The food was finished – and if it wasn’t, then she’d be judged on that, not on an empty dish. This isn’t failing to use a required ingredient, or continuing to cook or plate once time had expired. She made the dish. Just fucking eat it.

* Which brings me to my second point: Competition rules aside, I have a real problem with wasting food. The fact that Padma and Javier wouldn’t even taste that food – did it just go in the trash? – is beyond insulting. Taste it, give some feedback, and inform her she’s automatically on the bottom if you must. This was equivalent to taking her food and dumping it on the floor. Javier could easily have pled ignorance and just picked up one taco to taste it, even if it didn’t “count” for the show.

* Favorites: Karen’s oyster taco with kimchi-sesame salsa, pickled red cabbage, and avocado; Chad’s very spicy grilled thresher shark with oyster and sea urchin salsa, soy, and sesame; and, of course, Kwame, who made a wahoo taco with truffle cream and chipotle salsa. Winner is Chad, the hometown boy. Canking up the capsaicin appears to have been good strategy.

* Meanwhile, Phillip, from his orbit somewhere beyond Neptune: “Why is it that when I cook something perfect, I’m not in the top? I don’t understand. Am I not supposed to be making yummy food?” Well, you could start by not saying “yummy” because you’re not a three-year-old.

* Bottom: Angelina by default. Wesley goes on camera, saying failing to plate is “just stupid,” and then he knocks three trays and a pile of mangos on the floor. Angelina has to pick one chef to battle to save herself from elimination, and chooses … Wesley, because he “can get into his own head sometimes.”

* The quickfire elimination challenge is Caesar salad-inspired. It was invented in the restaurant Javier owns now, called Caesar, and the chefs must make any dish using only the ingredients he uses in that salad. I was a bit surprised to see anchovies in the dressing; I’m pretty sure Alton Brown said in his episode on the subject that they were not traditional.

* Wesley is struggling to fry an egg cleanly. Angelina calls out Wesley for double-dipping a spoon. This is kind of a race to the bottom at this point.

* Wesley eventually makes a proper fried egg, serving it with anchovy remoulade, grilled romaine hearts, croutons, and lime zest. Angelina made crostini with garlic, olive oil, dijon vinaigrette, lime, grilled romaine, and anchovy. Wesley’s was simple, with a perfectly cooked (!) egg, but Javier wanted more of the “garlic condiment of the lettuce” (I think that’s what he said – I listened three times and that’s the best I got). Angelina had a good idea but Javier says he wanted more sauce. Wesley wins, so Angelina goes home. I also think Angelina’s dish didn’t show much technique at all – it sounded more like layered ingredients but nothing like Wesley’s remoulade or grilled romaine.

* Elimination challenge: Emeril, Tom, and Blais show up with craft beer that they (including Padma) made in conjunction with Stone Brewing, a major microbrewer in the city. Each chef gets one and has to create a dish that includes or emphasizes the flavors the judge added to that beer. Padma’s golden ale includes jalapeño, ginger, and tamarind. Blais’ stout contains beets, chocolate, and ras el hanout (a Moroccan/Maghreb spice mix that includes about a dozen ingredients, like combining the spices for a pumpkin pie with those in a garam masala). Emeril’s beer, type unknown, contained coffee, cayenne, and tangerine. Tom’s wheat beer has lemon, coriander, and banana (for body). Wheat beer with coriander sounds very soapy to me – and I happen to really like coriander.

* They’re cooking at Juniper + Ivy, Blais’ first restaurant in Little Italy – his second, the Crack Shack, just opened right next door – and one of my favorite places to eat in the country. I think I even spotted one of my servers on the show. Anyway, if you haven’t picked up Blais’ cookbook, Try This At Home, I recommend it highly. (That links to my review.)

* If the episode is just an hour long, so 44 minutes of content without commercials, we could do with less footage in Whole Foods and more footage of actual cookery.

* Isaac says that banana is fatty (which it most definitely is not), so he has the idea to make it into a sort of mayonnaise that he calls “#banannaise.” Don’t try this at home, kids. Mostly because it will be gross.

* One of the guests at judges’ table – possibly the guy from Stone – says there are 106 microbreweries in San Diego, further proving that it is the greatest place to live in the continental United States.

* The dishes start with Padma’s beer. Chad made a carrot-roasted opah (moonfish) with ginger hominy, jalapeño purée, and tamarind-glazed carrots. Good marks all around. Amar made a sous vide chicken breast, crispy chicken thigh, jalapeño popper, and tamarind ginger chutney. This gets higher marks, particularly for how it complements the beer.

* Wesley sees that his lamb is overcooked, because he let it rest too long. But remember – Angelina’s mistake was “stupid.”

* The next set of dishes go with Blais’s stout: Karen made a roasted duck breast with cocoa nib beet puree, ras el hanout, and roasted carrots. Wesley served his lamb with roasted beet purée and ras el hanout roasted carrots. The judges pounce, saying the lamb is dry and the beet puree too one-dimensional. Jeremy made duck breast with chocolate granola, pickled beet, and a pickled blueberry hibiscus reduction. The judges like the concept but it needed more fat and more chocolate.

* Emeril’s beer: Marjorie made roasted potato gnocchi with chicken ragù, made with coffee, tangerine, cayenne, and roasted mushrooms. She braised the chicken in the beer, but the flavor of the beer did not come through to the final dish at all, although Blais says he loves it anyway. (The J&I menu always has a couple of hearty pasta dishes along these lines.) Phillip made a roasted duck breast with rutabaga puree, fresh tangerine, and a sauce with coffee in it. Carl made a grilled short rib with ancho chile, coffee, and dried cherry salsa. The pairing with the beer is almost too close, and Emeril says it needed a tiny bit more salt. Just on the description, this sounded the most mundane dish of all – I’ve had short rib preparations with all of those ingredients before.

* Tom’s beer: Isaac made a corn and crab velouté (actually a sauce made with stock and a blond roux) with crispy potato, king crab salad, and his sriracha banannaise. The dish just reads weird to the judges, including the presentation of the crab salad on top of a chunk of a corn cob. Kwame made a chicken mojo with banana soffrito puree, garlic puree, crispy chicken thigh, and garlic green onion. Huge raves, of course. Jason made a pork and squid meatball with a carrot wheat beer sauce, salsa povera, and grilled squid tentacles. The meatball is compared to the stuffing from dim sum dumplings. Blais can’t stop commenting on how weird it is. Tom says, “This is bait, man!”

* Karen, Jeremy, Amar, Kwame were among the judges’ favorites. Their least favorites include Jason’s; Blais keeps calling it weird, Emeril says customers would have sent it back, and Tom says it was too “historical” (based on Jason’s own defense of the dish). Wesley’s was not refined enough, and he killed the lamb. Isaac’s soup was a “muck of a velouté.” Marjorie’s dish was good, but had nowhere near enough beer flavor.

* Judges’ Table: The top three are Amar, Karen, and, The Man We All Know and Love, Kwame. Amar’s dish was “powerful” with the most assertive flavors of the season from him. He went heavy on jalapeño, which seems to have been a winning formula in this episode. Karen’s beet sauce was “addictive” per Tom. Padma loved how Kwame took the banana element form the beer and “made it (his) own.” Tom says, “That dish could stand up anywhere.” Yet the winner is Karen. I really thought Kwame would win based on comments and how clever his use of the banana was; perhaps they’re trying to spread the wins out a little more so he doesn’t Qui the whole season?

* Jason, Isaac, and Wesley on the bottom. Jason’s sounds really terrible. The tentacles were slimy and the whole dish was incredibly strange. Yet Wesley is sent home; Tom says shortly before elimination that the “worst-cooked dish sends you home,” and overcooking your protein is a capital crime in front of the 24-hour short rib master.

* LCK: Grayson, Angelina, and Wesley are in a three-person battle, making hamburgers in fifteen minutes to make the burgers. Angelina says you need 10-12 minutes to make a great burger, which sounds about right; I usually give mine about 10 minutes on a grill to get to medium, 12 for medium-well, although managing the heat is key.

* The first thing to do is start heating the skillet, right? You want that sucker hot when the meat hits the pan. All three chefs make very thick burgers that will require the maximum time to cook.

* Grayson wants to use pork belly in her burger, but it’s not ground yet, which costs her a minute or so. Her burger sounds similar to Bar at Husk’s burger, which is 1/3 bacon. Wesley is doing lamb, my least favorite protein and IMO a terrible burger meat because it’s so lean. Even at medium, it’s probably past eating.

* Wesley serves that lamb burger with a fennel-jalapeño onion slaw, goat cheese, and ras el hanout, although Tom says it’s a little too compacted. Grayson serves her beef and pork belly burger with mushrooms, pickled red onion, and Wisconsin cheddar. It looks gloriously messy but the cheese didn’t melt all the way. There’s that minute she lost to grinding the pork. Angelina’s burger includes beef and pork and comes with avocado, chimichurri, heirloom tomato, pickled habanero, and fresh arugula.

* Angelina wins! Go figure. The previously-eliminated chefs seem pretty happy for her. She did take a bit of a beating in the main show.

* Rankings: Kwame

… Jeremy, Marjorie, Karen, Amar, Carl, Jason, Chad, Isaac, Phillip. I’m making a call on Isaac here, as he’s cooked almost entirely within his Cajun comfort zone and struggles to get outside of it. And while I mock Phillip’s “my food is yumm-ay!” commentary, he’s right about one thing – the judges don’t seem to love his food.

Sorry this is a bit late, but I spent the entire workday Friday on the phone working on the top 100 prospects package, which will run right after the big hand-egg match in early February. I missed the Lazarito workout because my daughter had pneumonia (she’s better now), but it sounds like it wasn’t a great look for the 100+ scouts who were there.

* Quickfire: Dates! I miss Arizona Medjool dates. The natural-foods grocer Sprouts was my go-to spot for Medjool dates, which are just … better, I don’t even know how to describe it. I carry dried dates with me on the road a lot because they’re so good and high in both fiber and sugar. I also love them Firefly (Las Vegas)-style, stuffed with almonds and wrapped in bacon, with a balsamic glaze and a little sprinkled bleu cheese (although I could skip that last bit). Anyway, the chefs can choose from three specialty varieties here.

* Chrissy Teigen is introduced as the guest judge (did someone really call her “John Legend’s wife,” as if she has no individual identity?) and is showing award-show level cleavage.

* Teigen says, “Dates are sweet and succulent and sticky,” to which Padma offers the forced-risqué line, “Like you.” Slutty talk from Padma seems to be an ongoing thing here but it does nothing for me, sorry. The chefs’ challenge is to tell a story of the best date each of them has ever had in a dish that highlights dates.

* As much as I love dates, I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with them, because pitting and trimming them is among the bigger pains in the asses in the kitchen. Olives are up there too, as are gooseberries (did that once – never again).

* Giselle is somehow struggling with burners, but it’s not clear if it’s her fault or she’s getting edited to look the fool because they’re trying to offer us some #foreshadowing.

* We get a bunch of stories from the chefs, with the longest story coming from Jason, but overall these people had some boring dates. I don’t think I could do any better, though; my other half isn’t a foodie and hates dates (the fruit, that is).

* Angelina has no date story, apparently, saying, “My boyfriend is the restaurant.” That’s … hot.

* Worst dishes: Chad’s pan-roasted halibut with orange salsa verde, pine nut, and zahari date froth, because the orange was bitter. Phillip’s tuna crudo with peaches and zahidi dates didn’t have enough date flavor. Carl made a date milkshake, which I’ve had at Joe’s Farm Grill out in Gilbert, Arizona. They’re really good, but not exactly the kind of thing to win a Top Chef challenge.

* Favorites: Jason’s roasted baby carrots with Deglet Nour dates, brown butter, cumin, lime, and pine nuts; Padma loved the char on everything. Isaac’s chicken ballontine (hey, Ruhlman has a recipe for that!) with medjool date sauce thanks to crispy chicken skin. Giselle’s date salad with pork sausage, arugula, watercress, and spiced walnuts showcased the date particularly well. The winner, however, is Jason, which they kind of foreshadowed with long story about the date he went on with his long-term partner.

* Elimination challenge: Art Smith, who appeared on Top Chef Masters a few years back, is the guest judge, and will be renewing his vows with his partner as one of 25 couples getting married in a mass wedding ceremony. Yeah, it’s a gay wedding, but do we even need to say that any more? It’s not like it’s an alternate-universe wedding. A gay wedding is just like a straight wedding, amirite?

The chefs will prepare the entire meal as one team, but will be judged individually on their dishes.

* Padma got ordained that morning to officiate the wedding, which … um … okay.

* Kwame is making sauces for two different dishes, which seems ambitious, although he has been the most impressive chef so far.

* Giselle is struggling to understand a dish in the discussion on the way to Whole Foods, so they’re clearly setting her up for elimination in the editing. When she says she doesn’t like the sound of Wesley’s idea for their dish, saying, “for me it doesn’t go (together),” Wesley mansplains her down with, “It doesn’t matter, it’s unbelievable.” I get defending your own recipe, but to say that to another professional chef’s face is beyond dismissive.

* Isaac is buying peeled garlic? What?

* A yoga instructor comes to the house to do yoga with the chefs in the morning, other than Isaac and Wesley, who do what I would likely to and go laze around in the shade instead. I’d probably have a book, though. I have nothing whatsoever against yoga, but don’t namaste me, bro.

* The editing of this episode makes Giselle look both incompetent and hapless. She may be below the others in skill – although even assuming that seems like a stretch – but she can’t possibly be as bad as she looks here, or she wouldn’t have made the show in the first place. She’s squabbling with Karen, her partner on the vegetarian dish, but we get Karen’s perspective on their disagreement without Giselle’s. Is Giselle too needy, or is Karen just not communicating well? I feel like a defense attorney this season.

* Angelina doesn’t seem to grasp Jason’s dish (they’re working together too), which, again, would be his fault as much as hers. They’re not on the same page, which means he didn’t adequately communicate his vision to her. What isn’t helping is that he keeps calling it “capunet,” which I think means capuns, a Swiss-Italian dish that sort of looks like what they’re making but usually contains dried beef and/or sausage in the filling, not braised chicken, and is finished by boiling in seasoned milk. What these two are really making turns out to be more like niños envueltos, a dish with which I was not familiar before this episode, a sort of stuffed meat roll but here wrapped in a chard leaf like capuns would be.

* Phillip is making what he keeps calling “mashed potatoes” but is spraying it out of an iSi canister to try to create a foamy sauce, which I can only imagine will make it gummy by overworking the starches. Maybe (this is pure speculation here) he could have whipped cream and folded it into loose mashed potatoes? I don’t know if this would work but it would avoid the gumminess.

* Isaac semi-brags that, “I should probably come with a warning label that says ‘does not play well with others'” yet everyone likes him, so I think he’s all bluster. He’s just crazy, but he doesn’t seem to be getting on anyone’s nerves.

* Padma is dressed almost demurely as the instant minister, although she did have her one look-at-me element with hot purple lipstick.

* Has anyone heard how many heterosexual marriages across the country fell apart after this episode was aired? I feel like the entire institution has been undermined here.

* Enough of that – let’s talk food. First up is Amar/Chad: Sherry-glazed pork belly with smoked orange marmalade, pickled fennel, onion, and smoked salt. It’s a huge hit and of everything in this episode, this is the recipe I’d most want.

* Jeremy, working solo: Citrus roasted carrots with harissa yogurt, shaved radish, and baby kale. He got some kind of color on those carrots, unless my television was on the fritz. Tom and Art both rave.

* Wesley/Kwame: Pickled shrimp with cucumber onion salad, citrus vinaigrette, cashews. Kwame’s nuoc cham, a Thai fish sauce-based dressing that must have been in the vinaigrette, is an immediate hit.

* Angelina/Jason: Niños envueltos – Swiss chard rolled up and stuffed with braised chicken, pancetta, cauliflower, and a sauce made from braising liquid and caramelized honey. Angelina called it “like a dolma,” and Jason gets pissed off and very condescending because it’s not dolma at all. (Dolma are Greek or Middle Eastern dishes of stuffed vegetables or rolled grape/cabbage, which Wikipedia says can also be called sarma.) leaves Judges love it.

* Isaac: Dirty rice and smoked chicken and jalapeno sausage. Tom says it’s “right.” I’m a bit surprised they didn’t ding him for making something in his comfort zone.

* Karen/Giselle: Charred eggplant puree with asparagus, smoked mushrooms, citrus vinaigrette, and kumquats. The asparagus is undercooked, the farro (I missed that in the description, apparently) is underseasoned, and the mushrooms were soggy. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

* Phillip/Kwame: Center cut NY steak with potato “cream” and tomato-eggplant relish. Shockingly, the potatoes suck: they have a gummy texture and a raw taste. The relish is good, of course, and Padma says it “saves Phillip’s dish.”

* Tom and my sister were married on the same day in 2011. Not to each other, though. That would be weird.

* Marjorie/Carl: Grilled apricots with cherries, mascarpone, and hazelnuts. (Stop calling it “mascarpone cheese,” and please stop calling it “marscapone.” It’s “MAHS-car-POH-neh.” It’s like cream cheese, but good.) Apparently this whole dish is fantastic, which will be totally forgotten the next time someone is eliminated for dessert and people start talking about a “curse.”

* Judges’ table: “Today was a proud moment in Top Chef history.” Okay, okay, don’t hurt yourselves patting your own backs. The winner was Wesley and Kwame’s shrimp dish. Kwame added tangerine and ginger juice to the nuoc cham, and used all of the juices in the sauce to pickle the shrimp, so it had big flavors but was very cohesive. The individual winner is The Man We All Know and Love, Kwame.

* Worst dishes: Karen/Giselle and Phillip/Kwame. Kwame acts like he might actually be eliminated, which is positively Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan) in absurdity. Phillip explains his dish to the judges as if this was the result he wanted, but then Jason chimes in, “I don’t think that’s how the dish was described to the team.” Marjorie piles on with, “you said mashed potatoes,” so the editors didn’t mislead us here – everyone thought he was doing steak and potatoes. No one is talking about the steak, by the way, which is in and of itself odd since that’s the main component of the dish.

* Giselle said the dish did not include “her” flavors, so Karen retorts that she found it “hard to collaborate” and, more insulting, “at least I was trying.” Will nobody ever learn that these arguments in front of the judges do nobody any favors? Suddenly, Giselle says “it’s shocking that Phillip doesn’t recognize his flaws,” while she and Karen understand what they did wrong … which is sort of like saying the apology is more important than the mistake. Phillip defends himself by saying that was indeed the dish he wanted to make, but Tom says he was “going for something we didn’t care for.”

* Jason is really pissed, even after judges’ table, which might make sense if he were directly affected by the elimination decision.

* Giselle is eliminated. While she was the weakest chef up for elimination, Phillip made gummy potato sauce and I kind of have a hard time with him staying – as if perhaps he stayed on reputation. The only good thing on his plate came from Kwame.

* LCK: Chefs have 20 seconds to look at the cart of ingredients, then have to write down two dish ideas they can execute in 20 minutes. Tom picks one for each to do – Giselle has to do lamb, fig, and pistachio, while Grayson has to do shrimp and jalapeño – but the women negotiate and end up doing their first choices, Giselle’s chicken with summer polenta and Grayson’s lamb with fig and mustard. Tom is having way more fun in LCK this season, and the women both seem to join in by acting a little goofy. The main show could benefit from some of this silliness. I also love how Tom comments on specific cooking times (Grayson’s rack of lamb should take twelve minutes max) or plating (he tells the camera Giselle is plating too soon, with five minutes left, so she changes her plan). He’s a highly successful and respected chef – I want more of his commentary.

* Grayson’s lamb rack comes with a fig and port sauce and a take on aligot potatoes (a French dish of mashed potatoes blended with certain low-fat cheeses). Giselle’s chicken comes with a corn and tomato salad and polenta. Chicken appears to be perfectly cooked but the polenta might not be hot enough. Grayson wins although it appears to have been very close.

* Rankings: Kwame, Jeremy, Jason, Marjorie, Isaac, Carl, Amar, Wesley, Karen, Phillip, Chad, Angelina.