The Next Food Network Star, week 4.

Just playing a little catch-up here…

• I said last time that this show is about humiliating the contestants, and this week was no exception. How exactly did the first challenge – do a one-minute instructional video on a topic you may or may not be familiar with and have only seconds to prepare – relate to the challenge of being a TV chef? Are the instructional videos we see on FN.com unscripted? Are they all successfully shot on the first take? Giving the contestants a few minutes to think or jot down some notes would have been perfectly reasonable and avoided a lot of the ugly things that we saw, like Aaron going totally off the rails on presentation.
• I thought he had the easiest task, too; dismantling a pineapple is a snap. Hardest was either Kelsey’s – she totally cheated by taking the bone off, since Frenching means leaving the rack intact – or Shane’s, since you can’t dismantle a coconut in sixty seconds. Alton Brown even suggests baking them for 20 minutes.
• Nipa needed to go, clearly, but she caught a pretty raw deal this week, since she clearly doesn’t cook much with seafood, and may not really need to if her idea is to bring Indian cooking to the masses. That said, she didn’t carry herself well, had poor presence, and like Michael Symon I was offended by the way she wasted most of the meat on that trout.
• Symon said one of the most profound things you’re going to hear on this show when he pointed out that even if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you need to act like you do. We all know that the air of authority can cover up the stench of ignorance.
• The frustrating part about watching Jennifer is that her problem is totally fixable: When you’re on camera, don’t think. If you start to think through what you’re saying – or worse, what you just said – you’re lost. And it goes pear-shaped very quickly after that.
• Kelsey’s pretty clearly taken the lead, not just because she won both challenges, but because the judges are saying that they liked her new persona this week. I thought from the start that white chocolate would be my choice of the bullshit Iron Chef ingredients, since it’s full of cocoa butter, a fat with great mouth-feel. She made another good call with tilapia, which is pretty versatile.
• Adam: Crepes plus halibut cooked two ways in sixty minutes? What are you on? A crepe takes at least 75 seconds to cook, and doing two at once in adjacent pans still means almost 20 minutes just to cook the crepes. Bad idea.
• I distinctly remember saying “stop crying,” but no one listened.