Top Chef, S9E6.

I would say this was a weird episode, but this whole season is playing out strangely, isn’t it? The challenges seem stranger, Tom Colicchio seems crankier, the contestant pool feels as weak as the last non-All Stars crop, and whether it’s editing or reality we have some grade-A wackos among the remaining chefs.

* Quickfire: This I liked – emphasis on fundamentals of French cooking, which, like it or not, is the underpinning of most haute cuisine. And sauces are critical. Learning that, say, Whitney didn’t know how to make a sauce tomate or that Chris C. could see the sauce velouté as a foundation for building flavors (like you’d find in Ruhlman’s Ratio) was enlightening – one of the few chances we’ve had to learn a lot about several of these chefs in a short period of time. But again with all the scallops?

* So Paul didn’t use a roux in his sauce espagnole, but the recipe says he used demi-glace, which is a highly reduced sauce espagnole combined with veal stock. So there was some roux in the demi-glace, as well as the concentrated flavors of an earlier sauce espagnole, and the thickening power of the demi-glace boosted the finished product as well. Demi-glace is a major ingredient in high-end kitchens, but using it here feels a little off – like he used someone else’s work to boost his own dish.

* I’ve written about béchamel before – isn’t it kind of simple for a show like this? I think it’s the easiest of the five mother sauces to make, and I don’t think converting it into a sauce mornay (as I do in my baked macaroni and cheese) was permissible.

* Elimination challenge: Four-course meal, at least two including steak. Was I the only one surprised that they decided to cook 200 individual steaks? Not only is that boring, it’s time-consuming, and gives you no room for error; dishes of sliced steak mean you can always toss any pieces that are over- or under-cooked (within reason – they didn’t shop for 250 plates). And a ten-ounce ribeye per person after another steak course, followed by dessert, is an obscene amount of food for an average person.

* So, is Heather a horrible person, or is she just edited that way? There were a few clips of her being bossy – although you know the same behavior from a male chef would just make him a “bad-boy” type – but the rant she gave the camera about Beverly was over the top. And then she won, which felt a lot like a narrative to me. It did sound like the cake was awesome; I can’t see giving Nyesha the win for a sauce and a compound butter (the latter is pretty straightforward), but didn’t Chris J. perfectly cook the steak in a dinner that required two steak courses? That doesn’t win?

* Tom … man, I like Tom because he’s so incisive, but there’s a vicious turn to his comments in the last few elimination challenges. I’d like to think this is because he’s disappointed in the quality of the cooking so far; from my couch, it looks like we’re not getting the transcendent cooking of the Voltaggios’ season, so that might be making Tom grumpier. But he just lit into the three chefs on the bottom to their faces and tore apart the eliminated chef right after it. He’s so much friendlier on Last Chance Kitchen, so I’m thinking Angry Elimination Tom is about the quality of the chefs.

* Not enough Hugh. It does sound like he’s cool with the roux-less mother sauces, though. Also, “Heather can’t remember who shot J.R., but she’s pretty sure it’s Beverly” is gold.

* Ty-Lor wants Jamie Lauren to know she is a capital-w Wuss.

* I don’t think I’ve ever actually had gazpacho, so I couldn’t interpret the Tom/Hugh divide on that dish. I feel like I need to rectify this in my next meal.

* I feel badly for Whitney after she revealed last week that she grew up quite poor, at times living in cheap hotels with her family when she was a kid. But a basic gratin is a pretty easy dish to make; even if she’d executed it well, she wouldn’t have won, and it seems like other chefs didn’t like her decision to cook it all on day two. She wasn’t winning this thing anyhow, so on that level I’m not as disappointed.

* LCK: Love the peanut gallery of eliminated chefs, especially Keith, and they seemed to really enjoy offering the commentary. Whitney’s burger sounded better overall, considering the toppings and the use of the pork sausage, and it sounds like she won because she had better flavor but also may have cooked hers better. Was Chuy at a disadvantage with ostrich, which reminds me of the leanest steak you could imagine? Again, Tom is so much more human in these videoclips that I wonder what has him so curmudgeonly in the elimination challenges.

* Final three: Paul and Chris C. remain the top two in the competition in my eyes. Heather’s blustering and her win this week don’t elevate her in my eyes; I think she’s just as limited as Beverly and Sara but doesn’t realize it. I’m leaning Nyesha, who started to come on strong in this episode, for the third spot, followed by Edward.