Top Chef, S9E12.

Recap of last night’s Top Chef: Frozen Food Infomercial…

* Charlize in the stew room! I’m impressed – if nothing else, it looks like she didn’t big league anyone, and really is just a fan of the show. So she and I have … one thing in common. We can build a relationship on this, right?

* Quickfire: Prep three ingredients, then make a dish incorporating all of them. Guest judge this week is Cat Cora, who might be the least impressive TV chef I’ve ever seen. I did watch Iron Chef America for the first year or two that she was on it, and found her stuff less imaginative and a lot less appealing than any of the other Iron Chefs at the time; Boston chef Ken Oringer (of Toro, Clio, Coppa, and La Verdad – he’s legit) just destroyed her in one of the last episodes I watched before I gave up on the show. Cora may be a wonderful person, but given what I’ve seen from her on TV I’m not sure why she’s here.

* And then she criticizes the deep-fried bacon for not having “flavor.” Really? Deep-fried bacon lacks flavor? If you want to criticize them for not rendering the bacon at all, I guess that’s valid, although bacon fat is loaded with flavor, so really, what the hell was she talking about?

* Back to the quickfire … Padma looks like she’s wearing her boyfriend’s clothes, assuming she’s dating a lumberjack, or perhaps is just wearing his tablecloth. Then she refers to the prize money as “ten thousand smackeroos,” so someone forgot that she’s not at home talking to her baby.

* Chris J. and Grayson are one team, and their styles don’t meld that well, with Grayson – who nearly botches the fresh pasta beyond repair; I’d love to know what she did to rescue a dough so dry it was tearing in the roller – telling Chris to get a move on, and Chris saying, “Fast is slow, and slow is smooth,” reciting something he apparently once read in a fortune cookie. “Good fortune happy lucky big time for you and family.”

* Paul and Ed, the dream team combo, end up DQ’d because Paul forgot to cook the shrimp. He didn’t just forget to add them, as Bev did with her curried rice krispies – he didn’t even cook them. He might have been the last of the six chefs I’d expect to brain-cramp like that, even if he was once a dope dealer.

* Despite all their issues, including finishing in the final seconds, Grayson and Chris win, leaving Lindsay and Sara as bitter as raw radicchio. (Foreshadowing!) Sara says in the confessional that her dish was better, which would be entirely plausible if we’d ever seen her touch Grayson and Chris’ dish. No immunity, though, which makes sense since we’re almost to the finale.

* Elimination challenge: feed 200 people at a block party with your take on a traditional block-party dish, which is then twisted into a commercial for Healthy Choice, which pushes low-calorie, low-fat, low-salt, dishes made with cheaply-sourced factory-farmed ingredients and pretends they’re good for you. Anyway, how come I never get invited to these parties? I need to get my agent on this.

* Anyway, the chefs pick their dishes, and are then told to lighten them up because the sponsor says so. Healthier versions? Come on, it’s Top Chef, not The Biggest Loser. I want fat served on a bed of fat, topped with hollandaise.

* We keep hearing about how the chefs reduced the salt in their dishes. Is it unfair of me to expect a show that’s all about food, with chefs and judges who talk about fresh ingredients, to understand that for a person with normal blood pressure, salt is not a problem? If you’re not eating processed foods, and your blood pressure is fine, you’re not eating too much salt. I could understand saying that part of the challenge for the chefs is to force them to amplify flavors without salt, but please, stop repeating the myth that salt is unhealthful.

* The chefs only get two and a half hours, including prep time. They did know ahead of time, so they could plan accordingly, but on the flip side, the mise en place must have taken up half of that time.

* Lindsay and Sara are making meatballs. Sara switches to turkey, but other than seeing them come off the grilltop a little flat we don’t get much more info on them. Lindsay goes with veal and lamb. Why lamb in meatballs? That has to be the fattiest meat option available. I don’t really like lamb – just lost my taste for it all of a sudden – but when I’ve had ground lamb dishes, I always find them a little greasy. For a low-fat challenge, it seems like an odd choice. Lindsay binds her meatballs with Greek yogurt, which sounds weird, but she gets props for using chickpea flour, which I think is an underutilized kitchen weapon – I’ve used it for a slew of things, including savory crepes and fresh pasta. I’m also eager to try her quinoa and black pea salad with a garlic-parsley vinaigrette. (But did she really use garlic powder in the dish?)

* Grayson and Chris end up with chicken salad sandwiches, Grayson’s choice because Chris was too busy pondering the true meaning of “block.” Chris kills the mayo and uses a tofu emulsion, reminiscent of Alton Brown’s egg-less Caesar salad dressing, so not only is it lower in fat but it’s now friendly to people with egg allergies. Grayson is crunched for time, as always, but her choice to make the sandwiches to order turns out to be her trump card over Chris. I did think Chris’ watermelon salad side dish, with a frozen pineapple slush poured on top, looked far better than Grayson’s trendy watermelon salad with feta and whatever you lost me after you put goat cheese with watermelon.

* Paul and Ed push the envelope, of course, with their takes on a Korean dish called galbi, grilled beef ribs first marinated in a salty-sweet mixture and often cooked table-side in restaurants or at cookouts. I’ve never had it, but you pretty much had me at “beef ribs.” Ed refuses to tone down any of the fat other than trimming the short ribs, which is kind of a fool’s errand because there’s so much fat laced in the meat itself, and then pairs it with a white-flour steamed bun. Paul switches to ground turkey, mixes in eggplant, and serves it in a lettuce wrap with a white-peach kimchi and a nonfat yogurt-miso sauce. Paul says at judges’ table that he added eggplant for the fat, which I assume is just nerves talking because, um, it has almost no fat. Ed, meanwhile, has to deal with kids stealing his bread, which is also probably a sign it’s not health food.

* Winners: Paul, Lindsay, and Grayson. Tom loves Paul’s kimchi. Grayson stands up to Tom at judges’ table and I think rendered him speechless. Paul wins again, no shock, but he did have the most out-of-the-box dish, including the things he did to maintain flavor while losing fat, and apparently executed it.

* Losers: Ed, Sarah, Chris, although the judges say nobody really flopped. Sarah kind of gets a pass for a good dish that wasn’t as good as her competitor’s; the biggest complaint was uneven mixing of the salad, which sounds like a terrible nitpick. Ed loses to Deep Blue, but also gets points off for punting on the healthful part of the challenge and bullshitting the judges. Chris J. is the pretty obvious choice for elimination here, and I think he was the worst remaining contestant, at least in odds of winning the whole thing. Grayson blames herself for picking chicken salad, which didn’t play to Chris’ strengths, but he was there for the decision on what to cook and didn’t come up with a valid alternative.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Mystery Box challenge. Bev and Chris make almost identical dishes. Tom doesn’t say so, but I think the deciding factor may have been the white anchovy, which Bev integrated in her dish, but Chris didn’t after suffering chef’s block.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay. I still think Sarah is too limited – both of her dishes in this episode were Italian-plus, at best – and Grayson is probably the weakest chef remaining. Looks like we’ll get a re-entry from LCK after next week’s episode.