Top Chef Masters, S4E1.

New post for Insiders today with a scouting report on Danny Hultzen. I also broke down the Zack Greinke trade on Friday.

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I’ll say up front that I greatly prefer the regular version of Top Chef to what I saw of Top Chef Masters in season three, which included some fairly absurd challenges (cooking with live bugs?) and often felt, to me, disrespectful to chefs who by and large have already achieved substantial success in the field. The higher level of professionalism on Masters also means there’s less opportunity for snark, mostly because we don’t get the same silly drama behind the scenes. That said, I just made Mary Sue Milliken’s quinoa fritters again last night, so I’m going to watch this season of Masters if only because I’m hoping to learn something new.

As for the chefs … I don’t think I’ve eaten at any of their restaurants, although I’m familiar with Chris Cosentino and am dying to get to one of his places – I just haven’t been in San Francisco proper in five years. Cosentino does have a stand in LA’s new Umamicatessan, called PIGG, and I’m sure you can figure out what they serve.

To the episode:

* Quickfire: The blackjack setup, where two-chef teams were each dealt two ingredient cards and had to incorporate both into a single dish, was cheesy and took up way too much time. They should have let chefs double down, taking a third ingredient for double the prize money.

* Speaking of those ingredients … bologna? That’s back to disrespecting the chefs. There were eleven ingredients that would all have fit well on a haute cuisine menu, and then there was O-s-c-a-r. Also, I haven’t eaten bologna in thirty years. It’s what I imagine human flesh might taste like.

* Dry aged beef and whole catfish seems like the most challenging combination – the chefs have to work with two proteins, each of which should be the star of the dish, and as it turns out they have to break the fish down in the allotted time of 15 minutes.

* Clark Frasier complains that quinoa doesn’t go with langoustine. Quinoa goes with just about everything – it has little taste of its own but takes dressings, sauces, and aromatics really well. His team’s dish ends up a mess, looking like someone spat the candied/popped quinoa on the langoustine.

* Duck breast and peaches seemed like the best combo of ingredients – fruit sauces, chutneys, and gastriques all work so well with duck – but lost to the beef and catfish. We shouldn’t be shocked that Cosentino would be good with proteins, I suppose.

* Random thought: Do chefs like these worry that the editing will make them look like doofuses? We get complaints from chefs in just about every season that the editing required to squeeze the two challenges into 44 minutes often makes them look bad (or dumb, or mean), so does that also apply to these chefs? We already have Art Smith carping about Cosentino’s youth and inexperience, which I found incredibly catty – who cares how old a chef is if he can really cook? Does your food somehow taste better if you’re on the far side of 40? And does Art not remember the cocky-as-all-hell Michael Voltaggio?

* Elimination challenge: As twists go, these individual lottery tickets, with small awards or penalties (like losing 30 minutes of cooking time) are pretty harmless, nowhere near as bad as the team-wide tickets.

* Missy Robbins cut a deep cash into one of her little fingers on a mandolin and ends up leaving the show; she needed a skin graft and couldn’t wield a knife for one or two months.

* I love Thierry Rautureau discussing the BOOfay. Speaking of Thierry, he’s back for a second go-round; he appeared on season 2 of Masters under the previous format, where he failed to advance beyond the preliminary round.

* Art: “I cook for billionaires.” Does he have “Chef to the 1%” T-shirts for sale?

* The twists from those gold team-wide tickets: Each of the two teams’ assigned cuisines – one Mexican, one Indian – is revealed after their initial shopping trip. Team Mexican sends Art, who looked about as lost in the supermarket as I’d be in an auto-parts store, on the initial trip, while Team Indian chooses to make do with what they’ve got.

* The dishes … Patricia’s cornmeal pancake with chicken and beef adobo and peach and corn salsa sounded phenomenal; I wasn’t clear whether this was her concept, or her execution of Missy’s concept.

* Lorena’s ceviche ‘tigre de leche’ got mushy because she made it too soon. It amazes me that chefs at this level can make fundamental errors like that – is it the time pressure? I can’t imagine it’s the food knowledge. Anyway, Lorena’s probably the one chef you all know, because you see her face every time you drive by a Taco Bell.

* Clark’s dish – green beans with fried shallots and goat cheese – looked about as Indian as pasta alla carbonara, which, for a challenge in which his team was required to cook an Indian-themed buffet. Excuse me, BOO-fay. Team India scuffled almost across the board; Mark’s curried corn soup with curried flatbread was bland, and the judges made the filling in Takashi shrimp and salmon dumpling sound like spam mousse. The one dish that sounded most appealing here was Thierry’s masala salmon and beef shoulder with spiced mango couscous and lemon-peanut chutney, but that’s also not terribly Indian. (Unfortunately, the recipe omits the couscous, which was much more interesting to me than the proteins.)

* Judges’ table: Unfortunately, the insufferable James Oseland is back at judges’ table; he’s incredibly nitpicky, and even when he says he likes something he looks like someone just slipped a moldy onion under his nose. When your comments on dishes from chefs at this level are so skewed toward the negative, I have to seriously question your palate or your intent. And overall, I think the judges are much less insightful and entertaining than Tom, Hugh, Padma, and Gail. I understand the reluctance to lay into any of the chefs, given their resumes, but I also think the judges are so reserved that they fail to inform us enough about the dishes.

* Chris wins again for his “pork and beans” with pork belly, chorizo, and chickpeas, earning tepid applause from teammates Art and Kerry. That’s now $16K raised for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

* Team Indian gets scolded for missing the target by a subcontinent or two. Seems like they lost because they didn’t shop again or change their dishes enough, so apparently it’s better to send the village idiot back to the store than to send no one at all. Chef Sue Torres of Sueños in Manhattan is sent home for essentially having to cook a cuisine she wasn’t prepared to cook, having shopped for a Mexican dish and failed to adjust it enough after the challenge changed. That’s not a good way to send a lower-case top chef home, is it? I’m hoping future challenges push these chefs to be more innovative, not to leap over more obstacles.

* Final three prediction: I agree with Missy that Chris looks like the favorite. Thierry and Patricia (who did a dish and a half in the elimination challenge, and earned plaudits for both) also seemed strong, although to be fair I don’t think anyone stood out the way that Chris did.