Top Chef Masters, S4E4.

Thursday’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I wrote a column looking at hypothetical ballots for the five awards on which I’m not voting this year.

* Quickfire: Make a salad in eight minutes. I like this – making good salads is hard, much more than just throwing a bunch of leaves in a bowl. The prize is $5,000 and immunity.

* Patricia avoids the mad rush to the giant salad bar – and am I wrong to look at that and assume that it is covered with germs! – and focuses on the dressing first, going for the best-quality oils and vinegars in the pantry. One, I just generally think she’s really smart, more methodical than most chefs I’ve seen on any iteration of Top Chef. And two, this is the opposite of how most people, even most non-high-end restaurants, think about salads, right? If you make your own, you spend more time picking out the vegetables than you do considering the dressing. We’re lucky to live near an olive grove that presses its own high-quality oil, the Queen Creek Olive Mill, and I always have a bottle of their EVOO in the house, which means I don’t buy prefab dressings any more. Three parts EVOO, 1 part fresh lemon juice, a dash of Dijon mustard (for flavor and emulsifaction), salt and pepper to taste, and you’ve got a dressing to blow away anything that comes in a bottle for $5.

* Awful Chris says that despite being a meat guy, he spends more on produce than anything else at his restaurant.

* The B-52s are guest judges, which would be incredibly cool if this was 1988. Apparently it’s well-known that they’re vegetarians, but that wasn’t exactly the first thing I thought of when I saw them come out on stage. Fred Schneider seems extremely negative, a possible side effect of the producers raising him from the dead for this challenge. He’s also wearing sunglasses inside; he should have just popped his collar for the full effect.

* The three top dishes were Kerry’s salade rousse with yogurt dressing, Chapeau Guy’s blueberry salad with beets and baby arugula, and Lorena’s grilled cauliflower – the only dish that involved a cooked ingredient. They also seemed to like Patricia’s chopped salad with yuzu vinaigrette, largely for including those cheap crunchy Asian noodles. Lorena wins the $5K for her charity, Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which makes perfect sense for a woman who has sold her soul to Taco Bell.

* Please tell Curtis the word is not “AM-munity.”

* I don’t know what was the more shocking revelation of this episode: That Art has lost over 100 pounds in the last two years, or that he’s gay. Really, I can’t believe he kept this stuff from us for this entire season. I have a sneaking suspicion he’s also from the South but is still in denial about it.

* Also, I seriously hope Clark doesn’t prepare ingredients in the same bowl he used to cut his own hair.

* Elimination challenge: The Chairwoman of the Hualapai Tribal Council has invited the chefs to use eight ingredients native to their land and significant in their tribe’s culinary traditions in four dishes cooked outside by the rim of the Grand Canyon. The view is spectacular, as it’s such a grand … canyon.

* As it turns out, most of the ingredients are pretty straightforward, with only two real exceptions – prickly pear and banana yucca, which is actually a fruit rather than a root vegetable. I’ve never cooked with either, but I’ve had prickly pear in a number of things, including lemonade at the aforementioned Olive Mill (I recommend it half-and-half with their iced tea, a “Prickly Palmer” if you will … or if you won’t), and it brings both great flavor and color.

* The chefs are paired up at random into teams of two, each using one protein and one vegetable: Prickly pear with quail, banana yucca with venison, squash with rabbit, and corn with beef. They get two hours to cook and the meal will be served family style.

* Takashi is apparently afraid of heights, and then has to go in a helicopter and walk out on a glass-bottomed viewing walkway over the Canyon. Get thee some Xanax, Takashi.

* Anyone else notice from the helicopter shots how low Lake Mead is? The level of conservation awareness out here in Arizona is absolutely embarrassing. Drought or no drought, we live in a fucking desert. Stop putting grass on your damn lawns, people.

* It starts raining as they cook, although it never quite got to the level of pouring, and I wasn’t sure if the rain was causing issues with their grills or if the issue was wind, which is kind of a chronic thing all over Arizona as far as I can tell. Awful Chris repurposes his grill to create hot cooking surfaces with cast-iron planchas, then allows other chefs to use them as well, which is how you know you’re watching Masters. In the regular edition, one chef would have brained another with one of those surfaces, and on Desserts they’d still be arguing over who put out the fire.

* Chapeau Guy, working with Takashi, ends up pitting and stuffing the banana yucca, then breading and deep-frying them. It turns out he was also supposed to peel them, but I’m not sure how he would have known that ahead of time, since he’d never so much as heard of the ingredient before.

* Clark and Kerry disagree over presentation, and Clark just backs down. That nearly always foreshadows the chef getting eliminated.

* Serving: Art and Lorena go first and take so long to explain their dish that Lake Mead’s level dropped another two feet by the time they say what’s on the plates – quail with prickly pear sauce and slaw, corn dressing, peaches, and mint. They also basted the quail with the sauce while it cooked but didn’t butterfly or otherwise break it down to make it easier to eat. I love quail but it is a ton of work to get the meat off that little skeleton. Anyway, the quail also wasn’t cooked evenly, which seems to be a bigger problem.

* Kerry and Clark serve a beef filet with a raw sage pistou, grilled corn, bacon, tomatoes, and chili. Their beef is grey, as they never got their grill hot enough to sear it, so it looks boiled and gets none of the flavors that come from the Maillard reactions (what happens when you expose proteins to high heat, often mislabeled “caramelization”). Hualapai cooking doesn’t include much chili, but the tribe members at the table seem to enjoy its inclusion. However, every item on the dish is soft, so there’s no texture contrast, and this sounds really unadventurous overall. It’s steak and corn.

* Takashi and Chapeau Guy serve grilled venison and fried banana yucca cake with braised figs. This seems to get the highest marks and I thought sounded the best of the four dishes – if I saw all four on a menu, I’d probably order this one. Francis Lam compliments the mixture of textures in this dish, and the sugar in the figs makes up for the bitterness of the banana yucca skin.

* Patricia and Awful Chris serve “rabbit loin and its bits” with acorn squash and red berry and piñon agrodolce. They used the entire animal, which appeals to me as my own philosophy of the ethics of eating meat has evolved over the years – in particular, that there’s some obligation to eat more of the parts of any animal you consume than we typically do in this country. That’s been an adventure for me as someone who did not grow up eating things like marrow or gribiche, and I admit I still struggle a little with some organ meats (heart in particular due to its texture), but I’ve made the choice to change my eating habits.

* How is Aunt Inez, the oldest of the Hualapai at the dinner table, eating all this food with one tooth?

* Judges’ table: Curtis, Ruth, James, and Francis are all trying to outdo themselves with profound statements on the setting, the tribe’s traditions, the spiritual feeling of the meal, threatening to turn the whole thing into an Insufferable Feast.

* Judges’ table: Patricia/Awful Chris and Takashi/Chapeau Guy are on top. Chris and Patricia seemed to get the spirit of the challenge more, especially by using the entire rabbit, but Takashi and Chapeau Guy win and split the $10,000 prize. Thierry remarks that he won with an ingredient he’d never used before, of which he seems rightfully proud.

* Elimination: Lorena’s cole slaw wasn’t great but everyone loved the prickly pear sauce. Art split some quail but eventually chose to serve them whole because he didn’t want to lose the presentation. Kerry said getting a sear on the beef was hard. Their sage pistou got raves, but the second sauce, a compound butter with berries, separated on the plate. Clark made a corn ragout to “honor the cuisine of the region, “ then says he didn’t want to ruin the dish by making something that competed with Kerry’s beef, but that’s just a flaw in conception – the two didn’t work together to build a cohesive offering. Clark ends up eliminated, so the great tragedy they tried to show us last week of Mark’s separation from his partner lasted just a few days. Clark’s charity, Outright Lewiston, which helps LGBT kids in the community where his and Mark’s restaurant is, receives a donation as well.

* I think Patricia and Awful Chris are pretty clearly the top two chefs here, and have been from the start, with Takashi probably third. I’d be surprised if the winner isn’t one of the first two.