Top Chef Masters, S4E9.

This was my favorite episode of the season because of the elimination challenge. It served a good purpose, but I think it also required the chefs to demonstrate teaching and leadership skills that they almost certainly have to display in their restaurants anyway. It turned out that those weren’t factors in the ultimate decision, but they could have been, and I think that it’s one way to set Masters apart from regular Top Chef.

* Quickfire: Blind cooking with a mystery teammate, a holdover from Season 3. Kerry points out that, based on the previous season, “it pays to be nice” to your teammate. Each chef must create identical dishes with his/her teammate, and will be judged on how similar they look and how they taste.

* The mystery teammates are Ruth, Francis, and Jimmy Sunshine. Ruth uses a bizarre generic European accent in an 80-year-old’s voice to try to fake Kerry out. James uses fake Southern-ish accent – but then actually turns out to be the best listener of the three.

* Chefs in this challenge nearly always assume too much skill or knowledge on the part of the partner, but here the mystery partners were clearly playing dumb too, which I assume was the producers’ direction.

* I find the shouting within this challenge really annoying. Chris is actually the quietest of the three, which I would not have predicted.

* Chefs are all shocked at the reveal. Chris calls it “fucking hysterical” and their laughter was pretty infectious.

* Chris/James did prawns with sauteed celery, thyme, pine nuts, and chili threads. Curtis can’t decide which he likes more, to which James says “shut the fuck up.” This whole quickfire showed a far different side of James’ personality – the most human and likeable he’s been over the two seasons I’ve watched. He was genuinely stoked at the positive results.

* Lorena/Francis: Swiss Chard with sauteed chicken, bacon, onions, shallots, stock, touch of cream, and parmesan. Lorena wanted to serve this over pasta, but the pasta wasn’t ready in time. I thought this sounded simple yet delicious – I’m going to try this over pasta tonight using some of the bacon I smoked myself and a little reserved fat. (There’s no bacon in the online recipe.) The dishes tasted the same, but Curtis dings them for serving a sauce without something to put it on.

* Kerry/Ruth: Sauteed chicken, chard, bacon, parmesan, and rosemary cream. Ruth used way more chicken on her plate, which is part of that “playing dumb” bit I mentioned earlier. Curtis says Ruth’s chicken might be slightly better cooked!

* Winner: Chris, so $5K more for the Michael J. Fox Foundation and a total of $41K so far.

* Elimination challenge: Working with two Southwest Career and Technical Academy students who have taken culinary arts classes, each chef must create a dish … but they can only direct their student-chefs and can’t touch the food to be served. The students first prepare dishes for the chefs to taste and the chefs have to reinterpret the dishes to be “masters-level.”

* Chris says he has/had a learning disability but doesn’t say what it is. It does seem like a lot of great chefs were poor students in school for one reason or another, yet excelled once they discovered they had a passion for food.

* Lorena’s kids made lasagna and she says she feels limited by that dish – but why not deconstruct it somehow so she’s not bound by the shape and format? Anything with a starch, tomatoes, and cheese would have worked. Even just another pasta dish, but one that’s not so homey.

* Kerry is appalled that his students haven’t seen The Godfather. The movie did come out over 20 years before they were born.

* Chris keeps his kids with him during shopping so that he’s still educating them, which is awesome. It looks like both of the other chefs are doing some of this as well, so perhaps the editors just focused on Chris in the final cut.

* Chris shows the kids the basics of butchering the pork loin, but they can’t use the meat he cuts. Please tell me that food wasn’t discarded. His kids are so nervous that they break a bottle of cider vinegar. Opa.

* Kerry’s got his team roasting bones to make “brown jus,” which I assume is a stock he’s going to have them reduce. He says this is restaurant-level cooking, which turns out to be key – he’s really pushing his kids both in efficiency and in the quality of the food they’re producing, exceeding what Chris and Lorena are doing.

* One of Chris’ students will be the first in his family to graduate from high school, and says he grew up in poverty, eating same thing every night. One of Lorena’s students has Type 2 diabetes. I hope the producers do this challenge again in the future.

* Chris is concerned that they’re plating too soon, saying he won’t be happy if he goes home for “teaching kids to be fast.” But why dress the salad and plate with five minutes to go? If the meat is done early, that’s one thing, but you can dress the salad and plate it inside of sixty seconds. That was never fully explained.

* Judges’ table: Same trio from the quickfire. Guests include staff from the Southwest Career and Technical Academy plus some family members of the students.

* Team Chris: Pork loin with hazelnut and sage brown butter, apples, and watercress. They reimagined a basic pork tenderloin dish. Ruth says her paillard is beautifully cooked. Francis says the sauce is perfect. Emilio’s (single) mom starts crying.

* Team Lorena: Lasagna with three meats and a parmesan crema, along with a baby arugula salad and raspberry vinaigrette. The pasta is served in a skillet. Francis likes the goat cheese in the lasagna, but overall this seems like the least ambitious dish.

* Team Kerry: Florentine-inspired chicken with orzo and asparagus ragout. Kerry raves about the kids he worked with. Ruth is very impressed by the dish. James says it’s the best creamed spinach he’s ever had. It’s funny how sophisticated the finished plate is, since Kerry was so underwhelmed by the chicken florentine that he had to reimagine for the final product.

* Judging: Ruth asks Lorena if she thought about asking them to vary from straight-up lasagna, which would have been my first question, and Curtis seems skeptical that Lorena would really serve it in a restaurant. Chris says his kids were so efficient that they plated five minutes early and James comments on the soggy salad. Kerry seems to be the only chef getting no criticism, and he wins the $10K.

* Ruth hammers Lorena after chefs leave – says it was good home-cooking, not fine dining. James disagrees. Francis then makes a pretty spurious argument about the ‘experience’ of bringing people together in that lasagna. Then it seemed like three of the four, Ruth being the exception, were fabricating an argument against Chris to give the sense that this decision was closer than it actually was.

* Lorena is eliminated and doesn’t seem surprised. She earned $27,500 for Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Chris is visibly relieved – as was I, since I really wanted to see him in the finals. As much as I’d tab Chris the favorite, Kerry seems to have really hit his stride over the last three episodes, so maybe he just needed to adjust to the show’s format and, now that he’s done so, his skills are showing through.