Top Chef, S11E11.

It’s been a busy writing and podcasting week for me; here’s what I’ve spit out in the last three days:

• An omnibus post covering a bunch of trades and signings, including Ryan Doumit and the two Rockies’ deals.
• A Klawchat on Thursday, my last of 2013.
• A new Behind the Dish podcast featuring Texas GM Jon Daniels and AZCentral.com’s Nick Piecoro.
• A 30-minute appearance on the Productive Outs podcast.
• And here on the dish my rankings of my top 100 songs and top 13 albums of 2013.

We start with the usual stew room footage. Nina has some mouth on her. She might swear more than all the boys combined.

* ?uestlove in the house, hairpick included. He says he’d fly to any corner of the earth to try a new food. Fried drumsticks were part of a signature dish at Hybrid, his Manhattan restaurant that closed last month. The chefs have thirty minutes to prepare a dish with any of the various kinds of drumsticks on display. A drumline marches in with a giant cart of drumsticks from at least five different fowl. Winner gets immunity.

* There’s a ridiculous mad dash for the various proteins. Why not just draw knives? Instead we get drumsticks on the floor and bruised egos. Nick seems dismayed to get quail, but I’d love that – they cook fast, at least, although there’s not a lot of meat on one leg.

* Stephanie gets turkey legs and says, “I see a very specific stall at Disney world where people just mow down on them.” I have been one of those people. Meanwhile, Nina gets guinea hen, and is making grilled jerk chicken. She’s gone outside of Caribbean cuisine maybe twice all season, for gnocchi.

* Shirley’s duck legs fry too fast – you can see the meat has started to dry out even on TV.

* Stephanie: “nothing could be grosser than medium rare turkey.” Well, maybe rare turkey, but point taken.

* Carlos is trying to cut a goose leg bone with a chef’s knife, and keeps going despite a total lack of progress. Sisyphus told me he thought that looked frustrating.

* Carrie does squab legs marinated in thyme, cayenne, and cocoa powder with a fig mostarda. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a mostarda, and now I’m wondering why not as it sounds awesome – a sort of quick jam of dried fruit, sugar, dry mustard, and wine (or just essential oil of mustard). Anyway, I’m spoiling this a bit, but she ends up winning, and Nina gives her the stinkeye across the kitchen.

* For completeness – the least favorites were Nick’s oversalted quail, Justin’s boring/uncreative drumettes, and Carlos’ overcooked goose. Beside Carrie and Nina, Brian was in the favorites group for a soup that included cracklins.

* Elimination challenge: Feed 500 incoming freshmen at LSU in the school kitchen. Winner gets a RAV4. They stay in the dorms that night. I have enough bad dreams about being in college and forgetting to go to class, or choosing not to go to class again without telling anyone, or the usual “show up for the exams without going to class all semester” stuff. I don’t need to stay in a dorm and trigger more. Anyway, I do love going to LSU for baseball games – the atmosphere is incredible.

* Stephanie is my go-to girl for money quotes: “Every memory of living in the dorm is coming back to me.” Turns out she went to boarding school, which she implies is because her parents were wealthy (since she says it wasn’t about behavior). Meanwhile, Carrie doesn’t know how to make a bed. How is that possible? Okay, her husband does it – I do a lot of the laundry around here too – but she never learned as a kid?
* The mad-dash setup from the Quickfire is here too – there are eight stations and a pantry of ingredients, so chefs are calling dibs on stations and fighting for ingredients. Why not set up a draft: order them 1 to 8, pick stations in that order, then go 8 to 1 for proteins or other main ingredients? Any system would be better than this.

* Shirley claims the plancha (flat-top grill), then Carlos whines enough to convince her to give it up and take the wood-fired oven, which no one else wanted. This, kids, is known as foreshadowing…

* By the way: No one wants the wood-burning oven? Really? Hottest spot in the kitchen. You ever have a burger cooked at 1000 degrees Fahrenheit? It’s incredible. You can do stuff in that oven faster than in any gas or electric oven or on any other cooking surface.
* Nick is stirring a giant swimming pool of grits like he’s piloting a gondola through them. I’m pretty sure Homer Simpson had that dream once.

* Justin gives a rant about how he doesn’t “think it’s ever a good idea to cook down to people,” but then says that college students probably like chicken tenders and mac and cheese, so he’s talking down to them instead of cooking down to them. This is another example of foreshadowing.

* Carrie got the cold station and makes a cold broccoli salad with yogurt dressing. I like broccoli, but it looks like she barely cooked it. Why not do an elaborate salad if you want to go veg and have to keep everything cold and would maybe like to win a car?

* Nina is in the weeds, which is unusual for her, blaming part of her problem on the lack of an industrial blender. Maybe she could have taken that into consideration before deciding to do a giant corn puree.

* Carrie is getting virtually no takers, and says (half-jokingly), “it’s not my fault the kids are stupid and don’t eat their broccoli.” Well, they’re not stupid if they won’t eat that broccoli.

* Carlos is falling behind after claiming the plancha and now thinks he should also have the ovens. Pretty soon he’ll just claim the car and complain if the other chefs won’t give it to him.

* And the dishes … this is getting easier to write as the number of chefs dwindles: Shirley does roast beef with potato puree and fire-roasted tomato relish, making good use of the wood-fired oven; Nina does buttermilk once-fried chicken with sweet corn puree and pickled onions, but the breading keeps falling off and she can’t keep up with demand for the corn; Brian makes a shrimp cake with spinach on top and a chipotle aioli (using storebought mayo?) underneath. Shirley and Brian score well, but Nina’s fried chicken fares worse for the above reasons plus the corn puree making the breading soggy.

* Nick serves rosemary roasted pork with parmesan grits and a bacon brown sugar gravy; Carrie serves that marinated broccoli salad with herbed yogurt sauce; Justin does a marinated gulf shrimp with cauliflower, asparagus, and garlic puree. Justin’s apparently had less flavor than wallpaper paste and no one could identify the puree.

* Stephanie’s spicy tomato soup with pimento cheese sandwich is undone because she served the sandwiches already dipped in the soup, which made them soggy by the time they reached the table; Carlos’s seared tilapie with chile ancho and Mexican slaw plays second fiddle to his fifteen-minute delay and his claim to the judges that Nick stole his ovens. Nina is pissed off, and Nick refusees to believe it at first.

* In “the kill room” (thanks, Steph), everyone goes after Carlos for saying that to the judges. He apologizes, but it’s one of those “I’m sorry I got caught” apologies I get from daughter. He knew what he was saying.

* Judges’ table: Brian and Shirley get raves. Carlos’ flavors were great but service took too long. Justin and Nina get crushed, as does Carrie, who might have gone home had she not had immunity.

* Top three: Shirley, Brian, and Carlos. Brian’s was the most popular with the students, but Shirley wins the challenge, I think in part for looking at the pizza oven as (Tom’s words) “just an oven.” That’s a car and a $10,000 air conditioner for Shirley.

* Bottom: Stephanie, Nina, and Justin. Nina failed twice over – a lot of students didn’t get the corn, but it also made the fried chicken a little soggy. Stephanie used too much cottage cheese (Steph says it was feta) that made the sandwich’s texture inconsistent, plus it disintegrated in the soup. Justin tries to brag about going high-end (too “cheffy” per Gail), but he didn’t understand the audience and didn’t get enough flavor in the dish. I wonder if he still thinks as little of college students’ palates as he did when the show started.

* Nina does the false modesty act in the stew room, saying “it was a pleasure working with you all” as if she’s already been eliminated. She’s not quite the villain the producers want, but she might be the best they’ve got.

* Justin is eliminated, as Tom says it was the worst dish out of all eight, period. Hard to argue given what they said before – it had to be him or Stephanie, and I’m not sorry to see him go after his act in Restaurant Wars.

* LCK: I’ve been trying not to comment on Janine’s looks, but she was wearing a little pink sundress in this episode that was so short that at first she couldn’t sit on the high peanut gallery chairs. The challenge, meanwhile, was to cook with a basket of ingredients from the other chef’s current hometown, so Justin from NorCal, Louis from Louisiana. Justin does a grilled sardine with corn vinaigrette and fresh herbs, chooses not to use crab or grapes. Louis does a redfish almondine with corn puree and crawfish sauce, didn’t use peaches or rabbit. Justin slightly overcooked his sardine – it did catch on fire at one point – so Louis gets the W. His dish seemed more creative anyway.

* Rankings: Nick and Shirley remain the clear 1-2 for me. After that, I’d probably go Carrie, Louis (in response to one of your queries, it’s time to work in the current LCK leader), Nina, Brian, Carlos, Stephanie. I don’t think Nina has the breadth to hold on till the finale – it’s the same basic formula over and over – and the bottom three chefs all seem capable of some self-sabotage. Even Carrie feels like a soft pick at 3, as she coasted on her immunity this week.