Mei says her win in episode one proves to the other competitors that she’s a “force to be reckoned with.” Every challenge winner on every reality show gives one of two speeches – this one or the “this shows that I deserve to be here” speech. Come up with some new material, people. Your competitors are busy trying to win challenges and not get eliminated, not thinking about whether you belong on the show.
* Katsuji is embarrassed. I feel like Embarrassed Katsuji has a lot of meme potential.
* Aaron says molecular gastronomy is “the evolution of food.” This is the equivalent of baseball “true SABR” arguments. If MG doesn’t make the food better, then don’t use it. I want Aaron to say this in front of Blais next week.
* Don’t let the outside shots fool you. Boston weather looks like that maybe twenty days a year.
* James has a Patrick Swayze tattoo and I can’t even snark this. That said, in a house of virtual strangers of both genders, I’m probably not coming down to the kitchen wearing only my boxer-briefs.
* Guest judge: Todd English. He used to be among the best chefs in boston, but his flagship restaurant, Olives, really went downhill when he expanded with more restaurants and TV/book projects. It is the first place where I ever tried molten chocolate cake, and both that and their vanilla bean souffle (which I saw him make on a TV show with Martha Stewart, which taught me how to combine the two parts of the souffle batter, and also featured him saying that the eggs from her chicken coop were too fresh to work with) are among my favorite desserts to cook for a small group. I think both recipes are in the out-of-print The Olives Dessert Table
* Quickfire: Make the ultimate surf and turf dish. There are two lanterns, and two displays of food. When just one lantern goes on, chefs get to pick a “land” ingredient; two lanterns means they get to pick a sea ingredient. Each display is first-come, first-serve, which sucks because suddenly it’s a brawl to get to the ingredients and your size and agility matter. Winner gets $5000 and no immunity, but no one seems to mind that tradeoff.
* Land first. How does no one get killed in these scrums?
* Katsuji grabs sweetbreads, which are one of the few proteins I’ve tried (notably at Animal in LA) and not really liked.
* The land light goes on again. Mei gets the ramps and says she is “amped as fuck,” which is pretty amped. She’s making a compound butter with the ramp tops. I’d like to see more about that – did she blanch and purée them or just include them raw?
* James gets wild boar bacon. He had me at “bacon,” really.
* Katie plows into Katsuji and he spills his chili sauce all over the place. That’s Katsuji’s version, at least. Maybe he was too busy adding ingredients to see her there?
* The “sea” ingredients become available with under 15 minutes left. Adam misses the cattle call … I mean, the lanterns, and ends up with “dried crab snack.” I don’t even know what that is. I tend to avoid anything “crab-flavored” that isn’t actually, you know, crab.
* Land ingredients become available one more time. Why is velveeta one of the options? That’s not even food. What chef is ever going to use that in a high-end kitchen? And are viewers really interested in what a highly trained or accomplished chef is going to do with a combination of whey, seaweed extract, and preservatives? I’m not. That stuff is disgusting.
* We see some of the dishes, as is par for the course this early in the season. Adam made a shoyu-marinated flank with pretzel dashi (what?) and crab snack. Mos Chef made grilled lamb chops with aromatic soy and bluefoot mushroom salad. Padma says it was salty. Melissa did a fritto misto with pollock and razor clams, which seems a little mundane. Joy made a marinated buffalo strip steak on a veal cutlet with warm slaw and sea salt garnish. That sounds like a lot of meat, and not in a good Ron Swanson sort of way.
* Stacy made a pork shop with skate cheeks, black radishes, and arugula but overcooked the pork. That’s bad. James made sautéed mussels with a boar bacon broth and sautéed fiddlehead ferns. Aaron did a smoked bacon shiro miso dashi with pork meatballs, fish cakes, and nori, along with black garlic and gochujang. I was pretty sure Mei would be in the top three with her pan seared haddock, ramp tomato nage (like a court bouillon), wasabi tobiko, and shaved fennel salad. Katsuji made poached sweetbreads, quail egg, uni, caviar, hot pepper jelly. He’s praised for his “restraint,” which is more like a warning not to try to use every ingredient in the kitchen.
* Least favorites: Joy, because it was odd to have bison and veal together (obvious, no?). Stacy, because her pork chop was underseasoned and overcooked. Favorites: Katsuji, for the beautiful pepper jelly sauce and great uni. James for handling a potent ingredient like wild boar bacon handled so well and cooking the mussels perfectly. James is the winner. Giving someone the prize for including uni seems like cheating anyway. Some ingredients just get overexposed on this show. We don’t need foie gras on everything, and if you’re that good a chef, you shouldn’t need it to make a great dish.
* Elimination challenge: The guests are the Boston police and fire commissioners, Bill Evans and John Hassan. There’s no shopping: Each team (four of three chefs each and one of two chefs) will get to pick a basket of ingredients available in the kitchen at Il Casale in Belmont, then have two hours to prep and cook. Mei gets Katie and Katsuji and is not happy to have both of the bottom chefs from previous elimination challenge on her team. She seems really strong, but probably a bit quick on the judgment draw here. That’s my job. Meanwhile, Aaron and Keriann, who were squabbling in the stew room after the previous challenge, are on the same team, which had to make the producers happy.
* Evans’ only condition for the chefs: “No gourmet donuts. We have enough donut jokes.” That’s fair. Then again, this is a town that treats Dunkin Donuts as haute cuisine when all they really serve are stale donuts and acqua sporca as coffee.
* Adam, who came off horribly in week one, has a real moment of humanity when he talks about September 11th. His mom worked on floor 78 of tower two, and when that building went down, he was “100% certain she was dead.” He didn’t hear from her until two o’clock on the morning of the 12th; she had been stepping off the E train when the plane hit.
* Mei says to no one in particular that “it doesn’t need to be a forty ingredient dish,” which seems a little passive-aggressive with Katsuji on her team. She’s taking charge, though, showing some of Michael Voltaggio’s influence on her personality.
* Then we get Aaron, who is either a straight-up misogynist or just a lunatic, essentially picking a fight with Keriann for refusing to gameplan around ingredients they don’t have – specifically if it’s a basket of dessert options, since their team will pick last. Saying to her “you seem pretty fucking confident” and “I’m not being an asshole right now, trust me, you’ll know when i’m an asshole” makes me wonder how much worse he looks when he thinks he’s being an asshole. Also, he said they should discuss “hypothetics,” which is more proof that you shouldn’t use two-dollar words when you don’t have two neurons to rub together.
* Il Casale is right on Leonard Street in Belmont, a stone’s throw from where I used to live, and a street down which I’ve walked dozens of times. So, yeah, that was a bit nostalgic for me. Of course, they didn’t show what that street looks like in mid-January when dirty snow is piled two feet high on the sidewalks.
* Team 1 is Mei, Katsuji, and Katie, and they get first pick. The baskets all have amazing produce, something I appreciated a lot more about living near Boston when I moved to Arizona and couldn’t get anything close to this quality. Locals would complain about the cost of Wilson Farms in Lexington, but produce of that caliber should cost more.
* Katsuji and Mei squabbling over the sauce. It’s like the chefs never watched the show before applying: One, you don’t parcel out tasks before making the whole to-do list. Two, if you fight on camera, it will go on air. Always. So try to work it out.
* Team 2 (Rebecca, Adam, Mos Chef) takes a surf and turf box, with some insanely large chanterelles, filet (yawn), and scallops. Mos Chef already plans to make a leek vinaigrette.
* Team 3 is the two-man operation of James and Doug. They choose a basket with pork chops and a lot of produce. There’s a lot of stereotyping in the discussions of what to make for cops and firefighters, as if they’re all blue-collar meat-and-potatoes white men, but of all the baskets I saw on camera, this was the one that jumped out at me because of the fruits and vegetables in it.
* Team 4 (Joy, Melissa, and Ron) chooses a basket with veal, salmon, and kale. This leads to a discussion of how the veal has to be cooked, and Joy’s concern about their thickness, which is something that we refer to around here as “foreshadowing.” She wants to take them off the bone, but Ron and Melissa crush that idea and rightly so – you expect chops served in a restaurant to come on the bone. Ron suggests a “hint of vanilla” in the sauce or the root purée they’re making, which is basically the worst idea ever, because there is no such thing as a “hint” of vanilla. It does not play nice with savory ingredients. This is like saying someone is wearing a “hint” of Drakkar. Putting vanilla in the sauce for your pork chops is like halving a vanilla bean and sticking the two pieces in each diner’s nostrils.
* Team DISRE5PECT is Keriann, Stacy, and Aaron. They choose the chicken and short rib basket, but say there isn’t enough time to cook the short ribs. Ninety minutes in a pressure cooker wouldn’t be enough? Granted, I never cook short ribs that way, but if you can braise them in two to three hours, an hour-plus under pressure should do it. Meanwhile, after Keriann asked him not to force his molecular gastronomy obsession into the dish, Aaron insists on making a chorizo/onion jam with agar agar, then tries to order Keriann not to put onion in her corn salsa because he’s doing onion jam. She wasn’t blameless here, but Aaron seemed much more stubborn than Keriann. Meanwhile, did Stacy really not step in and try to get these two knuckleheads to work together? Not that they would have listened, given how much they hounded her over her preparation of the chicken.
* Mei tastes Katsuji’s sauce and says it’s “really fucking good,” which means it was probably really fucking good. Give her credit for de facto admitting she was wrong about Katsuji.
* Team 1, the red team, serves a pea and coconut purée (Katie) with sautéed halibut (Mei), pickled rhubarb, and a cherry and grilled rhubarb sauce (Katsuji). Everything here was great, especially the sauce. Tom said “everything made sense.” These writeups are easier when chefs screw up, by the way.
* Team 2, the blue team, does a grilled filet (Adam’s – and with the meat’s huge grill marks the pieces look like large slices of chocolate layer cake) with a parsnip purée (Rebecca), pan seared scallops (Mos Chef), and a leek marcona vinaigrette (Mos Chef). All proteins were perfectly cooked and Tom loved the vinaigrette, especially because Gregory didn’t let the leeks brown. Two for two.
* Team 3, the grey team, did a grilled pork chop and grilled stonefruit salad with morel mushrooms and walnuts. The pork chop was seasoned and cooked well and Gail loved the grilled apricots. She always loves some element that no one else mentions. I think that’s a good thing. It’s worth pointing out that we never saw these two chefs (James and Doug) bicker over anything – and I believe the editors would gladly have shown us even the slightest disagreement between them. Three for three, but it’s downhill from here.
* Team 4, the yellow team, was a mess, sending out veal chops that Melissa can see aren’t cooked. They served maple and vanilla wood-roasted chops (Joy) with a citrus kale slaw, vanilla-scented celery root purée, and pickled radishes. There’s way too much vanilla in this dish for me; it had to taste like drinking a bottle of perfume. The diners can’t even cut the meat because it’s raw in the center. Tom says we are all “conditioned to want sweet” when we taste vanilla. It’s a fucking dessert ingredient. This is not complicated.
* A policewoman at the judges’ table, Shana Cottone, tells of being at the finish line at the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon, and one of the two survivors she helped ended up having her attend his (I believe she said “his”) wedding. Seems like the producers made a great choice with the guests for this challenge.
* Team 5, the green team, is still arguing in the kitchen before service, with Keriann and Aaron both haranguing Stacy about her chicken and then sniping about her (within earshot) when she declines help she doesn’t need. Yes, it’s coming to the plates at the last second, but doesn’t it have to be? You want it hot but not sitting to carry over past 160 degrees, when it’ll begin to dry out. Meanwhile, Aaron is so busy yelling at his teammates that he doesn’t notice that his “marmalade” (no, douche, a marmalade usually has citrus peel and definitely doesn’t need agar) is watery until right before plating, and tries to warm it up and thicken it further with yet more agar agar. Like pectin, another polysaccharide, agar agar has a funny texture when it’s kind of on its own – you want its gelling properties but not its specific mouthfeel. I make a lot of jam and preserves and never add pectin for that very reason; I use recipes that give me enough pectin from fruit (e.g., a grated green apple) to make the finished product set. In conclusion, I don’t like Aaron.
* The green team serves pan-roasted chicken breast (Stacy) with a bourbon onion jam (Aaron) and a fresh corn salad with serrano (Keriann). The judges universally say that Stacy’s chicken is best thing on the plate. Padma doesn’t like the corn or the raw onion in the salad. Tom hates the jam and says Stacy should be pissed off: “You cooked a perfect chicken and the garnishes on that plate were terrible.” He kills Aaron’s relish for sliding across the plate. When Keriann lies about lack of teamwork and implies everything was fine, Aaron says, “Keriann was pretty erratic, made some bad moves, made some bad decisions.” Wow. Keriann finally stands up for herself after he throws her under the bus a second time.
* Back in the stew room, Aaron tells Stacy that Keriann is “such a bitch, dude. Like, such a bitch.” Sorry, but even if she was unpleasant to work with, there is no place for that – and a woman who stands up for herself is not a female dog. Later she calls him a “lying sack of shit.” Accepting that editing can skew our perceptions of the chefs, Aaron’s behavior in the parts we did see was reprehensible, beyond any justification. The preview of next week shows him similarly dismissive toward a male chef, so I’m not sure it’s just woman-hating – more like misanthropy.
* Judges’ table: The red and blue teams were the favorites. The judges loved the avocado in Katsuji’s sauce, Mei’s halibut was great, and Katie showed a “lot of refined technique.” The blue team’s surf and turf was perfectly seasoned and cooked, and Tom loved Mos Chef’s vinaigrette. Blue team wins – Tom says that every bit of that dish was “precise” – but we don’t get an individual winner, which robs of us some bitter commentary in the confessionals.
* The yellow and green teams (4 and 5) are on the bottom. The yellow team had problems “with conception and cookery.” Oh, is that all? Meanwhile, Tom points out that the green team was “doomed to fail,” that you “can’t talk past each other,” and “need to check (your) egos at the door.” This is advice for life, not just Top Chef team challenges.
* Aaron’s jam wasn’t jam at all, as the agar didn’t work. Tom is incredulous: “That’s what you did in two hours?” You can thicken jam in under an hour of cooking; using agar is just forcing a technique, and Aaron couldn’t even make the technique work. Onions do contain pectin, and adding a little bit of a base (like baking soda) extracts even more of it. Don’t use molecular gastronomy unless you first pass chemistry. Meanwhile, Keriann says she knew the corn was starchy but left it raw anyway. That’s usually the type of answer that makes Tom’s head turn into an overripe tomato.
* Gail says the yellow team’s vanilla completely overwhelmed the dish, and on top of that, the veal was raw in center. Joy accepts responsibility for the veal, but nobody on the team bothered to taste the entire dish. (That’s another one: Have you ever watched this show? Chefs who don’t taste their own food go home. Like, every other episode.) Absolutely nothing about this plate appealed to me. “Some raw veal covered in flowery perfume, sir?” “Thanks, I’m stuffed.”
* Padma says Aaron and Keriann should really thank Stacy because her chicken saved them from being the bottom team. That means the yellow team is on bottom, and Joy is eliminated. She blames herself for not speaking up more, which I assume is a reference to her agreement not to debone the veal. But if you can’t cook that piece of meat, one, don’t volunteer to do it for the team, and two, how are you here?
* Time to start ranking these cats … Top three: Mei, Mos Chef, and Adam; James gets an honorable mention. Bottom three: Ron, Keriann, and, because I kind of expect him to overreach again, Katsuji.