Top Chef S12E08.

Sorry this week’s recap was delayed, but I didn’t see the episode until Friday night due to the winter meetings and all-day travel on Thursday (I passed on taking a redeye home, and I’m not sorry about that part).

* We start with a window on last episode’s decision to send Keriann home rather than Katie. Gregory says in the stew room that “you don’t mix bananas and chocolate and call it a mousse,” to which Katie concurs, saying “that wasn’t a mousse.” Remember Tom and/or Barbara saying you could play hockey with it? Well, I guess we know now. I don’t think anything without whipped cream folded into it could be called a mousse; chocolate mousse has both that and an egg white foam (meringue) to provide structure and lightness by incorporating air.

* Gregory’s an ultra runner and has run 50 miles a couple of times. I’m not sure if I should be impressed or horrified. If I run 50 miles, it’s because there’s a large carnivorous animal chasing me.

* Quickfire: Jasper White’s in the house. I’ve been to his Summer Shack a few times and liked it. I’ve heard him credited with inventing grilled lobster, although I don’t know if that’s apocryphal.

* This is a sudden-death quickfire, involving clams, with a table full of buckets of clams available for the chefs. They’ll be making “chowdah,” as Padma says it, although I could have sworn it was said differently:

The chefs have to create their own unique versions of clam chowder. White wrote a book on the dish, called 50 Chowders.

* The winner gets immunity; the loser has to fight to survive. The chefs have thirty minutes, which isn’t much time to create strong clam flavors.

* Mei grabs the whole bucket of littlenecks, which apparently are one of the most desirable clams up there, but ends up sharing them with Adam when he asks … only to have Melissa swipe them right off her station when she heads to the pantry. That’s bad Top Chef etiquette, at best, and sleazy at worst.

* Gregory is making razor clams, which he chose because they’re juicy, tender, and really quick to cook. I’m light on clam knowledge here, since my wife is allergic and I eat clams maybe once a year when dining out.

* Adam is trying to make a light chowder, which would differentiate itself from everyone else’s, but he’s really just making a Manhattan chowder by using tomato water instead of potatoes.

* Melissa is using lemongrass in her chowder, which will taste like tom kha gai. Katie makes a black tea sourdough chowder, using the bread to thicken the chowder, which sounds like it’ll work for thickness but not for mouthfeel.

* Mei made a steamer clam and lobster chowder with yuzu aioli, celery, and fennel. Katsuji makes a green chowder with oysters, poblanos, jalapeños, and toasted garlic broth. Gregory’s dish is a razor clam and sweet potato chowder with bacon, dashi, and coconut milk broth. He grilled the clams and thickened it with the sweet potatoes, an idea I’ll definitely steal for something. Adam’s Manhattan chowder features red wine poached clams, boiled potatoes, carrots, celery, and tomato water.

* Melissa’s cioppino chowder has clams, shrimp, white wine, onions, leeks, and garlic. Doug made a grilled oyster chowder with a steamed clam broth using the clams’ liquor for flavor and fresh jalapeño. Katie’s clams in lobster stock with black tea and sourdough is a take-off on the bread bowl.

* Katie says “sudden death makes me think of death.” That might be taking it too far.

* The favorites are Adam, Gregory, and Melissa, with Gregory winning. Mos Chef is back … and has immunity. That’s his third quickfire win, with Adam apparently a very close second.

* Least favorite: Doug’s dish was very salty; Katsuji’s masked the taste of the oysters; Mei’s seemed underseasoned; Katie’s raw sourdough bread overpowered the soup and gave it a gummy texture. Katie ends up on the bottom and has to face…

* … one of the previously eliminated chefs. Those seven vote to pick one of their own to face Katie. George, who is Mike Isabella’s business partner and was eliminated in the very first quickfire of the season, gets four of the votes and wins the right to face Katie to get back into the competition.

* The challenge: cook rabbit. Katie hasn’t cooked with it in seven years, since culinary school. They have 45 minutes to cook any part of the animal that they want.

* That’s probably the protein I’d least want to face if I were in a cooking competition – that or venison. I’ve never cooked rabbit, because there’s no one here who’d eat it (my daughter is horrified that people eat rabbit, even though I’ve explained that they’re vicious animals who will chew your face off without a second thought). I also don’t love rabbit, even though I’ve had it several times; it doesn’t taste like chicken, but I find its flavor unpleasantly sharp and gamy. I’ve had it at some pretty good restaurants, but I guess I need to keep trying it.

* Katsuji hopes Katie wins because “we know she’s not the best one,” while George might be better than anyone realized. He’s right, of course.

* Adam’s running commentary doesn’t spare George: “Did I hear glazed carrots? I didn’t realize this was a CIA cookbook from 1996.”

* George’s rabbit legs aren’t braising quickly enough, so he goes back for the loins because he can cook them in less than five minutes. Can you braise any meat in under 45 minutes? Duck legs aren’t big, and they take at least two hours to braise. Even though rabbit legs are smaller, the braising process involves very low temperatures (lower than what George was using on a burner) and long cooking times to dissolve collagen in tough cuts of meat where the muscles received more exercise while the animal was alive. The collagen forms gelatin, and its extraction allows the muscle fibers to separate more easily, producing a tender dish. If you let the braising liquid boil, you’ll let the proteins in the muscle unfold and relink with each other, which produces a tough, chewy result. I know you can’t braise anything in 45 minutes without using pressure; why don’t professional chefs know that?

* Katie serves a braised leg with a Moroccan tomato sauce. George serves his roasted loin sliced over barley risotto (although I could swear he said farro, not barley, while talking to the other chefs), glazed carrots, and a mustard jus. Jasper says the clearcut winner was George. Tom votes for George as well because his rabbit was perfectly cooked. That puts George back in the competition and sends Katie home.

* George sounds exactly the priest character on Gracepoint, which, by the way, we just finished last night. I thought it was spectacular, and now that Broadchurch is on Netflix I’ll go back and watch that too since the latter series is coming back for another season.

* Elimination challenge: The chefs will cater a tasting event for 75 Top Chef fans in the TC kitchen … except the four judges are doing the shopping, and the chefs won’t see the ingredients till tomorrow. Each chef is randomly assigned to one of the judges’ pantries via knife draw.

* Richard warns his two chefs, Adam and Doug, that “I hope you like the vitamin aisle.” Adam is displeased: “there’s going to be agar or some other playful molecular shit,” rhyming “agar” with “dagger.” Just because that’s what Blais buys doesn’t mean he has to use it all, right? Having just had a blood orange gelée at Blais’ Juniper & Ivy that I presume used agar-agar, I’m a big fan of the stuff.

* Blais goes bananas in Whole Foods, taking off with his cart and heading right through produce to the proteins, mocking the other judges for lollygagging over the produce, and saying that Padma probably doesn’t do her own grocery shopping, followed by footage of her struggling to carry two jackfruit into her cart. To be fair, those things are massive. The jackfruit, I mean.

* Richard buys lecithin, a potent emulsifier that’s found in egg yolks and soybeans, among other sources. What the heck do you do with pure lecithin? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a non-dessert recipe.

* Padma gets her revenge on Richard by stealing his cart from the checkout line, spilling (wasting, really) a big cooler of fish. They’re all a bunch of dorks, by the way. I can only imagine the relief at that Whole Foods every time the Top Chef crew leaves.

* Richard’s pantry ends up also including liquid nitrogen (of course) and Versawhip, a modified soy protein that can replace egg whites or gelatin to create highly stable foams. I assume you all have this stuff in your cupboard right now. Adam’s concerns seem to be at least a little bit legit, although Blais did give him and Doug plenty of normal ingredients to work with.

* Melissa is making shrimp scampi with a salad, which the other chefs are pointing to as too safe. Adam, meanwhile, is doing some weird technique (hint: foreshadowing) where he’s not cooking the shrimp but scalding the exterior with very hot oil. I know some folks love raw shrimp (ama ebi, sometimes called “sweet shrimp”), but I find the texture to be gross – slippery and chewy, but with the feeling of breaking all those cell walls and proteins up with your teeth when that process should be started with heat. The only time I’ve ever seen this hot-oil trick was on an episode of Iron Chef America maybe ten years ago, where Chef Morimoto used it to crisp salmon skin by pouring the hot oil repeatedly over the fish, not just once.

* Doug can’t describe Katsuji’s dish without laughing, but says it makes sense because “Katsuji’s batshit insane.” I’d like to see someone font Katsuji that way rather than giving the name of his restaurant.

* Gregory tears open the jackfruit and says it smells like bubblegum. So maybe all those years I wanted to retch up the pink liquid amoxicillin, I didn’t realize it was just jackfruit-flavored.

* Did you know that Katsuji came to this country with just $5 in his pocket? I can’t believe he hasn’t mentioned that before. Seems like he’d want everyone to know that.

* Padma enters the kitchen with vertical striped pants that make her legs look like they’re about ten feet long.

* Richard drops a “plethora” when describing his Whole Foods trip to fans. If he were on every week, we could have a Blais vocabulary drinking game – take a shot every time he drops a ten-dollar word on the show.

* The food … Katsuji (Gail’s pantry): Tunisian potato salad and harissa-poached shrimp, plus a white sangria on the side. It sounds amazing, actually, and I usually think Katsuji’s stuff just sounds weird. Richard says it could use more heat, although he may have been mocking Katsuji there.

* Gregory (Padma): Coconut milk and chicken in Madras curry with jackfruit relish. Padma seems to love it and says the smells were “so authentic.” It’s pretty audacious to make an Indian dish for Padma Lakshmi.

* Adam (Richard): Peppadew piperade with flash-marinated shrimp, mushroom conserva, herbs, and aioli. Gail says her shrimp was just a few seconds undercooked, but that seems to be overly kind based on what the other judges say later on.

* How great is that father who brought his daughter, maybe 11 or 12 years old, to the tasting event? She ended up with Blais’ autograph and Doug gave her his menu board to take home.

* Melissa (Gail): Sauteed shrimp with harissa yogurt, roasted figs, fennel, dill, mint, artichokes, and a shaved root vegetable salad. Richard says it’s not spicy enough, Gail has it as just barely too salty. Richard calls it safe, beautiful for a cafe, not bold enough for a competition. Also, hasn’t she made something like this before? It’s Top Chef, not Top Shrimp and Salad.

* Mei (Tom): Charred eggplant puree with black garlic, rack of lamb, scallion-ginger relish, and lamb jus. The flavors are good, but the lamb starts bleating when she cuts it, a real turnoff for the diners.

* Doug (Richard): Chorizo-marinated mussels with sweet pepper and cauliflower relish, lemon preserve, and bacon crumble.

* Padma says her pantry “had enough chilis to kill a village.” Are we talking a small village or a medium-sized one? Asking for a friend.

* George (Padma): Beef/lamb kabob with green lentils and cucumber-mint yogurt. Padma and Tom praise this effusively.

* Everyone loved George’s, and Gregory’s. Gregory’s vinegar/jackfruit relish wowed Richard and he praised Gregory for introducting a new ingredient to diners. Doug chose his ingredients well (and I think the implication is that Adam didn’t, using the same pantry) and his mussels were well-cooked.

* Mei’s lamb was too undercooked and was light on flavor. Adam used a “mind-boggling technique” on the shrimp per Richard, producing “squeaky,” “slimy” shrimp, adjectives you probably never want used to describe your food.

* George, Doug, and Gregory are the top three. The winner was Doug, so Portland is dominating this season so far: one or both of Doug and Gregory has won, individually or on a team, six of the eight elimination challenges and four of the seven quickfires.

* The bottom three: Mei, Adam, and Melissa. Mei’s eggplant puree and salad were beautiful, but the lamb wasn’t cooked enough. She says she realizes now that she should have taken it off the rack to cook it. Adam says he knows the technique was risky, but Tom says beyond the shrimp being undercooked, the piperade was underseasoned. Padma asks Melissa an obvious (in hindsight) question: If she was cooking shrimp to order, so what did she do with the two and a half hours of prep time? “Knife work” is a weak answer, and I can’t remember anyone winning Top Chef based on knife work.

* Adam is eliminated. That wasn’t my guess at all – I assumed it would be Melissa for playing it safe, rather than Adam for taking a risk that didn’t work. He seems stunned too: “If you don’t love cooking enough to be an emotional mess on national television, put the knife down.” Seems like pretty sound career advice to me.

* Power ranking: Gregory, Doug, Mei, George, Katsuji, Melissa. Tough to say where George should fit, but the fact that he executed two dishes extremely well is at least a good sign. Mei slips one spot behind Doug, although I think the reason at this point is obvious.

* Last Chance Kitchen returns as well, with two episodes the first week. The first part features all the chefs eliminated before this episode, sans George, and they have to remake the dishes that sent them home. Joy, Rebecca, and James end up the top three of the seven eliminated chefs. Joy’s veal was slightly overrested, which knocks her out. Rebecca wins for her revised seared scallop dish, edging out James. Rebecca wasn’t on the show that long, but her boasting in the confessional interviews was unbearable.

* The second part pits Rebecca against Katie and Adam in taking dry and slimy ingredients, which is based on how Katie and Adam were eliminated, to make one appealing dish. Two chefs of the three will advance. One “slimy” ingredient is miso, which is crazy-high in the glutamates that produce umami (as are many fermented foods), so I’d imagine the chefs would want to grab that right away.

* Bacalao (dried salt cod) is also on the table; can you hydrate and desalinate it that quickly? I thought soaking it in milk was an overnight process.

* Adam makes a salt-baked oyster with pickled morels, nori, and white miso glaçage. Katie made morels stuffed with pancetta and mascarpone, with a tomatillo, cranberry, and pepita salad with miso vinaigrette. Rebecca made a warm octopus and confit potato salad, toasted pepitas, and pickled onions. Tom praises all three but says Adam’s was his favorite and Rebecca’s was his least favorite, so Katie and Adam advance, and Rebecca’s “you’re in my kitchen now” speeches fall flat again. Cook more, brag less.