I did not recap episode 3, since I didn’t even watch it until five days after it aired. I’m just jumping ahead to episode 4 and should be on schedule with every episode at least until spring travel begins.
So we start with some comments from Tesar on how Katsuji “gets a hall pass for being an asshole.” And that’s why 1) he’s back on the show and 2) I’m not happy to see him on the show. What Katsuji seems to think of as gamesmanship is borderline harassment. It’s not good TV and it has nothing to do with food.
* Quickfire: The new EIC of Food & Wine, Nilou Motamed, is here as the guest judge. Each chef has a box in front of him/her, and must use everything in the box – the gag is that it’s “not quite everything you wanted for Christmas.” The boxes contain cooking tools as well as ingredients: pressure cooker, tequila, pomegranate, wasabi, melon baller, chocolate pretzels, squab, and so on. We’re ripping off Chopped here, right?
* Jim says melon ballers are “from a pantry in the 1950s” but I use mine constantly to take out the seeds of apples. Cut the apple (or pear) in half, then use the baller to carve out the half-sphere with the seeds and tougher flesh from each half of the fruit. I don’t use them for melons, though.
* Shirley’s using white chocolate in place of butter. I’m not sure how that’ll work – white chocolate is fat plus a lot of sugar, while butter is fat, milk solids, and water.
* Emily has never used a pressure cooker, which I find hard to fathom. Tesar points out that they use them on this show all the time, so basically don’t come on this show without learning. Also, how do you not own a pressure cooker when you’re a chef? You don’t cook at home, ever? This isn’t some sort of novelty device. I just used mine two nights ago. They’re fantastic.
* Jim’s stand mixer bowl is smoking … it would have been nice to know why. I’m just sayin’.
* Shirley burns her squab in a tequila fire – although that can’t be what actually happened. Tequila is usually 80 proof, and that’ll burn if vaporized (like, say, heating it in a hot pan), and of course if it’s bringing any sort of lipids with it those will burn too. But 80-proof tequila shouldn’t just burn on its own, and even if it did the fire would be cool enough to slip your hand through it (not that I recommend doing so). I once created about a three-foot high flame by adding rum to a pan that was much hotter than I realized, and it didn’t ignite anything else – not even the wood cabinets the flame touched – or leave any scorch marks anywhere. So I guess I’m really wondering what was in that fire to char the exterior of the bird.
* We only see a few of the dishes here, I guess for time’s sake, not that we’d want to see more food on a show about food. Katsuji made braised squab in tequila and soy with pretzels, pomegranate, and wasabi in his salsa … Tesar made a pan-seared squab with mole and an avocado and pomegranate salad; he calls avocado “light and refreshing” which it’s not, with about 75% of the caloric content of an avocado coming from fat … Brooke made a pan-roasted squab with a clove, tequila, and pomegranate stock, and some melon-balled squash … Emily made a pan-roasted squab with a soubise, and Padma delivers the deadly compliment, “well, the squab is cooked nicely” … BJ made a pretzel-encrusted squab with wasabi cauliflower puree, tequila, and pomegranate; Nilou asks if that was the texture he wanted from the deep-fried squab, so we know what that means .. Jim made a roasted squab with beets, fennel broth, and a smoked pretzel and tequila whipped cream (that’s what was in the stand mixer, I suppose) … Casey made a smoked chili, tequila, and squab soup, then compressed pineapple with several of the other ingredients from the box … Shirley made a roasted squab with wasabi rapini and flambe tequila. She didn’t use the melon baller because she didn’t have hers – Sheldon appears to have taken it at some point. Then Padma makes a bizarre comment about hoping it’s not a sudden death quickfire. If Sheldon took her melon baller, shouldn’t he be eliminated (hypothetically) rather than Shirley? And the fuck is Padma talking about here anyway?
* Bottom three: Shirley, really because she charred her squab “to within an inch of its life” … Emily’s soubise was gummy, and now they’re saying she was not “kind to that protein” … BJ’s squab was very tough. Top three: Brooke, Casey, and Tesar. The winner is Casey, again, so she gets immunity.
* Anyone else see a little bit of Kristen Bell in Casey?
* The guest judge this week is Mike Lata of Fig, a very highly-rated restaurant in Charleston that made Eater’s list of the 38 most essential restaurants in the country for 2016. Also, he used to be Emily’s bossn and fired her once.
* The elimination challenge is based on the Italian feast of the seven fishes. I never had this growing up, even though I’m ¾ Italian, and I’ve never had it as an adult because my wife is allergic to shellfish. The twist on this episode is that the chefs are going to use “trash fish,” incidental catches that are often discarded because “consumers aren’t familiar with them,” which makes them good for chefs interested in sustainability. Jim seems comfortable with the concept, though, having won the Great Ameircan Seafood Cookoff in 2011.
* Casey gets first pick of the fish and chooses amberjack, which I’ve never thought of as a trash fish; if you’ve had the kind of sushi or sashimi called “kampachi” or “kanpachi,” you’ve had amberjack. The remaining chefs are combined randonly into teams of two. Tesar gets Katsuji, the only person Katsuji didn’t want to work with, although later they’re bickering like buddies in the confessional. Shirley’s paired with Sheldon, but they’re getting along fine in Whole Foods. BJ’s paired with Silvia, Silva with Neck-Tat, and Jim with Amanda.
* The other fish available are tunny, blackbelly rosefish, gray tilefish, triggerfish (which Lata was the first chef in Charleston to serve), mullet, and barrelfish.
* Tesar wants to use canned tomatoes; Katsuji wants to use fresh heirloom tomatoes. Each is acting like the other is insane. But doesn’t this depends on the time of year? If tomatoes are in season, you’ll never beat fresh. If they’re not, then they’re not going to have much taste, if any.
* Shirley wants to use mullet shank, the tail end of the fish, which has fewer bones (?).
* Emily is deferring to Brooke on everything, so Brooke ends up the de facto head chef on their team with Emily playing the role of a line cook. That could go either way – Brooke’s probably the best competitor on the show this year, one of the best they’ve ever had, and Emily appears increasingly to be a train wreck as a contestant.
* Silvia is making pane carasau, a traditional yeast-raised flatbread, similar to pane guttiau (which you might have seen at Trader Joes). Both are Sardinian, with the former using yeast and the latter not. To Americans, they’re more like crackers – I’d compare pane guttiau to what matzoh would be like if you made it with something like puff pastry dough, so it shatters rather than breaks.
* Tesar and Katsuji are now each making a sauce with the tomatoes, and then each ends up plating some of the dishes with his own sauce. This should have been a disaster.
* Sheldon & Shirley made a Sichuan peppercorn (a Chinese spice that isn’t a true pepper) braised mullet with tofu, celery, and buttered radish. Tom seems to have gotten a small bone, but says he loves the dish, especially the use of the Sichuan pepper. Blais likes the combination of tofu and fish together because their textures are similar. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had mullet, although it seems like the most familiar name among the trash fish after amberjack (I’d never heard of triggerfish or barrelfish before this show).
* Hugh is back! Judges’ table is always better with his dark Canadian humour.
* Silva and Neck-tat had Tunny. I’ve heard the term before, because it can refer to a couple of fish, but I’m assuming this one is little tunny, a fish in the tuna tribe (Thunnini) but in a separate genus from the fish we eat as tuna. That Wikipedia article mentions anecdotal reports of ciguatera poisoning from eating tunny, so I’ll pass on this one, thanks.
* Lata says he’d go calabrian with tunny, making a spicy preparation because the fish itself has such a pronounced fish flavor. The team made a ras el hanout-dusted tunny, seared so it’s nearly raw in the center, with melted leeks, parsnip puree, wild mushroom ragout, and xo jus. Graham Elliott says is “looks like a $30 tuna steak dish.” Hugh deadpans that “we were all guessing that you’d fail miserably.” One thing no judge mentioned was the taste of the center of the fish. If tunny is oily and has a strong fish flavor, and the chefs didn’t address that throughout the fish, what happened when the judges got to the middle of those “steaks?”
* Brooke and Emily made roasted blackbelly rosefish with fiddleheads, marble potatoes, leeks, corn, coconut, and tamarind sauce. Lata says it’s a tough fish to work with and needed more than just the sear? All the judges seem to agree that the dish was totally confused, with a bunch of different ideas all on one plate. Brooke won’t throw Emily under the bus, however, even though Emily contributed nothing to the concept of the plate. Tom says “leek sauce all day, all this other stuff get rid of it,” which I suppose would be great if this were a leek challenge.
* BJ and Silvia made a barrel fish brodo with leeks, kale, cauliflower, and pane carasau. They poached fish, but as it dried outside of the poaching liquid, it seized up and became tough; Tom suggests they could have flaed it back into the broth, although if the broth was still hot enough to be safe, wouldn’t it have continued to cook? The broth was apparently excellent, but there wasn’t enough of it, and Silvia’s pane carasau is probably the most-praised aspect of the dish.
* Tesar and Katsuji made trigger fish with chili sauce, fennel puree, bottarga, and breadcrumbs. Tom says the sauce is terrific and the fish was cooked beautifully. Hugh says they bridged a monumental gap to put aside their egos, which also says to me that it’s no accident that these two chefs were asked to return this season.
* Jim and Amanda made a gray tilefish with tomato and fennel broth, and some apparently very undercooked beans. Tom asks, “Who cooked the beans?” and Amanda responds, “I did. Why?” She looks like she just ran a marathon.
* Casey’s amberjack dish is a catastrophe, but we never really saw anything about why? She barely cooked it at all, and her rice porridge is gummy and tasteless. So what was she doing during her allotted time in the kitchen? She thinks she’d be sent home if she didn’t have immunity, so what the hell happened?
* Tom: “There’s a reason why these fish don’t usually end up on a table – they’re very difficult to work with.” For some of these fish, that’s almost certainly true – tunny being oily and fishy is going to be a deterrent no matter what chefs or fishermen do, but gray tilefish is supposed to be lean and mild-tasting, and amberjack is lean and firm like mahi-mahi or swordfish. Some of the problem is just education: consumers only look for a few common types of fish, like salmon, because they’re familiar with those and know how to prepare them.
* The top three are Sheldon and Shirley, Jamie (Neck-Tat) and Silva, and John and Katsuji. Katsuji’s sauce was amazing. S&S’s dish ate like something they’d cooked before. The mullet had a lot of bones, but they made the best of it. Every component of Jamie and Silva’s dish was done very well and it showcased the fish. John and Katsuji win, and Katsuji wins the individual honor for the sauce. He even tears up, I don’t think he expected that. I’m sure he’ll handle the victory in a quiet, professional manner.
* Padma says Casey “really needed” that immunity. The other three teams are on the bottom, by default. Jim and Amanda’s dish died for a few reasons, but Mike says in his kitchen one of his commandments is never serve undercooked beans. The inclusion of mussels also took the dish away from the star ingredient. Brooke and Emily’s dish just had way too much going on, and it obscured the fish. Silvia and BJ’s fish tasted like overcooked chicken. BJ made the broth, Silvia did the bread, but the fish was both.
* While the chefs go back to the stew room to wait, Katsuji starts going after Emily for failing to tell everyone more about Mike Lata’s preferences. What a dick move.
* Mike says the barrel fish (Silvia/BJ) was overcooked, while Tom says BJ overreduced the sauce. Brooke and Emily put too much on the plate, but it seems like the judges are giving them a pass because the two were “too nice to each other.” Jim and Amanda’s fish got lost in “all that stuff.” Tom says that could be the worst dish because of the beans, which Amanda cooked. At this point I assumed she was gone, given the emphasis on the beans, and also, how do you serve undercooked beans on Top Chef and survive?
* Yet BJ is eliminated. He could have gone home last week, or the prior week with the pork that he cooked poorly, a move that tanked his team because it took so much of the team’s budget. That’s three rookies out and one veteran who was just barely eliminated in four episodes. I thought Amanda had ‘earned’ the elimination, given what we heard from the judges, but it’s hard to weep for BJ with him on the bottom so many times already. But we’re now at seven veterans to five rookies, and two more of the rookies (Neck-Tat and Emily) seem perpetually close to elimination.
* I guess it’s time to rank ’em … Brooke is the clear #1 in this group, and of the rookies I think only Silvia has shown the potential to catch her. I’d go Brooke, Silvia, Shirley, Sheldon at the top. Bottom three: Emily, Amanda, and Neck-Tat.
* I’ll catch up on LCK later this week. In the meantime, have a safe and Merry Christmas.
Surprised you don’t rank Sylva/Silva higher. He’s had two weeks in a row where he was one of the top chefs.
Agreed. Sylva is flying under the radar but has shown excellent range.
I don’t have a good feel for Sylva. I know he’s well-regarded here in Philly but I try not to let that skew or inform how I rank chefs.
As for Casey, I think she’s shown way too much downside risk already.
as for celebrity doppelgangers, BJ is a dead ringer in appearance and voice for Seth Rogen. And Jim has a bit of Rick Moranis in him.
I tried swapping white chocolate for butter in brownies and blondies. It was complicated–accounting for the extra sugar, less liquid, et. The results were okay, but not worth the trouble.
Very interesting. Someone suggested on twitter using cocoa butter to make vegan cookies (after I’d suggested refined coconut oil); I’ve never cooked with cocoa butter but the melting point and saturated fat content are in the right ranges.
FWIW, I am a professional chef and don’t own a pressure cooker. In part because, for most of us, cooking barely pays the bills (wages have been roughly stagnant for more than 20 years), so until 2 months ago, I lived in a one room apartment with a kitchen that barely had storage space for plates, let alone non-essential appliances. That’s not a knock on them, and if I ever wanted to go on top chef, I’d find out what kind they use on the show and become downright ninja with it.
Casey’s won two quickfires in a row, and doesn’t crack the Top 5? Is there a reason?
Note: Honest question; I haven’t actually seen any episodes this season, I just read the recaps.
Tough to say for me. She does well in quickfires, but her dish tonight seemed really bad. But they spent so little time on it it is tough to say how bad. If she didn’t have immunity, she likely would have gone home.
It’s too late for this season, but I hope the producers never try bringing back 8 chefs again. There is such a huge advantage to having competed previously, that by the time the new chefs catch up, they will mostly be eliminated.
Also, even Katsuji aside, the returning chefs have all come back with an attitude and it is making me root against all of them. The difference with the returning chefs is that they are all losers on the show already and they really shouldn’t have the attitude they are showing towards the new chefs.
I’m hoping this season picks up because I am finding it tough to root for anyone since the newbies are all getting eliminated and the returning chefs are turning me off with their attitude (I was praying for a double elimination when I saw Tesar and Katsuji were on the same team).
That no one tried to make a baccala type dish annoyed me. That was always the highlight of Christmas Eve at my Italian grandmother’s – along with Escarole soup.
But in general this year has been very disappointing so far. Brooke or Shirley will win and Silvia will carry the torch for the rookies. I don’t remember Katsuji being this annoying in Boston, but don’t like him. Tesar annoys me and most of the rookies just seem incompetent. Silva and Silvia seem like the only two rookies who actually belong on Top Chef. And as has been the trend, they show hardly any cooking or thought process anymore, so there’s really no way to know what the food is like. I’m close to giving up on Top Chef, not even close to my favorite cooking show anymore.
What are some of your favorite cooking shows?
I’d add Jim as a rookie that belongs. But the remaining two, Neck-tat and Emily, don’t inspire a lot of hope.
Andrew, are you asking me? My favorite cooking show is Masterchef Australia. It is by far the best cooking show around. I’ve watched Top Chef, Chopped, Masterchef US and UK, and many other cooking shows. But Masterchef Australia is unlike any other. First off, they have Five episodes a week, and they show actual cooking and the thought process behind the cooking. Secondly, they clearly want the cooks to succeed. The judges do what they can to help the contestants succeed, and the contestants actually help each other out most of the time. But then they have celebrity/great chefs come for an entire week. So watch any time they have Marco Pierre White or Heston Blumenthal come for a whole week and spend five episodes teaching the contestants. And they have many other great chefs that won’t go one other shows come and actually teach the chefs not just criticize them. And when they have guest chefs at the end of the week they do an episode called Master Class where the chef teaches the contestants a secret trick of theirs. It’s really a great and happy TV show where you can see actual cooking and listen to why decisions may or may not be the smartest choices.
How do you watch MC Australia? I’ve been really interested in checking out some of the other MCs (I mostly watch the regular American version as a time-killer with occasional sweet respites–there’s too much ugly drama–but the kid version blew me away and now I’m getting excited by the franchise), but streaming international shows can be a pain.
We discovered Masterchef Australia when my family lived in Singapore, and I agree with Brian on how good it is. Getting it in the States has eluded me, too, although persistence with an appropriately comfigured VPN would probably be part of the equation.
I am surprised that Shirley is doing so well, as I visited her restaurant last week and I was thoroughly underwhelmed. After visiting both of Amar Santana’s restaurants (he was last season’s runner-up for those not familiar) and having excellent meals, I was really looking forward to this. There was nothing exciting about anything being served. I had a steak tartare and braised Oxtail over noodles while my wife had uni & bone marrow over toast and duck 2 ways. None of the 4 dishes were anything to rave over. We went on Saturday night at 7 and you would expect a restaurant to be packed at that time, but it wasn’t even half full. Guess I know why now. A definite skip for those in the area.
If you mean Twenty-Eight, it has never gotten glowing reviews, and I don’t think she’s even cooking there – she’s a co-owner but that’s it. It hasn’t been on my radar for a visit when I’m out there every spring.
Keith – Exactly the one I am referring to. Surprised that she would put her name on something sub-par.
I get more of a Jennifer Aniston vibe from Casey than Kristen Bell. Maybe it’s the hair.
And going on Top Chef without knowing how to use a pressure cooker (or any widely used piece of equipment) is apparently like going on the Amazing Race without knowing how to drive a stick. At some point, in some part of the world, you’re gonna need to know how to drive a stick. I say that as a proud owner of a stick.