We start out back in the stew room and see the Kuniko debate again, where John points out, quite accurately, that Kuniko had five hours to cook a potato dish and never checked to see if it was cooking properly. Josh then lectures John about tact while he’s tying a damsel to a railroad track. John says he’s not being a prick, he’s being truthful, although those things aren’t mutually exclusive. I agree with his comments on Kuniko, and I don’t think he lacked tact, although he was way out of line to snipe at Josh’s home state of Oklahoma, an argument ad hominem that ceding some of his high ground.
The next morning, we see Kristen smoking on the balcony while flirting with Stefan, who is also smoking. I do not understand chefs who smoke. It wrecks your taste buds. Do you want to taste your food? That might be important. And that’s assuming your tongue doesn’t go all Achatz on you. By the way, flirting with Stefan? He looks like he should be fronting a Rammstein cover band.
* Quickfire: Naomi Pomeroy from Beast is the guest judge. Two beef primals are hanging in the kitchen. Chefs get one hour to butcher and cook a cut of beef, with no more than two chefs butchering any one piece at one time. There’s actually some coordination there rather than the literal backstabbing I expected.
* Sheldon talks about the importance of technique and his apparent lack of it. Josie and Carla can’t get their primal off the hook, which isn’t going to convince Stefan that girls belong in the kitchen any time soon.
* CJ is doing a tartare, which is so cliché – and doesn’t involve cooking, by the way. Tyler is also doing a raw preparation. Granted, I prefer meats cooked, other than fish, so I’m probably not the ideal judge for that.
* Lizzie is struggling with the pressure cooker, which she’ll need to get her cut cooked enough. This shocks me – how does any chef get this far without knowing how to use a pressure cooker? They’re pretty user-friendly, other than your inability to see the food while it cooks.
* Micah and John are also struggling with braising ox tail, which I assumed took hours and hours.
* Kristen, showing some strategy, says she picked first cut she saw to get cooking.
* Bottom three: Lizzie’s didn’t cook enough, as foreshadowed. Eliza’s steak was fine but the combination of asparagus and cherries didn’t work together. Tyler’s crudo was under seasoned, which is fatal. I swear I heard “underseasoned” fifty times in this episode; if you had a Top Chef drinking game based solely around mentions of seasoning, you’d be dead before Judges’ Table.
* Top: CJ’s tartare, John’s oxtail gnocchi (which had a rich sauce from the oxtail’s connective tissue), and Josh’s meatball with polenta. That is, the three chefs who were at each other’s throats in the stew room. Winner is John, his second quickfire win. He cooked something harder than the other two chefs did, and CJ didn’t cook his at all. John gets immunity. They can snark at him all they want, but he’s clearly got some ability.
* Elimination challenge: Cook dishes from the original menu at Seattle’s Canlis restaurant, which first opened in 1950. Only one dish is still on the current menu, the Canliss salad. Two chefs will be eliminated.
* Somehow, Stefan ends up assigning the dishes, for reasons I must have missed. Kristen is unhappy that she ended up with two sides, fried onions and sauteed mushrooms. Chrissy gets the dreaded salad. Carla is stuck doing squab, which either she has either never cooked, or she’s comparing it to her ex-husband. I really have no idea.
* John offers to expedite because he has immunity. CJ mocks John in the confessional for having experience opening restaurants. I don’t get the invective here. Either John is behaving way worse off camera than he is on, or CJ and Josh need to worry about their own shit.
* Josh, listening in on a conversation in the condo, is twirling the ends of his mustache.
* Kristen’s a real perfectionist, drying mushrooms in the oven at 450 before searing them so that they’re completely dry when they hit the pan and she’ll get the maximum possible caramelization.
* Carla can’t get into the grill for the squab and has to delegate the cooking of her protein to Sheldon and Bart. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.”
* Other chefs are ignoring John as he tries to set up for expediting. Then we see a bunch of chefs without their noses, faces fully spited.
* Service – forgive me for the detail here, but I don’t see a better way to get through it. Starters: Lizzie did marinated herrings, which Naomi loved, saying they’re balanced, well marinated with plenty of acid. Josh does a French onion soup that isn’t “guest friendly,” with a too-hard crouton, nowhere near enough cheese, and far too much salt. John’s steamed clams bordelaise seem to be good-not-great. Chrissy’s special salad is visibly wilting on the plate from all the dressing. Brooke’s seafood salad a la Louis gets raves for the preparation of the seafood. Tyler’s crab leg cocktail was also great, mostly because he let the Dungeness crab shine, although he earns props for the chopped lettuce on bottom as well. My takeaway at this point was how dated some of these dishes are.
* Switch back to the kitchen where we see Carla talking over John so other chefs can’t hear orders, after which we see her dishes coming back because they’re too rare and have to be refired.
* Mains: Sheldon’s mahi-mahi with beurre blanc (something you might actually see on a modern menu) wasn’t quite trimmed right but was perfectly cooked with a properly emulsified sauce. Carla’s squab with red wine reduction isn’t boned properly, is now overcooked in reaction to the earlier undercooked ones, but does have a nice sauce. Micah’s vegetable medley is a mess of over and undercooked items. Stefan’s liver with French fried onions gets big raves both for the liver and Kristen’s onions on top. Bart’s New York strip steak was cut with the grain instead of against it, which kind of wastes the tenderness of the meat. CJ’s lamb kebab was underseasoned (drink) and the lamb was mealy, as if he used sous vide to cook it (he did). His pilaf underneath was soggy as well. Kristen’s mushrooms get huge raves and the color on them is spectacular – I love well-browned mushrooms with just a little salt, black pepper, and maybe a little fresh thyme, and her dish looked like it had that flavor. Josie’s enormous baked potatoes aren’t hot enough and get more comments on their size than their flavor.
* Desserts: Danyele and Eliza each made two, with Danyele doing vanilla ice cream and a royal Hawaiian supreme, and Eliza doing mint sherbet and a frozen Hawaiian pineapple parfait. Danyele seemed to get more positive comments, especially for the salty peanut brittle with the ice cream that balanced out all the sweetness in the four dishes.
* We get another discussion of losing dishes at the dinner table, which I think is a great change to the format. Chrissy’s salad gets trashed. Carla’s squab had the breast plate left in and was overcooked. CJ’s lamb had no flavor, was both tough and mushy, and wasn’t seasoned well. This sounds absolutely disgusting, like something you’d get at a school cafeteria. Josh’s soup had so much salt and no bubbly cheese on top. I’m inclined to say that his failings are the worst because French onion soup is still a popular dish, and because proper cooking of onions is a cooking 101 thing – the onion even gets its own chapter in Ruhlman’s Twenty.
* Judges table: The top four are Lizzie, Kristen, Tyler, Stefan. Stefan plants one on Kristen’s cheek, because he’s a pig. She’s the winner for making two side dishes, getting $10k and I think a pretty big boost to her confidence.
* The bottom four are, as expected: Carla, Chrissy, CJ, and Josh. How freaking tall is CJ? He’s like Lurch in a sea of Cousin Its.
* At the inquisition, Josh immediately throws John under the bus, calls him a monkey as expediter, and refuses to take any responsibility for Tom getting cold soup. CJ says he tasted the mealiness after sous vide-ing the lamb, but can’t explain why he used a technique that didn’t exist in the 1950s. Carla wilts under questioning over whether she tasted the dish during service, and I honestly don’t think the judges ever got a clear answer – but they seemed to believe she hadn’t.
* Chrissy and Carla are eliminated, but as badly as Carla fared, Josh’s flop with a very ordinary dish and CJ’s choice of sous vide seemed like bigger transgressions to me. That said, no one will be sorry to hear the relative silence in the kitchen with Carla gone.
* My new top three: Kristen, John, and Micah, with Brooke making a strong showing. Stefan might be on the fringes of that group. Right now, I don’t see who else belongs in this discussion.
* Last Chance Kitchen: The four chefs eliminated so far are each charged with making a dish using the 2-3 key ingredients in the dishes that got them eliminated; they can make the same dish if they so choose but don’t have to. Carla cooks the squab incorrectly again, in large part because she uses 40% of the allotted time just getting the meat off the bone. (I have never cooked squab or tried to de-bone a bird this small, so I can only imagine that it’s not straightforward.) Chrissy’s salad isn’t falling under the weight of the dressing, Jeff’s halibut isn’t overcooked, but Kuniko reimagines her whole dish, skipping the potato pave in favor of a lemongrass potato chowder that seems to really show off both her technical skills and command of flavors. It’s a huge challenge for her to run the table now through Last Chance Kitchen but, before her elimination, I thought she was comfortably among the top five chefs in the main competition, so I do like her chances more than I’d like any of the others to do it.
(just $199!) in what I can only assume is a bit of 
TV series and the 1997 edition of the classic American cookbook Joy of Cooking. With Good Eats airing in repeats on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, you can just set up your DVR to record them rather than buying the overpriced DVD sets, but the companion books, starting with 
, are worth owning for the revised (usually re-tested) recipes and the commentary on each episode. Brown’s techniques always revolve around sound science and increased efficiency, whether it’s a faster way of doing something or a way to reuse an existing kitchen tool for a new purpose. He’s goofy – belching yeast sock-puppets are just never not funny – but always educational. And of all of his recipes that I’ve tried (more than I can count), only one, the squash dumplings, didn’t work for me, and that was fixed in the companion book.
is always my first recommendation for people who are either just learning to cook or who are looking for one cookbook to rule them all. There are many editions available and there are some wide variations from one to the next, but the ’97 version has served me extremely well for its tremendous breadth of recipes – that’s still my go-to book even for Italian classics like pesto Genovese or shrimp scampi – and for the clear, logical recipes. For this edition, the publisher hired food writers to rewrite most of the recipes in the book, losing the folksy prose that charmed readers of earlier editions, but ensuring that the recipes were easy to follow and worked properly. Each recipe in Joy lists the ingredients in bold face at the point in the recipe where they’re used, rather than listing them all at the top. If you don’t succumb to the temptation to skip your mise en place – prepping and measuring ingredients before you start any cooking – this makes it much easier to follow the recipes and reduces the odds that you’ll skip an ingredient.
for nearly a decade. It’s out of print but amazon has used copies for $4 and up at that link.
, a book I own myself and have given away as a gift. Its recipes require a slightly higher skill level than Joy, but Ruhlman’s twenty section essays – on basic techniques like poaching, braising, and frying, or core ingredients like onions, eggs, and salt – build up your knowledge on each subejct from the ground up. It’s the kind of book that might intimidate a rookie but, if you try some of the recipes, will leave you impressed with your own capabilities. I 
, is another must-have but is for intermediate home cooks and above because it makes assumptions about the reader’s experience and comfort level with certain techniques or foods. The book’s recipes are largely presented as ratios that can be scaled up to produce the desired quantity. If you want to make biscuits, you need 3 parts flour to 1 part fat to 2 parts liquid. The specifics are largely up to you, and there are brief discussions of your options, but again, Ruhlman is largely assuming you know how a biscuit or a Hollandaise or pâte à choux and is describing each recipe in terms of its foundation.
, which I 
, easily the most beautifully shot cookbook in my collection. Slater is a very famous food writer in England who has just a small cult following here, but Tender deserves a much wider audience for its focus on vegetables from seed to table. His gardening advice hasn’t helped me much because you can’t get a much wider gap between soil types than England and Arizona, but his dishes, many of which do contain meat but still accentuate the vegetables, are subtle showstoppers, turning some very ordinary veg – the more mundane and kid-unfriendly the plant, the more Slater seems to adore it – into warm, glowing, gorgeous dishes. Tender is the book that got me to buy and cook an actual pumpkin (not from a can), a process that, with about a tablespoon of added brown sugar led to this:
, which isn’t a cookbook at all. The authors, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, interviewed dozens of professional chefs about what ingredients went well together, and tabulated the results in this book. Look up an ingredient in The Flavor Bible and you’ll find a long list of good partners, with ingredients that were mentioned more often earning bolded entries. For example, parsnips are in season right now in much of the country, and the parsnip entry first says they should always be cooked, and work well when baked, boiled, braised, fried, grilled, mashed, pureed, roasted, or steamed. When the authors asked chefs about parsnips, the most-mentioned ingredients were butter (including browned butter) and nutmeg, both appearing in bold, capital letters. Bolded entries, mentioned less often than those two ingredients, include apples, chives, cream, curry, garlic, ginger, maple syrup, olive oil, parsley (a relative of parsnip and carrots), pepper, potatoes, sage, salt (duh), brown sugar, thyme, and root vegetables. The entry also includes about fifty other ingredients that work well with parsnip and were mentioned at least once by the interviewed chefs, and then concludes with five “flavor affinities,” combinations like parsnips + honey + mustard or parsnips + butter + cream + potatoes. Some entries have “Holy Grail” pairings, marked with an asterisk and mentioned by a large portion of the chefs they interviewed, like plums and Armagnac or lamb and rosemary, and some entries have “avoid” sections, like parsley and dessert. There are even sections for national cuisines – if you want to know what flavors work well in Afghan or Eastern European cuisines, for example, they’ve got you covered. What The Flavor Bible doesn’t do, however, is tell you what to do with these pairings. There are assorted quotes from celebrity chefs describing specific dishes, but the book contains no recipes. They assume you have the recipes and techniques and are looking for inspiration.
, which has most of the basic desserts you’d want to make, including a pie crust (for lattice tops, like the one in my Twitter avatar, but functional in any pie) that works as reliably as any I’ve ever tried. The writing can be cloying, especially when they go into more detail on failed kitchen experiments than I ever needed (if you’re going to describe something that didn’t work, at least make it funny), but the recipes work and their pumpkin pie is bar none the best I have ever tasted, one I make at least once every year.
, 
(most of the same breads as the first book, but in whole-wheat, multi-grain, and 50/50 variations), and the more accessible 
. His pizza doughs are pretty foolproof; I add a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten to his 100% whole wheat pizza dough and it’s strong enough to stretch it to translucency without tearing. (Sometimes I tear it anyway because I’m clumsy like that.) His pain a l’ancienne white-flour baguettes from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice are absurdly easy if you have a stand mixer or food processor (this 
is the current version of the one I’ve used for fifteen years) and never fail to get raves when I bring them to friends. I’ve made his focaccia, his cinnamon rolls, his struan, his challah, his pitas, and his wild yeast starter, which I kept going for about a year and a half until we packed up the house in Massachusetts. His books even have recipes for international breads like pumpernickel, panettone, hutzelbrot, and stollen, as well as Ethiopian injera and crackers like lavash and graham. Go with Artisan if you’re a bread-baking rookie, or the others if you have more experience or want books that will focus on baker’s ratios and allow for more ingredient substitutions. I 
. I don’t own the full book, but have a magazine version they sold when the book first came out, including about a third of the main book’s recipes, and they’ve all worked on the first try, including a surprisingly flavorful bolognese sauce that makes enough to freeze for one or two future meals (you lose a little texture, but the flavors remain strong), a beef burgundy stew that gave us about three dinners’ worth, and a white chicken chili that is surprisingly low in fat.
. I’ve eaten at Mesa Grill three times, once in Manhattan and twice in Vegas, and every dish I have eaten at those restaurants is in here and easy to reproduce at home. The blue- and yellow-corn muffins are decadent.
, which does, indeed, include wisdom from the woman who introduced America to French cooking – but whose most famous cookbooks haven’t aged well, at least not to my eyes. This book focuses on the bare essentials in the kitchen, including the basic vinaigrette formula I’ve been using for years, mother sauce formulas, simple instructions for roasting or braising major cuts of meat, souffles, breads, custard, and even baking-powder biscuits so you can make strawberry shortcakes. 
for three main reasons:
: 
: I haven’t reviewed this one yet, as I just got it earlier this month and have only played it (and lost, as it turns out) three times. It’s a light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon has plenty of new copies through marketplace sellers. Complexity: Low.
: 
. I need to play this some more, but it does have promise as a 2-4 player game that actually works with two players. Each player competes to place meeples and buildings on a rectangular grid by playing cards that match the row and/or column in which he’s placing the pieces. Points increase when players form larger groups of farmers on adjacent squares, place buildings next to farmers already on the board, or accumulate coal and gold tokens by building mines. It’s pretty simple and quick to play, but not that deep strategically. Complexity: Low.
: 
: 
. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.
. 
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: 
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. 
. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the 
: The most complex game we’ve tried, with the steepest learning curve. Very well made aside from the square animal pegs, which we replaced (at the suggestion of one of you) with 
I bought via amazon. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. My wife felt this game felt way too much like work; I enjoyed it more than that but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Complexity: High.
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: 
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: 
: 
: 
: 
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: An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve. Complexity: Low.
: 
: 
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: 
: 
: I do feel somewhat odd about dropping this in the rankings for the second year in a row, but the truth is we don’t pull this game out as much as we did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it in the top ten largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Three or four players compete on a variable board of hexes to acquire different resource types, build roads and cities, and reach twelve victory points before any other player. Resources are parceled out in part according to rolls of the dice, and you can lose resources if the Robber shows up on a roll of seven and you’re not prepared for it. The 
expansion balances out the core game’s low value on the wool resource, but also makes the game take about 50% longer to play. It was, and is, a great starting point if you’ve never played anything on this list, and is also one of the few games here that has some traction outside of the boardgamer culture. You can even find this along with Ticket to Ride (higher up the list) at Target, which is about as mainstream as you can get. We’ve just got lots of other games we prefer after playing this one so often over the years. Complexity: Low.
: 
expansion, but several people (including my sister and her husband) rave about what it brings to the base game. If you’re looking for a cooperative game you can play with kids, try 
: 
game – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think we have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. We own 
(which is outstanding) and 
(which I find a little weird), plus a standalone expansion further up this list. I can also vouch for this as appropriate for a young player – my daughter (age 6) understands the base game well enough to play it without me deliberately throwing the game to keep it competitive. Complexity: Low.
: 
. Intrigue can be combined with the base game of Dominion, but unlike other Dominion expansions (of which there are now approximately 82, with a new one released every other week, or so it seems) Intrigue is a complete game right out of the box because it includes the money and point cards. And it’s better than the original game when both are viewed without any expansions because it’s more interactive – Intrigue lives up to its name in the sense that you should spend much of your time either plotting against your neighbors or trying to defend yourself, which makes the “Big Money” strategy in the base game much less effective. The changes make the game longer, but more even, and more fun. Complexity: Medium.
: 
, yet. Complexity: Medium.
. 
to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. We also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. Complexity: Low.
: 
. 
expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. We also have 
, which we’ve only used once; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.
is one of my favorite non-fiction books on any subject.
. How is it possible that none of the six chefs in this group knew how to do that?