The dish

My latest column for Insiders is on the Giants and Royals using the draft well, especially in the first round. I also had my weekly Klawchat.

This week’s safe word is “hammered.”

* So we start in the stew room with Aaron and Keriann still sniping at each other and Ron telling them, “don’t act like fucking children,” which, of course, makes them act more like fucking children.

* Meanwhile, we get some bio info on Aaron, saying he grew up in a broken home with no discipline, no father figure, and apparently not a very active mother since he says his sister helped raise him. That could certainly build empathy for him if he wasn’t treating half his colleagues like peons. He says, “People view me as the cocky little asshole who likes to talk shit,” without any apparent irony or self-awareness. Maybe they view you that way because that’s what you are and what you do?

* Quickfire: Ming Tsai (of Wellesley restaurant Blue Ginger) is here for another sudden death QF. It’s a tea challenge, since we’re in Boston, but Tsai reports the myth that Americans drink coffee because tea culture died after the Tea Party and the association of tea with the Brits. (It’s more likely that we became a coffee-drinking country because importing coffee from Brazil was cheaper than importing tea from China.) The challenge is to make a dish highlighting tea, where each chef is randomly assigned a type of tea, some of which turn out to be incredibly awful.

* Adam is complaining that he got monkfish cheeks because Adam snagged the yellowtail. I thought cheeks were a desirable cut of any meat or fish; shouldn’t a chef on this show be thrilled to get them?

* Rebecca tells the camera that she’s a real double threat because she can do savory dishes and pastry. That sort of bragging always ends well on this show.

* Varieties of tea include lemongrass pomegranate rooibos (a tisane, not true tea because it isn’t from the Camellia sinensis plant), white tea with strawberry, chocolate salt tea, and toasted nut oolong, alongside more traditional varieties like gen mai cha, a Japanese blend of green tea and toasted rice that is actually amazing even though it sounds so strange.

* We see some of the dishes, but not all. Melissa’s seared duck breast with tea-infused jasmine rice gets very high marks. Katsuji did a gen mai cha broth with brown rice crusted tuna. Katie made a golden honey black tea panna cotta with poached asian pear in tea and lemon, certainly among the most visually appealing dishes and easiest to understand around the use of the tea. Mos Chef does a tuna crudo with strawberry white tea and young coconut; Ming says he normally hates fruit and fish combinations, but loves this one. Ron does a tea-crusted duck breast with polenta and a chocolate-salt tea mole. Padma hates that tea (so do I – chocolate teas are gross) but likes the use in the dish. Aaron seared the monkfish … and Padma says that the fish is “hammered,” overcooked nearly to the point of inedibility. James made a crispy skin trout with quinoa cooked in tea plus a prosecco and tea buerre blanc. Rebecca made a tea-infused cake with strawberries and fresh apple; Ming says she needed more liquid to drench cake and he doesn’t taste the tea enough.

* Top three were Melissa, for the tea-infused rice; Mos Chef, for the balance of the tea and fish; and Ron, for the use of the tea in the mole. The winner is Mos Chef, thanks to the precise use of the strawberry flavors in the tea.

* The least favorites: James’s dish had too much sauce, Aaron’s fish was way overcooked, Rebecca’s didn’t have enough tea flavor. Aaron is named the worst and the crowd goes wild … or they just smirk and nod and hope this is the end of Mr. Congeniality. He picks Katie for the elimination one-on-one and proceeds to insult her in front of everyone by saying “it’s an easy choice.” Keriann points out that his bluster about cooking her “under the table” wasn’t enough for him to choose her for this battle. The challenge is to cook without any heat other than the pots of boiling water on the stove.

* Katie says Aaron is young and immature (true) and that it would be “ridiculous” to lose to him (don’t say that).

* Aaron play on a spring roll, cooking shrimp wrapper in a ziploc in the water. Katie says he’s young and immature, would be “ridiculous” to lose to him. Making pasta, cooking veg in a bag to make sauce.

* Mos Chef says “everyone is secretly rooting for Katie,” and that Aaron is kind of a loudmouth. It doesn’t seem like he wants to come out and slam the guy, which speaks well of him … but I admit I’m enjoying watching everyone turn on Aaron for being such an ass.

* Aaron makes a spring roll using pureed shrimp that he boiled in a ziploc bag as the wrapper, filled with cucumber, carrot, mint, and raw peanuts. Katie made hand-cut saffron pappardelle, smoked mozzarella, tomato sauce, and fresh cherry tomatoes. Hers needed more sauce and salt, but I think Aaron using the gimmick of the shrimp as wrapper is why he won. We knew this anyway from last week’s previews, which showed him fighting with Katsuji in the stew room.

* Elimination challenge: Cooking at Fenway Park. The chefs must choose a classic ballpark snack – peanuts, pretzels, popcorn, fried dough – as inspiration for a fine dining dish. They have three hours to prep that day and an hour to finish the next day at the park.

* The guest diners will be … Dennis Eckersley and CHB. So, a guy not particularly known for his Red Sox tenure, and a writer known for atavistic, retrogressive viewpoints that run completely counter to the entire ethic of the show. Good choices, guys. How do you not go get Pedro Martinez for this? I’d listen to Pedro comment on anything. He could be a guest judge on Project Runway and it would be entertaining.

* Baseball is dying, but it seems like half of these chefs profess to be serious baseball fans. Ron takes his son a couple of times a year. Keriann’s a fan, Stacy’s a fan, Katie’s dad (who died last year of cancer) “loved slash hated” the Twins.

* James grabbed pretzels because everyone else was grabbing peanuts. He says he doesn’t like this challenge because he doesn’t eat much junk food; his restaurant uses ingredients from farmers and foragers.

* Watching Mos Chef use the mandolin terrifies me. I own two different kinds, and I use them, but there’s no question I’m going to slice off a finger at some point with one of them. You could probably shave with that blade.

* Katie is making thick free-form creme brulee and doesn’t know if it’s set. This also appears to be … foreshadowing. Meanwhile, Doug points out in the confessional that Keriann is nuts to try to cook short ribs in under three hours. Does nobody like to use the pressure cooker any more? If I were going on Top Chef, I’d make damn sure I knew how to use a pressure cooker to make all kinds of things. You’re facing timed challenges and it’s the best time-saver in the kitchen.

* Mos Chef is doing either yoga or tai chi in the morning; he says that earlier in his career, he was using drugs and partying too much, which cost him jobs and burned a lot of bridges. When he decided to get sober, he made a plan for the person he wanted to be and made “a lot of amends” with people he’d hurt or let down in the past. I don’t mean to compare drug addiction to anxiety, but his discussion of taking control of his recovery and of his initiative in rebuilding damaged relationships certainly reminded me of my own experiences.

* Look, Fenway just isn’t that nice. It’s not. It’s cramped and old and dirty. I get the nostalgia angle, and the current ownership group has made it way better than it used to be … but it’s still a really uncomfortable place to watch a ballgame.

* The concession stand kitchen is tiny. This shouldn’t be a shock. They should see the visitor’s clubhouse; I’ve seen studio apartments bigger than that.

* Katie has soup rather than brulée, and has to call an audible, whisking it into whipped cream to make a sort of soft mousse. Aaron, meanwhile, says that, “Miss Culinary Instructor bit off more than she can chew.” As Russell from Fat Albert would say, that guy is NCAA: No class at all.

* CHB starts bloviating the moment he sits down. “It’s like a church to (Sox fans). We’re sitting in church.” No, it’s not. It’s a baseball stadium. You’re sitting on a lawn, in a baseball stadium. Maybe I went to the wrong church growing up, but I don’t remember parishioners getting hammered, grieving widows telling the priest he sucked, and fights breaking out in the pews.

* Someone says “Oh Katie” – maybe she said it herself. She’s an emotional wreck at this point.

* First group serves: Aaron made a pretzel-wrapped rillette and spring pea tendril salad. Blais loves the presentation, Tom likes the sauces and sides, but Ming said the meat was too soft and mushy. Ron made a popcorn soup (which looks thicker than day-old grits) and a breaded fish croquette, with dill pickled celery and sun gold tomatoes. Ming likes the popcorn flavor in the soup, but the consensus is that the croquette, which was supposed to symbolize the baseball itself, was too big. Katie apologies before even saying what the dish is, which is usually the worst possible strategy. Don’t ever apologize before anyone’s even had to chance to tell you your dish isn’t good. You’re just showing weakness. And as it turns out, everyone loves the dish – popcorn mousse with blue cornmeal salted shortbread and a beer molasses pomegranate something something sorghum honeycomb something. Really, I have no idea what was in that.

* Good news – Hugh is there! Him, Blais, Tom, and Padma is the Murderers’ Row of Top Chef judges’ tables.

* Eck mentions giving up Kirk Gibson’s homer as his worst moment as a player, that “no one would look at” him as he walked off the field. Padma says he “should have played for the Yankees.” Like you didn’t already have enough trouble in Boston, Padma.

* Next group: Doug did a seared scallop with grilled corn, sweet corn sauce and popcorn, and piment d’espellette. Keriann’s beer-braised short rib with horseradish parsnip puree, crispy pretzel shallot, and fondue was, in fact, undercooked, and underseasoned. I’m still flabbergasted that Blais didn’t get up and drop a pressure cooker on her head right there. Katsuji did a savory bread pudding (using the fried dough) with mushroom, bacon, and braised-then-deep fried pork belly. Blais loves the repurposing. Hugh says belly is tough and “desiccated.” Maybe Katsuji shouldn’t have put those little “DO NOT EAT” packets in the braising liquid. I don’t think Katsuji is very long for this show, which is too bad, because I love his accent.

* Melissa made a corn and ramp soup with pickled ramps, fried calamari, truffle butter, and bacon popcorn. It’s a big hit – Ming loves the corn flavor, Tom loves the pickled ramps, everyone likes the surprise of the bacon popcorn. Mei made a seared pork loin with braised peanuts, peanut sauce, herb salad, and peanut brittle, but (shockingly for her) the pork is a little overcooked. Stacy did a seared scallop (is this Top Escallop?), pickled peanuts, and a peanut and sunchoke puree/emulsion. Hugh loves it, loves the pickled peanuts, loves the Thai flavors. Blais says maybe she’ll get to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at Fenway, after which Tom warns her that you “can’t bounce” a first pitch – and my respect for Tom just tripled with that comment. (Stacy had the perfect response: “I can throw a ball.” Like, don’t throws-like-a-girl me, bro.)

* If this set of contestants had to form a baseball team, Aaron and Adam agree Katsuji would be the catcher. Adam says the mask will get him to shut up for a minute. I just thought Katsuji was the one guy who was built like a catcher – short and stocky. Although Buster Posey doesn’t look anything like the stereotypical catcher and he seems to be doing okay.

* Mos Chef’s duck breasts look amazing. The color is pristine across every single piece. I don’t think they’re that easy to cook, at least not at that level of precision, because the gap between “not browned enough” and “burned” is so narrow.

* Third group: Rebecca did a roasted salmon with mustard and honey glaze and toasted pretzel streusel, pickled shallots dill and watercress, and a mustard creme fraiche underneath. Blais calls it a “clean, classy little dish.” That sounds like Philip Marlowe describing a woman. James’ lobster cake with pretzel panzanella and avocado buttermilk mousse came out mushy, which means either it wasn’t cooked to a high enough temp or he had too much filling and not enough lobster meat. Adam’s watermelon curry with peanut oil poached halibut, jalapeno and fresno chili salad didn’t fare well because the fish was – wait for it – “hammered.” Tom says he let up a homer in the 9th inning, but maybe he was just pitching to the score, Tom. Mos Chef made those seared duck breasts with peanut nam prik pao, peanut brittle, crispy shallots, anchovies, and a fresh herb salad. Hugh loves the pears, the scallions, all the bright flavors. Blais called it “Moneyball” because it was “a smart dish right here.” He actually used the term correctly, which is why we love Blais. CHB would have used the term Moneyball to insult a dish that walked a lot and couldn’t field.

* Tom begins the judging with the awkward “Fenway Park is a great metaphor for today’s challenge” line. I don’t know if that’s worse from a baseball perspective or a literary one.

* Today’s theme was badly cooked proteins. Katsuji’s pork belly, Mei’s pork loin, Keriann’s short ribs, Adam’s fish, James’ lobster, Aaron’s pork rillette. Top two reasons chefs get sent home on this show: incorrectly cooked proteins and improper seasoning?

* Aaron making more friends in the stew room, saying “shut the fuck up for a moment” to Katsuji, who sort of interrupted/commented on Aaron’s self-loathing. “Bread pudding is what five year olds cook.” My daughter’s eight and she hasn’t mastered bread pudding yet. Should I give up on her?

* Katsuji tells him, “people are starting to hate you, you know what, embrace it!” I couldn’t be the one people hated. Just be nice. It’s so much easier to be nice. Being this much of a prick would require a lot of effort.

* Mos Chef, Melissa, and Katie are the top three. Padma tells Katie, “I think your dad would be so proud of you and I’m sure he is.” Tom was wowed by her recovering from her mistake. Melissa gets praise for the simplicity of the dish, surprise of the bacon popcorn. Says she wanted refined and complex but simple and that didn’t make a lot of sense but I guess it tasted good. Gregory wanted to incorporate all the ingredients, make it all round and work with each other. He’s so freaking calm. I just played in a little concert in front of fifty people and I was more nervous than he gets cooking for his life on this show.

* Winner is … Mos Chef! The man is on fire. New York/Delaware reprazent.

* Ron, Keriann, and Katsuji are the bottom three. There are lot of relieved faces in the group of chefs who didn’t get called out. Tom says it’s all basic mistakes, of cooking meat wrong, of portion problems. Keriann, why cook without a pressure cooker? I’m glad someone asked. Hugh says it was really tough and something about not being a sabertoothed tiger, which I assume was like saying he needed a chainsaw to get through it. He also says Katsuji “needs to be a better editor.” Ron’s dish seems to get the most criticism – the soup wasn’t soup-like, the croquette was too big, and what they don’t say is that it looked unappetizing.

* Tom says even the two remaining need to step up your game to remain in the competition. Ron is eliminated. Messy dish. Soup looked like porridge on screen. “I’m better than what I showed today.”

* Ron is eliminated. “All these little miniature entrees that these kids are doing … that’s not what I do.” Yeah, but that might be what wins. And I’ve eaten Blais’ food – those aren’t miniature in size or scope. I’ve eaten at one of Hugh’s places and the same applies. That’s a silly stereotype.

* Rankings: Mos Chef, Mei, Melissa, Adam. I think Aaron’s going to last longer than we’d like because he provides drama, but he’s struggled in three straight challenges now. Bottom three: Katsuji, Katie (despite the comeback), James.

Programming note: I’m going on vacation starting next Wednesday, so I’m not sure when next week’s recap will be up.

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. More important, however, is that his face no longer moves when he talks, which I find disturbing.

* 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.

Sorry this post is a day late, but playoffs plus podcast plus Klawchat made for a busy 24 hours.

This season of Top Chef moves to my old hometown of Boston, a great food town with many celebrity chefs and a broad spectrum of ethnic cuisines. But will the contestants have to cook their pasta in dirty water?

* Hey, it’s Richard Blais! I’m a fan of his work, and had the pleasure of meeting him in San Diego this spring at Juniper & Ivy. He’s looking very studious with glasses; if he were a pitcher, we’d say he was cerebral. And he’ll be judging quite a bit, apparently. That’s a good thing, but I just hope we don’t lose any Hugh Acheson as a result.

* We meet some of the chefs, at least some of the contestantswith interesting backgrounds. Katsuji, a Mexican-Japanese chef, runs a kosher taco place in Beverly Hills. Mei Lin is the sous-chef at ink, the LA restaurant run by Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio. Adam was previously at Jean-Georges’ (Vongerichten, but he doesn’t say that because, you know, first-name basis and all) upcoming vegan restaurant, ABC Home, which doesn’t seem to be open yet. Keriann introduces herself in front of anyone by saying she won some world’s greatest young chef award in 2008, which, while true, isn’t quite how you should greet your new housemates. George’s partner is Mike Isabella, former Top Chef All-Stars runner-up. Joy is head chef at a farm-to-table restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, called Foode, not too far from where the Potomac Nats play.

* The big new twist this season: Some Quickfires will be sudden death quickfires. If you lose, you “face” immediate elimination – although that phrasing was deliberate. Anyway, shit just got real.

* Quickfire: A mise en place relay. Four tasks for each of four teams of four. Prep three lobsters, 20 oysters, eight mackerels, and 21 littleneck clams – one chef per task. Each ingredient should take the same amount of time to prep, according to Padma, although given the chefs’ reactions I don’t think they concur. The slowest chef on the slowest team will be “up for elimination.”

* Adam bullies Keriann straight off, trying to claim the right to break down the lobsters. There’s a clear male talking down to female thing here, and Keriann backs down, as I think most women would when confronted with an aggressive and much taller man. However … this is Top Chef, so this may be what we refer to around here as “foreshadowing.”

* I wish we saw more close-ups on the chefs breaking down the lobsters, just for my own education. Mei Lin is just ripping through the big pink cockroaches and finishes first. Meanwhile Adam is struggling to get through his lobsters – who saw that coming?

* Doug, who is short, starts talking about how he needs to be Napoleon in the kitchen. Starting to think Doug might have failed 19th century French history.

* Ron zipping through mackerels. Lot of blood in that fish. Blue still in lead. Yellow jumps to second.

* Katsuji is the closer for the blue team (Mei Lin’s), but it turns out that he has no idea how to open clams and starts banging the end of the knife’s handle on the table. Are they not allowed to tell him how to do this?

* Adam refers to Keriann as his team’s “beautiful blonde thoroughbred.” So, he’s defining her by her looks, and then referring to her as an animal. Maybe I was wrong to expect better from a guy raised by a single mom. That said, she jumps into the lead when tearing through the clams and they win the challenge, so maybe he’ll stop pushing her around.

* Gregory hacks up the mackerel, and then George, who wanted the mackerel, can’t shuck the clams. They barely finish behind the blue team, and George took the longest to complete his task, so he’s … facing elimination.

* So now we find out what that means: He gets to pick any chef in the room to face in a sudden death cookoff – if he wins, they both stay; if he loses, he goes home. He picks Gregory, because he wanted the mackerel, but Gregory took it and struggled with it. They get twenty minutes to cook, using any of the mise en place ingredients.

* I’m not sure how I feel about this. Getting whacked for a quickfire seems harsh, and I can’t think of any point where I felt like I wanted the show’s format to change. But also, what’s Gregory’s motivation? He’s playing for pride, but George is cooking for his life. Gregory says “if you come for me, you better come correct,” and suddenly I feel like I’m watching Mos Chef.

* This challenge happens so fast and is so heavily edited that we don’t see much of the cooking. I actually do watch to see people cook, you know. I might learn something.

* George does a pan-seared mackerel with fennel salad. Gregory makes a chilled trio of mackerel, oyster, and lobster. Adam refers to this move as a statement of, “Hi I’m Greg and this is how big my dick is.” Adam appears to use his dick to supply his mouth with all of its thoughts.

* Gregory’s actual dishes: Oysters with yuzu ginger minionette, mirin marinated mackerel with bonito, lobster with chilled coconut and spiced tomato sauce. That is a hell of a lot to do in 20 minutes, isn’t it? The oyster/yuzu combo is pretty cliche, but the other two dishes seemed really clever.

* Blais says George’s dish was more elegant, but needed more heat. Gregory’s was bright and refreshing, although Blais cautions that “when you do 3 dishes instead of 1 you give yourself two more opportunities to fail.” He would know, since he was always churning out duos and trios. Gregory wins, George goes home. We hardly knew ye.

* Elinination challenge: The first-ever Top Chef food festival, featuring all the remaining contestants plus some of Boston’s best chefs and restaurateurs: Todd English, Barbara Lynch, Ken Oringer, Jamie Bissonnette, Ming Tsai, Lydia Shire, Jasper White, Kristen Kish. They didn’t miss with that invite list. Except they didn’t invite me to come eat. I need to discuss this with my agent.

* The actual challenge: Prepare an updated version of the first dish you remember cooking, with three hours to prepare that day. It’s being held at the Museum of Science, which I think is the best museum in the city.

* We see too much talking by the chefs and not enough cooking.

* Michael is making sriracha pearls to put in his chili corn soup. He clearly likes using molecular gastronomy tricks, but it seems like they’re just tricks for him, or gimmicks, not ways to elevate the food.

* Mei Lin is making congee with stewed pork. Her grandfather made congee (a thick porridge of heavily cooked rice), and she says all the men in her family cooked – as it should be.

* Katsuji is making some bizarre sauce based around cheese and squid ink. What. Blais and Tom look totally perplexed. Tom says “I’ll let you get back to work” but means to say “because I have no idea what the hell you’re doing.”

* Keriann says “Bend over and grab your ankles, honey. It’s about to happen.” Really? Anal rape jokes? When did that shit become funny? I didn’t think it was funny when Dr. Dre used it to mock Eazy-E in the “Dre Day” video, and that was 22 years ago.

* To the dishes… Joy made creamy yellow grits with sauteed greens and crispy chicken skin. She says she went for a simple approach vs “fine fine cooking.” I’d order this.

* Rebecca made a citrus tart with ginger cherries and chantilly cream. Blais and Padma say they’re not getting ginger flavor in the cherries. It seems a little too simple, maybe?

* Adam does fish (cod) and chips with a tri-color salad and mustard mayo with nori aleppo pepper and cumin seed. Lose the nose ring dude. You’re in a fucking kitchen. I don’t want your rhinogerms in my food.

* Stacy made a pulled chicken salad with sweet pea green coddess dressing and cranberry mostarda on thick-cut potato chips. I thought this might end up near the top, given the complexity and presentation.

* Ron does an odd twist on a shrimp cocktail, adding strawberries, shaved fennel, curry, and pickled jalapeños. Padma thinks it’s “over the top” spicy – so clearly instant feedback is a new feature of this season, which the chefs are not expecting.

* Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is in the house. For once, I wish Menino was still mayor, just for the unintentional comedy value of it.

* Doug (“call me Dougie” – no, thanks, Doug) made fried chicken with pickled jalapeños and watermelon. Tom likes the sweet and sour combination, and it sounds like he did the best job of keeping the chicken hot and crispy.

* Katsuji made … I’ll give this a shot: “petroleum shrimp” with a cheese sauce that includes orange peel, chipotles, white wine, and squid ink, along with saffron couscous and serrano aioli, served on a tortilla. Padma says eating it was complex. Wasn’t this what sank Kenny a few years ago – he executed well but everything had twenty ingredients?

* Keriann made a sweet corn soup with bacon jam, truffle crumble, and olive oil snow. Blais hates the snow. It’s fascinating to see Blais come down on chefs who use techniques we might associate with his cooking – but it’s evident that he feels there’s a right time or place for those tricks, and that overusing them earns you demerits.

* James made a crispy harissa chicken thigh with creamed corn, bbq spice, and watermelon. Apparently I missed out, growing up in the northeast, becuase fried chicken, some kind of corn dish, and watermelon (plain or pickled) is a popular combo here. I won’t complain about my mom’s cooking, but damn, that seems like a good thing to grow up eating.

* Melissa does a spicy ma-po tofu with pork over spiced rice, szechuan peanuts, and pickled cukes. We don’t hear much feedback but the description caused my palate to spontaneously ignite.

* Mei made a congee with caramelized pork, fish sauce caramel, and black garlic puree. Gail likes mix of raw herbs and scallions with dark caramel. It’s pretty stunning to look at. I can’t quite wrap my head around fish sauce caramel, though.

* Katie made a broccoli salad, with tamarind aioli, cured black olives, bacon powder. Blais said it was more of a side dish than appropriate for the event and that the bacon powder doesn’t serve any purpose. Also, it looks like a mess.

* Michael, who grew up in Russia (where soup cooks you!), made a chilled corn soup, with pickled cherries, salmon roe, and sriracha caviar. Tom doesn’t like fishy finish and doesn’t get much heat from sriracha. Michael’s response: “What went wrong with their palates?” Yeah, it’s their fault. I believe comments like that qualify as … foreshadowing.

* Mos Chef does a Haitian stewed chicken with fried bananas, spicy pikliz, and scotch bonnet chili relish. Padma making a face. “So strange and funky,” but she really likes it. She confesses to Blais after walking away that she nearly hated it – I guess you had to get every component together to appreciate it. It sounds like a ton of heat; I imagine I’d get blown out by it, having grown up eating virtually no chili pepper in anything.

* Aaron made a twist on bacon and eggs, serving pork belly braised in tamari, miso poached egg yolk, and birds-eye chili caramel. He didn’t set aside any of the better pieces for the judges, and ends up serving a very fatty piece to Padma, who almost immediately spat it out – right in front of him. She tells him, “clean up your act and your station.” It’s even worse that he dissembles when she points out (before tasting it) that her piece is nearly all fat.

* Their favorites: Gail cites Doug’s as her favorite fried chicken. Padma and Tom seem to like Gregory’s. Blais cites Mei’s congee. No huge surprises, based on the instant feedback.

* Their least favorites: They all killed Katie’s broccoli side dish. “That’s your showcase?” when it’s not appealing to look at. Michael’s corn soup was fishy due to the fish eggs – ” an unpleasant surprise.” Gail and Padma have a little moment, though: When Padma says that Aaron served her a piece of pork belly that was all fat, Gail kind of rolls her eyes and says that pork belly is mostly fat anyway. There was a trace of contempt in that whole exchange. Padma acts like it never happened, though, and just presses her complaint further, saying she almost never has had to spit any dish out in the history of the show. Katsuji’s dish gets bashed as too weird and sloppy.

* They call everyone in from the stew room. All praise and shaming will now be public, apparently.

* Tom says overall the effort was fair: They got a lot of rustic and homestyle dishes, but only some chefs pushed it farther than that. Blais is a little more positive, maybe because he knows what it’s like to be on the other side.

* Top three: Doug, Mei, and Gregory. No surprises there. Mei’s congee was spot-on. Mos Chef’s dish had a million things that could have gone “crazy bad” (Padma) and it was all crazy good. Blais spins this motorcycle chase analogy for Gregory’s stew, and shortly after the episode his monologue was optioned by TLC. Doug’s was bright and fresh and chicken so crispy and well seasoned. His was probably the easiest dish for me to understand, given my own limited experience with congee and with Caribbean cuisine.

* Winner: Mei. Blais says it was appropriate for a food festival and a fine-dining restaurant too. She jokes she has her job for another day.

* The bottom three: Katie, Michael, Katsuji. Aaron, who served Padma the big piece of pork fat, isn’t among them.

* Katie’s felt more like a salad, but she says she lost her focus with the bacon powder. I think she lost her focus at the conception: if you want to make broccoli salad your starting point, serve it with a protein where you get to show off. Michael’s soup had a great concept and base but all anyone tasted was the salmon roe. He says he tasted it, found it was “a little fishy,” didn’t think it was too bad … and Tom jumps on him. You can’t talk your way out of anything at judges’ table. Tom has absolutely no tolerance for bullshit. Katsuji’s dish had some solid elements but way too much going on.

* Michael is eliminated. Tom says it just didn’t work with sweet corn and fishy salmon roe.

* In the confessional, he says he tried to be original and out of the box, but it backfired. He should have stopped there, but then says, “Maybe Tom should be more open-minded… you’ve gotta grow with age or get left behind.” Dude, nobody liked your dish, not just Tom. Do they not realize the most incendiary things they say are guaranteed to make it to air? Have they never seen the show before? Before you go on Top Chef, you should read my recaps, because then, if nothing else, you’ll know just how ridiculous you’ll look when you say stuff like this.