I’m back from vacation and am on the clock again for ESPN and for Top Chef. I’ll be chatting on Thursday, just at a later time than usual, and will be in Nashville for the winter meetings next week. I’ll also do a Hawai’i eats post as well as posts on the books I read on the trip. In the meantime, here’s an abbreviated recap of last week’s episode of Top Chef to get you ready for tonight’s show.

* Quickfire. Each chef gets one of 17 different dumpling styles from around the world and must cook an authentic version including sauce. The chefs get five minutes to research their assigned dumpling types on Kindle Fires (just $199!) in what I can only assume is a bit of product placement.

* Stefan gets the German dumplings called klopse, which he grew up eating. Sheldon also gets one he knows, the Chinese dumplings called jiaozi. It seems like there’s a big imbalance here across the assignments.

* Brooke ends up with no flour to make dough to wrap her dumplings. How is there a flour shortage? And why does this count against her – shouldn’t this be on whoever’s stocking the kitchen? Why are we judging chefs on their ability to source ingredients from the central kitchen? This really annoyed me given how clearly it seems to work against the purpose of the show.

* Kuniko didn’t get to plate. Time management remains an issue. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.”

* Bart tops his dumplings with fried spaghetti, and Dana Cowin calls it “crazy fried hair.” This is the most insightful thing she has ever said on Top Chef.

* Brooke is in the bottom three, which is bullshit, in case you were wondering how I felt about her. Carla’s South African fufu was inauthentic. Kuniko fails with the empty plate.

* Top three: Josie’s Korean mandu, Stefan’s klopse, and Micah’s manti from Kazakhstan. Josie wins. I might have given edge to Micah for cooking something unfamiliar, although that’s without me tasting the food. I also find Josie kind of annoying in way “college freshman coming home for Christmas break and acting all superior to kids still in high school” way.

* Elimination challenge: Cook thanksgiving dinner for the staff of Farestart, a nonprofit that provides culinary training for homeless and disadvantaged individuals. The chefs are split into two teams, with Tom and Emeril each leading one. Each team must prepare the turkey, sides, and desserts.

* Tom talks up basting the turkey, which is odd to me, since I was reared on the words of Alton Brown, who always opposed basting, saying it has little positive effect but causes you to lose heat every time you open the oven. If you put some form of fat on the skin at the start, it should brown without any help from you, and basting doesn’t make the interior any juicier.

* Emeril thinks bread because Tom will do pasta. I always made bread when we hosted Thanksgiving, so I approve.

* Josie volunteers to do turkey because she has immunity. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.”

* The whole episode seemed much faster to watch because each team had a leader making a set menu up front. We didn’t have mid-cooking shifts and we avoided a lot of petty squabbling. Maybe that’s not more compelling for TV but it meant far more focus on the food.

* Three of the best-looking dishes: Brooke’s sweet potato biscuits with orange zest, Carla’s carrot soup with turkey meatballs, and Chrissy’s pecan pie bread pudding with whiskey sauce, all of which eventually earn raves.

* Stefan needs more room to work in the kitchen, a spat that seems to go nowhere when it’s not broached again on the show.

* Josh is making fresh pasta but it looks like he’s putting way too much filling in the middle.

* Kuniko is making a form of potato gratin called a pavé and talks about emphasizing clock management. Then we see Kristen asking if she has time, to which Kuniko says “I think so,” while ignoring her dish to help others on the team finish theirs. This is known in the business as “obvious.”

* Stuffing has foie gras pancetta and belly. John doing stuffing and pumpkin torte with Kuniko helping. Too much filling in Josh’s ravioli?

* Tyler says he’s been sober for seven months after 25 years of problems with alcohol. Having lost two family members to alcohol abuse, I have no snark to offer here.

* Carla is losing her shit again, saying she doesn’t want to be called “sweetie” or “honey” when her male counterparts are just called “chef.” She’s not wrong. The kitchen can be a pretty testosterone-soaked, misogynistic place. Stefan says, “that’s why I left Europe – European women,” because European men are apparently such a prize.

* Serving time, starting with Team Emeril: Josie’s triple spice turkey with cayenne and hot sauce is a little pink in the center … or a lot pink. You can’t serve that, ever, and a quick thermometer check would have verified that it was still gobbling. Emeril’s mom’s stuffing with chorizo and a cornbread stuffing with ground turkey and diced bacon score well. Kristen’s assiette of root vegetables, parsnip truffle puree, and crème fraiche is under-seasoned. Tyler’s gumbo lacks depth, has a bitter finish, and lacks heat; Emeril thinks he didn’t add Tabasco (blech) or Worcestershire sauces. Kuniko’s pavé is uncooked, and Tom correctly points out that she should have noticed it was resisting the knife when she cut it. Sheldon’s collard greens aren’t falling apart yet, which turns out to be a lack of understanding of the dish on his part. Brooke’s biscuits and Chrissy’s bread pudding both score really well, while John’s spiced pumpkin torte with goat cheese and ricotta is good but a little grainy by his own admission. There are four items here that really flopped – the turkey, the gumbo, the pavé, and the collard greens.

* Team Tom looks like they’re struggling to plate. Out at the table, Dana’s comments are useless; I don’t know if she’s suffering in editing, or if she can’t come up with insights on the fly, but she’s not adding anywhere near enough to this show for me. The turkey was “braised” (pretty sure that’s what they said) with tons of butter underneath the skin, although again, I don’t see how that would work in practice. The stuffing has foie gras, kale, pancetta, and pork belly. Carla’s carrot soup is an enormous hit, overshadowing the bird. Bart’s fennel, gorgonzola, orange, and pumpkin seed salad isn’t “refined” enough for Padma. Josh’s ravioli were tough because he didn’t even out the edges; I’m wondering if he rolled the dough extra thick to support all that filling, which would have produced edges that wouldn’t cook before the dumplings exploded. Micah’s roasted Brussels sprouts with cranberries, bacon, and shallots look great and elicit little comment – Thierry loves them, others say they were under-seasoned, and we move on. Lizzie’s potato purée with a ton of butter is great … of course it is, there’s a ton of butter in it. Stefan’s panna cotta with jam may have too much cardamom, although Tom likes that. Eliza’s chocolate tart with white chocolate and mint syrup has too much chocolate overall. That’s three flops here – the ravioli and both desserts, with only the ravioli a real mess.

* Team Tom wins unanimously. I like that the editing showed the discussion at the table of which team won, skipping the false-drama of revealing the winning team at judges’ table when it seemed pretty lopsided during service.

* The ever-quotable Carla says “I need a subtitle” when Tom reveals he thought she was making cabbage soup, not carrot soup. Her dish is the winner, and she says she made it “basically with one hand” after slicing her right hand in the previous episode. Her dish also seemed the most inventive of any on Tom’s team.

* Loser’s bracket: Josie is such a bullshitter, which is part of why I’m having such a negative reaction to her. Just own up to the mistakes – you undercooked it, don’t try to finesse it by claiming it was on the raw side of medium or something. She had immunity but was sent to Judges’ Table to send her a lesson. Tyler realizes now that he should have added Tabasco and Worcestershire, which is how you take responsibility for an error. Kuniko says she was pushed on time, to which Tom responds that she had five hours. Josie pipes up that Kuniko spent a lot of time helping the team, which was an honorable move and perhaps something the judges should have considered (although Padma indicated they wouldn’t). Sheldon says he didn’t want the collard greens to be mush, but done correctly, they are kind of mush.

* Kuniko is eliminated. She says she has no regrets, and that if she didn’t help anyone and just took care of herself that would have been worse than going home. John points out correctly that she blew an easy dish, but no one wants to speak ill of the recently eliminated, so he gets hammered for what is a pretty dead-on assessment of the situation. On the bright side, she’ll be heading for Last Chance Kitchen, so perhaps she can bring her not-insignificant skills back to the main show.

My MVP preview piece is up – won’t you be glad when this is over in a few hours? – and I had my weekly chat today.

On to the food … The qualifying stuff is gone, and the fifteen surviving chefs head off to Seattle for the real fun.

* Quickfire: The chefs break down into five teams of three. The judges include three past contestants who didn’t win their respective seasons – Josie, Stefan, and CJ. They must make a dish using local seafood in twenty minutes. John profiles Kuniko as a knife-skills expert because she’s Japanese … but he’s not wrong, in this case. Meanwhile, he’s game-planning while Padma’s talking about the challenge and she goes all Catholic-school on him and smacks his hand with a ruler. Don’t mess with Padma.

* Several chefs focus on digging in one muddy bin for geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”). Kristen says it “looks like a penis … a really big one.” Maybe a dinosaur’s penis? Even John Holmes feels inadequate next to one of those.

* Carla, who looks like Señor Wences’ puppet Johnny, says she wants to win a James Beard award and have a nice ass. Later, she yells at her teammates that she “can’t keep running around like a stupid.” She’d be hilarious if her voice didn’t sound like a jackhammer scraping down a chalkboard.

* John referring to himself as most hated chef in Dallas has already gotten old halfway through episode two. I also don’t think he’s quite as much of an asshole as he’s making himself out to be – he’s blunt, but there’s zero evidence so far that he’s the least bit malicious.

* For all the talk about the time limit, every camera shot of prep work has the chefs working deliberately. Only plating ended up rushed.

* Judging. John, Kuniko, and Sheldon won for their thinly-sliced gooey duck sashimi, which was sliced more thinly than that of the other team that used the dinosaur penis. Bottom dish was Josh, Danyele, and Eliza, whose razor clam and corn chowder was underseasoned; they wanted to use gooey duck but there was none left for them to utilize. John wins immunity on a random draw.

* And the twist … the three former contestants are reentering the show! Why are the new competitors all complaining? You still have to beat a ton of other chefs. And it’s not like these are past winners.

* Elimination: now we have six teams of three, with the former contestants forming the sixth team together. The challenge is to make a dish using regional ingredients for local chef Tom Douglas. They get 47 minutes to prep and cook in the Space Needle, the time required for it to make one full revolution. I lived there for a summer and never went up. When we wanted a great view, we went to Kerry Park on a clear day, where you get the skyline and Mount Rainier in one shot.

* Now John calls Kuniko a risk taker and praises her for it. He might not play well with all of the others, but if they’re trying to make him this season’s villain, he’s not complying.

* Danyele, Josh, and Eliza are using a fish they can’t identify. That won’t go well. If that fish showed up in Arizona they’d deport it.

* Josie says people call her the “Global Soul Chef.” It’s probably a bad idea to ever use your own nickname on a reality show, unless you want your new nickname to be the Insufferable Douchenozzle Chef.

* Two teams cook at a time in a fairly small kitchen, although that ends up a non-issue.

* Kuniko wants to poach cod fish in chili oil and there’s instant agreement that that’s the team’s dish. Sheldon makes dashi while John does the veg. I don’t know if this is just good chemistry, or if we’ve got three chefs who are all mature and/or laid-back enough to jump immediately to the same page.

* Team Carla is doing poached salmon on seasonal veg. She insists on using a chinois for beurre blanc, saying that’s the only way to make one … I may have missed something in her plan but I have no idea why that would be the case. She’s even annoying chefs who aren’t on her team.

* Chef Douglas is at the table, wearing Meatloaf’s hair. This is not a good look for anyone.

* Kuniko’s chili oil reaches the smoke point and she has to start over. I’m completely confused about how she could “lose focus” (something she says she does a lot because she’s always thinking … that sounds familiar) in a kitchen that small. Was she working on something else? She couldn’t have gone far.

* Judges’ table. Team Kuniko’s cod is poached perfectly, with just the right amount of heat, and a spot prawn shabu shabu that also gets high marks.

* Team Carla’s poached salmon looks like spam. I have never understood the appeal of poached salmon; I don’t know of any other fish that develops so much flavor when seared or otherwise browned, yet poaching just produces a flavorless, gummy pink slab. It’s over fava beans, baby carrots, and baby fennel, as well as that beurre blanc. Sure enough, the judges say the salmon has very little taste, but it’s saved by the sauce. Meanwhile, Carla only enhances her image as Chef Train Wreck by reaching into her knife bag and slicing her hand open.

* Next two groups include Jeff, Brooke, and Bart, where there’s already discord when Brooke thinks Jeff has overcooked the halibut by searing both sides (skin off) but doesn’t seem to speak up in the kitchen. Team Retreads changes its dish at the last minute to try to do something different from the other five teams, which are all making fish; their new dish is quail with a cherry emulsion-broth that no one likes. Meanwhile, Stefan keeps making breast jokes, because those aren’t tired and unfunny at all.

* Josh, no one thinks you’re just this little guy from Oklahoma. They think you need to shave and maybe stop being so paranoid.

* Back to the table: Team Retread’s quail breast with confit spot prawn, porcini, mashed potatoes, and cherries goes over poorly. The quail and spot prawns are all overcooked, the broth is slightly bitter at the finish, and the cherry mixture isn’t sweet. I guess experience is as overrated on Top Chef as it is in October baseball.

* Jeff, Brooke, and Bart serve pan roasted halibut with mushrooms, English peas, and wheat beer with herb sabayon. Padma’s fish is hockey-puck overcooked.

* Final two groups start with Daniele, Josh, Eliza, and the mystery fish, which turns out to be cod. They pan-roast it and serve it with sautéed mushrooms, fava beans, and pickled apples. The apples get raves but there’s too much raw garlic in the sauce.

* Micah, Kristen, and Tyler serve seared pacific salmon with seasonal veg and another spot prawn butter sauce. It doesn’t seem very creative, but they “crrispy-seared” it, which is how you treat salmon, dammit. Kristen can really sell a dish – her descriptions are always detailed and highlight what makes each dish distinctive. She knows what to say that will get judges’ attention. It’s like subliminal advertising. Anyway, their salmon is far better than the other salmon dish.

* John, Kuniko, and Sheldon win again. John is very quick to credit Kuniko in front of the judges, again defying the villain tag. She’s cooked ling cod (native to the U.S. and Canadian Pacific coast), but has never poached in chili oil before. The dashi was flavorful, John’s spot prawns were perfect, yata yata. Kuniko wins, making me wish the racist from the first episode was around to see that. John has a kiss for her on the head as they walk out.

* Bottom two: Team Retreads and Team Brooke/Jeff/Bart. Josie can’t even identify why they’re there, which has Tom wearing his Smuggie. Stefan doesn’t realize the quail was overcooked, then makes excuses when confronted about it.

* Brooke is fairly polite in disagreeing before the judges. Jeff overcooked the fish with hard sear on both sides. Bart’s sabayon was flavorless. The judges were far harsher here than at the table; from this discussion you’d think this wasn’t fit for your dog.

* The killer here seems to be Jeffrey starting the fish too soon (14½ minutes to go) and hard-searing both sides, so by the moment of service it was already dry in the center. He goes home, with a pretty clear explanation of why. Padma’s already crying; episode 2 waterworks has to be a new record for her.

* Still way too early top three: John, Kristen, Micah, with Kuniko just on the outside because she might be her own worst enemy if she can’t maintain focus. None of the three retreads was remotely impressive this time around.

My buyer’s guide to the relief market is up for Insiders, and I’ll be chatting today at 1 pm EST.

This year’s opening-episode twist had the chefs broken into four groups, each visiting one of the four chef-judges at one of his restaurants, and competing in a challenge of that judge’s design. The producers also broke the show up by using Tom’s group as the main story arc of the episode, returning to them three times while presenting each of the other three groups in single chunks from start to finish. I thought it was a clever twist and didn’t involve sending home as many chefs as last year’s opener did.

* Group Tom features John Tesar, the “most hated chef in Dallas,” who gets off to a roaring start of arrogance; South African Lizzie Binder, who has a mad crush on Tom; and Jorel Pierce, wearing Rollie Fingers’ mustache.

* Tom’s challenge puts the contestants in his Craft LA kitchen for part of a shift, with each chef getting one specific task to tackle, like stuffing and shaping fresh tortellini (Lizzie, who seems to nail it), breaking down whole birds (Anthony and Jorel), or fileting fish (John and Micah).

* Micah makes a statement against self-interest by telling Tom he went from line cook to executive chef but never worked as a sous. Tom contemplates eliminating Micah on the spot by using a boning knife but thinks better of it.

* Rollie Fingers’ restaurant is “butchery focused,” then he screws up butchering the chickens. We can see where that’s going. By the way, friend of the dish Dave Cameron (also of Fangraphs) says that Rollie’s Denver restaurant, Euclid Hall, is excellent.

* Moving along to group two, we have another insane mustache, which must be some more Movember nonsense. (Seriously, you’re going to ask people to sponsor you for doing nothing? Growing a mustache is not effort. If you’re not dead, your facial hair will grow. This isn’t like asking people to sponsor you for running a 5K. It’s like asking people to sponsor you for going to the bathroom.)

* Anyway, group two’s judge is Emeril, who asks the contestants to make soup in one hour. What isn’t clear is whether they get any stock as an input, although from the results I assume they didn’t. I find it really hard to imagine a soup with the proper body if there’s no stock involved.

* Two of the chefs, Stephanie and Kristen, work together, live in the same building, and got the same tattoo. Then Stephanie clarifies that they’re not actually a couple, which the editing leading up to that point implied pretty strongly, right? Kristen has the look of a breakout candidate/fan favorite – she was born in Korea, modeled as recently as five years ago, is chef de cuisine at a Barbara Lynch restaurant (Stir) in Boston, and, judging by her performance in this challenge, is ready to kick ass. (Aren’t models usually pretty tall? I always assumed that would be a handicap in the kitchen because you’re constantly leaning over a low table.)

* Word of advice to all the male chefs in the audience: Do not go on Top Chef and risk missing the birth of your daughter. Not only does that disqualify you from all future Father of the Year awards, your wife will bust that out in every argument you ever have with her, forever. And no, I didn’t miss my daughter’s birth, before anyone asks. I just know these things.

* Jeffrey trying to quick-chill a gazpacho was one of the few moments of cooking drama in the show, but they sort of dropped the subject until service – the same with Josh plating his soup a good five minutes too early.

* Judging: Jeffrey’s gazpacho is cold and he gets the Top Chef jacket immediately. Kristen makes an English pea broth with scallops, crème fraiche, and lemon peel she poached three times to remove the bitterness, something that makes a pretty clear impression on Emeril (and was, perhaps, done to make just such an impression, a pretty slick move). She advances, as does Josh, whose soup was still warm enough and who gets points for sutble use of chili pepper to balance the sweetness of his coconut broth. Kristen’s colleague/tattoo-mate Stephanie goes home, as does one other contestant.

* Group Tom resumes, with John saying that because he’s in Tom’s kitchen, he needs to do stuff Tom’s way. That’s maturity speaking, and doesn’t quite fit with the arrogant front he showed in the comments at the top of the episode. He nails the halibut he’s preparing and advances on the spot, although the other four chefs in the group don’t know if he passed or was sent home. Incidentally, John reveals that he came up through the ranks with several chefs who’ve gone on to greater heights but saw his career derailed by “casual drug use that became self-medication.” So he’s an ass, but one we might root for anyway. I think.

* Group Wolfgang is the motley crew, featuring the foul-mouthed (even by Top Chef standards) ex-wife of the owner of Rao’s in New York, a Japanese woman whose parents don’t respect her career choice, and a guy bragging about being ranked #1 on Yelp. That’s like a baseball prospect bragging about being on the most fantasy rosters.

* The challenge: Make an omelette in 45 minutes with presentation counting very heavily. Puck says, “I’m such an easy guy as long as they do it exactly the way I want it.” Having seen him on several other shows, I’m actually concerned he’s too soft for judging on this show, and he ends up being (I think) the easiest judge to please in this episode, passing several chefs who screwed up royally.

* Chef Yelp uses bacon fat and produces a messy, greasy omelette. Carla ex-Rao shreds her omelette when it sticks to the pan, Tyler’s omelette is overcooked and brown all over. Eliza burns her first omelette and has to salvage her other ingredients from that dish to make a fresh one. They probably all should have gone home.

* Kuniko infused chamomile in the milk in her omelette, the one bit of innovation I saw in all six dishes. It’s like everyone panicked and forgot that you don’t win Top Chef if you’re not pushing the envelope somewhere.

* All but Chef Yelp advance, after which Puck shows how to make a proper omelette, the French way … in a technique I learned from a $10 Julia Child cookbook. How is it possible that none of the six chefs in this group knew how to do that?

(EDIT: I forgot to mention how Chef Yelp referred to Kuniko as “Origami,” which was both incredibly racist and unwarranted since she actually made the dish correctly. He could have been a great punching bag for me for a few more weeks if he didn’t suck.)

* Let’s face it – we’re watching primarily for Group Hugh, and the editors show it to us last because they know we’re not changing the channel until we see the Unibrow. His challenge to the chefs: Make a beautiful salad in 45 minutes. I like that it’s possible to pass this challenge without actually cooking any ingredients, although if you take that route you had better be precise with your flavors.

* Chef Bart is a knight in Belgium, and really, Hugh is going to mock him endlessly for this, as am I.

* Gina says she’s a ferocious tiger. She is also annoying. But she founded a community food program, so she’s noble, but still annoying. She also says that Danyele is dumb for flaming her tomatoes and that is cooking school 101 and it’s pretty clear that this point that the editors are telling us Gina will not be with us for much longer.

* Sheldon has spent nearly his whole life in Hawaii and worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef, making him another early leader for fan favorite. Hugh asks for Spam in his salad, of course.

* Put the lid on the fucking blender, Bart.

* Judging highlights. Brooke does a kale salad with Brussels sprouts leaves, lemon vinaigrette, and fried kale on top, trendy across the board, so she advances on the spot. Sheldon does fried Brussels sprouts and gets dinged slightly for using an out-of-season ingredient and for using too little acid in his dressing. Bart’s salad is overcomplicated. Danyele’s charred tomato vinaigrette is a little overpowering. Gina is blatantly trying to manipulate Hugh in judging, and she ends up the only chef in this group to get the axe.

* Group Tom, finale. Rollie Fingers’ beurre monté is too salty. Anthony did too much damage to the duck and was too timid in the kitchen. Both chefs go home, with Micah (who recovered from revealing too much of his resume) and Lizzie advancing.
* Way too early top three prediction: Micah, Kristen, and John. I also considered Brooke, Jeffrey, Josh (who can cook with more focus when his pregnant wife dumps him), and even Kuniko for that one burst of creativity. I don’t think we got a great look at Tyler or Eliza – if they were players I’d need to scout them again before even forming a preliminary opinion.

Today’s chat transcript is up. I apologize to anyone looking for Wednesday’s Sportscenter segment, but I don’t think it’s going to appear online. I’ll tweet the link if that changes.

* So for the finale, each chef had to make a four-course dinner, with an odd theme – each dish had to be the equivalent of a letter, starting with a love letter, then an apology, then a thank-you, then a letter to himself. I never really get these whole “translate an emotion into food” things. Make four awesome dishes, then cook up a story afterwards to fit. The chefs do each get an assistant, a surprise appearance by someone from Chris’ restaurant and a longtime cooking buddy of Kerry’s.

* The judges will be joined by ten diners. Obvious conclusion, made by Chris, Kerry, and me, is that it’s the ten eliminated TCM contestants.

* Chris says the only way to beat Kerry, a classically trained chef, is to put his heart on the plates, which was his hint that one of his dishes would in fact contain heart.

* Kerry does all his shopping at Whole Foods; Chris goes to three places, losing some cooking time but getting more adventurous ingredients. Letting him loose in a butcher shop with a fistful of dollars might make for an hourlong reality show of its own.

* Chris says he hated the smell of tripe as a kid and would run screaming from his grandmother’s house when she cooked it. Now he’s known for offal. Maybe it served as some sort of exposure therapy. Then he makes blood sausage and it looks like a horror movie. I’ve had black pudding, but have never cooked with blood, which apparently is a pretty labor-intensive and, um, messy process.

* Curtis does a side commentary where he talks a lot and says nothing, mostly just saying how either chef could win and whoever doesn’t execute will lose. He’s the Tim McCarver of Top Chef.

* But then Curtis cooks dinner for the final two, which is a great idea, since Curtis was originally a chef but is better known in the U.S. as a TV personality. I’d love to know if this was the producers’ idea or Curtis’; people who love to cook love to cook for others, and I could see Curtis wanting to do something for the two finalists but also to show off his own skills. He made two dishes but the foie gras with figs and Sauternes jelly seemed really clever and interesting. I also enjoyed the snippets of the three chefs’ discussion on critics who don’t have kitchen experience or a culinary education, pointing out that knowledge can be acquired in multiple ways, and (from Kerry) a thought on the challenge of deconstructing a dish in your mind when all you see is the finished product. Obviously, I side with the critics in a sense, since I evaluate baseball players, teams, and even front-office personnel, but never played the game (and couldn’t, in fact). It probably took me longer to learn how to evaluate than it might have taken someone with field experience, but I think I’ve at least figured it out enough to do my job.

* The ten extra diners are all food critics, not chefs, so it’s the toughest set of judges the chefs have faced all season, or perhaps just the biggest bunch of complainers they’ve faced all season.

* This could be entirely editing, but while both chefs look extremely intense in the kitchen, Chris seems like he’s enjoying the chaos, while Kerry just seems stressed. Maybe it’s just their processes. I’m a lot more like Chris personality-wise, at least in the kitchen. If things are going too smoothly, I’m more likely to get distracted by something else.

* Serving time. First course, the love letter: Kerry serves a jjigae (not to be confused with a jugga jigga wugga) with scallops, spot prawns, and gnocchi, earning praise for “smoothness and finesse,” which sounds boring. Chris serves beef heart tartare with foie gras and puffed beef tendon, which is not boring. One critic calls it a “steampunk version of steak tartare.” I don’t even know how to visualize that.

* Second course, the “apology:” Kerry serves a flan of sugar snap peas, prosciutto, morels, and chervil, earning raves all around. The color of the flan was amazing, although I have to admit my first thought was “Shamrock shake.” Chris serves scallops, pancetta piana (pancetta that is cured flat rather than rolled), and sea urchin. Lesley Kama Sutra or whatever her name is calls it the makeup sex. Ruth says it’s sexy. Jane Goldman hates it because she’s celibate.

* Third course, the thank-you: Kerry serves branzino with clam ragout and mustard greens and a little bacon, an homage to his family’s New England roots. The theme so far with Kerry is technical excellence but not a ton of wow factor. Chris serves tripa napolitana with a dark brown streak on the dish to represent him running out of grandmothers house. This earns some of the biggest raves so far around the table.

* Fourth course, the narcissist’s plate: Kerry serves dry aged côte de boeuf (a thick bone-in rib steak), short ribs, swiss chard, and a fennel and potato gratin. Lesley says the frying to crisp the short rib dried it out, which would be criminal, but otherwise gets high marks. Chris makes his “last supper,” a blood sausage with pork-jus poached oysters, and a sunnyside up egg. Francis makes a horribly awkward analogy about swimming in the ocean and getting a back rub from a pig. I believe it’s illegal to even fantasize about that in 13 states. John Curtas calls this embarrassingly awful. No one agrees with him, apparently.

* Critics table: Kerry says the letter to himself was about enjoying something special and rich. Chris says he won’t cook for the critics, but cooks for himself. “When you cook to receive accolades you lose direction and focus.” Isn’t that true when you’re at the top of just about any profession? If you’re cooking for the masses, you need to listen to the customer. When you’re so good that people will pay twice as much for your food, it’s because they’re paying for your vision, or to experience your passion.

* Ruth says she’d never had beef heart tartare before and loved it. Krista loved the poached oysters. Francis liked the reduced jus’ unctuous texture. After the larger group seemed to favor Kerry, the five judges seem to favor Chris. Ruth asks if you want to be comforted or thrilled, while Jimmy Sunshine comments about not wanting to be TOO thrilled, then heads off for his Wednesday-night bingo game.

* The new Top Chef Master is … Chris. I’m a little surprised given the editing of the dinner comments, and Chris seemed to genuinely think Kerry would win. He ends up raising $141,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation on the show, and mentions (I think for the first time) that he lost his uncle to Parkinson’s last year after a 34-year battle. The Foundation posted a brief story on Chris’ win, which says that Fox himself called Chris to congratulate him.

I’m skipping Life After Top Chef because October is always so crazy between scouting the Arizona Fall League and watching playoff games, but I’ll resume blogging for Top Chef: Seattle when it starts up on November 7th.

This was my favorite episode of the season because of the elimination challenge. It served a good purpose, but I think it also required the chefs to demonstrate teaching and leadership skills that they almost certainly have to display in their restaurants anyway. It turned out that those weren’t factors in the ultimate decision, but they could have been, and I think that it’s one way to set Masters apart from regular Top Chef.

* Quickfire: Blind cooking with a mystery teammate, a holdover from Season 3. Kerry points out that, based on the previous season, “it pays to be nice” to your teammate. Each chef must create identical dishes with his/her teammate, and will be judged on how similar they look and how they taste.

* The mystery teammates are Ruth, Francis, and Jimmy Sunshine. Ruth uses a bizarre generic European accent in an 80-year-old’s voice to try to fake Kerry out. James uses fake Southern-ish accent – but then actually turns out to be the best listener of the three.

* Chefs in this challenge nearly always assume too much skill or knowledge on the part of the partner, but here the mystery partners were clearly playing dumb too, which I assume was the producers’ direction.

* I find the shouting within this challenge really annoying. Chris is actually the quietest of the three, which I would not have predicted.

* Chefs are all shocked at the reveal. Chris calls it “fucking hysterical” and their laughter was pretty infectious.

* Chris/James did prawns with sauteed celery, thyme, pine nuts, and chili threads. Curtis can’t decide which he likes more, to which James says “shut the fuck up.” This whole quickfire showed a far different side of James’ personality – the most human and likeable he’s been over the two seasons I’ve watched. He was genuinely stoked at the positive results.

* Lorena/Francis: Swiss Chard with sauteed chicken, bacon, onions, shallots, stock, touch of cream, and parmesan. Lorena wanted to serve this over pasta, but the pasta wasn’t ready in time. I thought this sounded simple yet delicious – I’m going to try this over pasta tonight using some of the bacon I smoked myself and a little reserved fat. (There’s no bacon in the online recipe.) The dishes tasted the same, but Curtis dings them for serving a sauce without something to put it on.

* Kerry/Ruth: Sauteed chicken, chard, bacon, parmesan, and rosemary cream. Ruth used way more chicken on her plate, which is part of that “playing dumb” bit I mentioned earlier. Curtis says Ruth’s chicken might be slightly better cooked!

* Winner: Chris, so $5K more for the Michael J. Fox Foundation and a total of $41K so far.

* Elimination challenge: Working with two Southwest Career and Technical Academy students who have taken culinary arts classes, each chef must create a dish … but they can only direct their student-chefs and can’t touch the food to be served. The students first prepare dishes for the chefs to taste and the chefs have to reinterpret the dishes to be “masters-level.”

* Chris says he has/had a learning disability but doesn’t say what it is. It does seem like a lot of great chefs were poor students in school for one reason or another, yet excelled once they discovered they had a passion for food.

* Lorena’s kids made lasagna and she says she feels limited by that dish – but why not deconstruct it somehow so she’s not bound by the shape and format? Anything with a starch, tomatoes, and cheese would have worked. Even just another pasta dish, but one that’s not so homey.

* Kerry is appalled that his students haven’t seen The Godfather. The movie did come out over 20 years before they were born.

* Chris keeps his kids with him during shopping so that he’s still educating them, which is awesome. It looks like both of the other chefs are doing some of this as well, so perhaps the editors just focused on Chris in the final cut.

* Chris shows the kids the basics of butchering the pork loin, but they can’t use the meat he cuts. Please tell me that food wasn’t discarded. His kids are so nervous that they break a bottle of cider vinegar. Opa.

* Kerry’s got his team roasting bones to make “brown jus,” which I assume is a stock he’s going to have them reduce. He says this is restaurant-level cooking, which turns out to be key – he’s really pushing his kids both in efficiency and in the quality of the food they’re producing, exceeding what Chris and Lorena are doing.

* One of Chris’ students will be the first in his family to graduate from high school, and says he grew up in poverty, eating same thing every night. One of Lorena’s students has Type 2 diabetes. I hope the producers do this challenge again in the future.

* Chris is concerned that they’re plating too soon, saying he won’t be happy if he goes home for “teaching kids to be fast.” But why dress the salad and plate with five minutes to go? If the meat is done early, that’s one thing, but you can dress the salad and plate it inside of sixty seconds. That was never fully explained.

* Judges’ table: Same trio from the quickfire. Guests include staff from the Southwest Career and Technical Academy plus some family members of the students.

* Team Chris: Pork loin with hazelnut and sage brown butter, apples, and watercress. They reimagined a basic pork tenderloin dish. Ruth says her paillard is beautifully cooked. Francis says the sauce is perfect. Emilio’s (single) mom starts crying.

* Team Lorena: Lasagna with three meats and a parmesan crema, along with a baby arugula salad and raspberry vinaigrette. The pasta is served in a skillet. Francis likes the goat cheese in the lasagna, but overall this seems like the least ambitious dish.

* Team Kerry: Florentine-inspired chicken with orzo and asparagus ragout. Kerry raves about the kids he worked with. Ruth is very impressed by the dish. James says it’s the best creamed spinach he’s ever had. It’s funny how sophisticated the finished plate is, since Kerry was so underwhelmed by the chicken florentine that he had to reimagine for the final product.

* Judging: Ruth asks Lorena if she thought about asking them to vary from straight-up lasagna, which would have been my first question, and Curtis seems skeptical that Lorena would really serve it in a restaurant. Chris says his kids were so efficient that they plated five minutes early and James comments on the soggy salad. Kerry seems to be the only chef getting no criticism, and he wins the $10K.

* Ruth hammers Lorena after chefs leave – says it was good home-cooking, not fine dining. James disagrees. Francis then makes a pretty spurious argument about the ‘experience’ of bringing people together in that lasagna. Then it seemed like three of the four, Ruth being the exception, were fabricating an argument against Chris to give the sense that this decision was closer than it actually was.

* Lorena is eliminated and doesn’t seem surprised. She earned $27,500 for Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Chris is visibly relieved – as was I, since I really wanted to see him in the finals. As much as I’d tab Chris the favorite, Kerry seems to have really hit his stride over the last three episodes, so maybe he just needed to adjust to the show’s format and, now that he’s done so, his skills are showing through.

Is it just me, or is this show kind of limping to the finish? Perhaps it’s the lack of urgency from chefs playing for charity rather than for personal gain or career advancement. I’m not seeing the tension I would expect on Top Chef: Original Recipe.

* Quickfire: The chefs are paired up, Chris and Patricia vs Kerry and Lorena, and must work in tandem with one chef in the pantry and one on the hot line – but with neither chef able to cross to the other side of the kitchen. So that means the chef working pantry must rely on the chef at the stove to fire his/her dish correctly.

* Intelligentsia coffee makes its appearance in the pantry, which is only notable because I made my first visit to one of their shops this morning. The espresso was outstanding, smooth yet with plenty of character – I guess by smooth what I really mean is that the flavor wasn’t interrupted by unwanted bitter notes. I was very impressed and am grateful to reader Stan, who works for Intelligentsia, for hooking me up and joining me for coffee.

* Pretty sure I heard Awful Chris ask Patricia, “do you want water in the salt?” I believe Thomas Keller would approve of that phrasing.

* Patricia was once Chris’ boss, so the two are working very seamlessly and without conflict. Kerry and Lorena aren’t communicating as well, and Lorena ends up frustrated that Kerry blows her dish off to make sure his is cooked correctly. This, it turns out, is also a function of scoring – the judging is based on a single dish, not on a team’s output of two dishes together.

* Patricia, working pantry, chooses to make a tempura-fried tuna dish that cooks for only two minutes, to make it easier for Chris (and, I presume, herself).

* Lorena is making a tom-a-teeeeeeyo sauce. She’s pretty clearly playing that accent up for the camera. It’s like watching Dora. Anyway, her salmon dish ends up incomplete when the rice is never plated, which is apparently Kerry’s fault but I’m not sure why.

* Guest judge: Johnny Avello, who runs a sports book in Vegas that also takes bets on entertainment events, including Top Chef. 

* Chris’ dish: Berber style duck with dates, pine nuts, and mint. Curtis and Johnny both thought Chris could have rendered more fat; Chris chafes at the suggestion, but I’m with the judges here – render more of that fat out so the finished product is mostly crispy skin and duck meat. Duck fat is a glorious cooking medium but you don’t really want a mouthful of it in its solid state.

* Patricia makes a nori and wasabi-crusted tuna with ginger and scallion vinaigrette. I’m guessing this was expertly made but not adventurous enough.

* Kerry: Farfalle with shrimp and a yellow tomato fondue that was “tangy,” so I must have missed an ingredient in the sauce, something like goat cheese or creme fraiche. This was boxed, dried pasta, which is fine for home use but not really what I expect on Top Chef.

* Lorena: seared salmon filet over salsa verde (with tom-a-teeeeeeyos) and an arugula/cherry tomato salad. Johnny says it’s “just salmon.” I don’t see how white rice on the side was going to rescue this dish.

* Kerry’s pasta dish wins, even though Lorena’s dish flopped, and the two split the $5K prize. That’s a bizarre way to judge a team challenge. 

* Elimination challenge: Like Awful Chris, I’d never heard of Diner en blanc before this show. It’s a pop-up dinner party where guests all dress in white and bring the tables, chairs, linens, and so on. The all-white getups push this over the line from cool to pretentious. 

* This dinner party will include 300 guests in the plaza at the Venetian. Each chef will have to serve a three course packable meal to be eaten “picnic style” (yet with silverware and plates, which is rather fancy for a picnic), and each chef is responsible for feeding 75 attendees.

* Lorena going to make a spicy jalapeño chocolate mousse, because, you know, she’s from Latin America, which she might have mentioned before.

* Kerry says he got inspiration for his cold cauliflower soup from Hillary Clinton, who uses it in place of cream. I may have heard this wrong too because that sentence makes zero sense to me. I don’t even get the whole mashed cauliflower in lieu of mashed potatoes thing. You’ll never get the texture right without loading it up with fat and cooking the cauliflower to death (also known as “English-style”). So why not just use potatoes?

* Chris and Patricia are still cooperating, which really pisses off Lorena. Who cares? Shut up and go cash another check from Taco Bell.

* Awful Chris is making a terrine with pork belly and chicken livers, which makes some sense because it’s a dish designed to be eaten cold. But forcemeats are apparently very fussy dishes (I’ve never made one, since no one else in my house would eat it) and Chris even acknowledges the risk involved in rushing one and slicing it before it can chill and set fully.

* Chris pushes Kerry to get his stuff on the cart in time, which Kerry later credits him for doing during judging. I have no objection to seeing cooperation among the chefs, but I think that’s why this show feels so much less dramatic than the regular version.

* Lorena’a three items: huancaina style potato salad with aji amarillo and cilantro; jerk chicken salad with mango and caramelized pine nuts; spicy chocolate mousse with berries and whipped cream. The mousse became too thick and stiff overnight and the chicken salad gets lukewarm reviews. That potato salad does sound like a showstopper and is easily the best-reviewed item in her boxes.

* Patricia tries to do a Silk Road-inspired trio: daikon, edamame, and radish salad with whitebait; Uighur-spiced bison with chili jam; sumac-dusted flatbread with curried cauliflower and red chief lentils. The flatbread grew stale overnight and there are mixed reviews on the bison, with comments that the spice in the jam overwhelmed the meat. James says her dishes were too busy, required too much assembly, and that he wants his binky.

* Awful Chris: swordfish conserva (or confit – he uses both terms) with green beans, tomatoes,and olives; marinated wild mushrooms with toasted pine nuts; pork and chicken liver pâté with hazelnuts and truffles and carrots cooked in … Did he say hay? Everyone raves about the terrine, with the Diner en blanc founder saying it’s one of the best he’s ever eaten. Swordfish may have been slightly overcooked – that fish is so lean it dries out really quickly. I haven’t eaten it in ages because it’s been overfished and can contain more mercury than most other species. So hooray for us destroying the planet.

* Kerry’s French accent sucks. His dishes: cauliflower soup with saffron coulis; green bean and orzo salad with fresh mozzarella and pesto; grilled chicken and kielbasa with peppers and paprika pepper coulis. This sounds the least interesting to me of all the picnics, certainly the least experimental, with two dishes that I could easily recreate at home. Francis, meanwhile, says Kerry swung for the fences. He grilled chicken. That’s not even the right field fence at Yankee Stadium.

* “Robin Leach TV personality” is really its own punch line. 

* Judging: Kerry gets tons of praise, especially that the three dishes worked in a progression. Lorena’s chicken salad was too sweet, her mousse got too thick overnight, the potatoes were great but there was too much sweetness overall. Chris gets raves for the terrine, with Ruth pointing out the sea-forest-land theme across the three dishes. (Chris never says whether that was deliberate.) Ruth didn’t love the chili jam and bison together cold in Patricia’s dish, and overall it sounds like she prepared items that would have been better served hot.

* Awful Chris wins again, another $10K, which I think brings him to $36K total for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

* James calls Patricia’s salad a “mouthful of bitterness,” and I suppose he would know what that’s like.

* Patricia is eliminated. It’s Understandable, as she didn’t make food that could survive sitting overnight. Chris has to be an overwhelming favorite as the next two best chefs are now gone, although next week’s challenge appears to involve cooking with kids, which seems like a big random variable to include.

I’ve got a family wedding to attend this weekend, so I’m not chatting today or appearing on the podcast. I will probably post here once or twice as my schedule permits, and you might spot me on Twitter. This week’s recap is a little brief, in part because I’m on the move, but also because it turned out to be less dramatic than I anticipated, probably because they crammed in four head-to-head battles in the elimination challenge.

* Quickfire: preppin’ weapon time. The chefs must separate 18 eggs, grate two pounds of Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and portion five 7.5-8.5 ounce filets from a beef tenderloin without using a scale. The first two to finish get to cook using their prepped ingredients. Chris is stoked. Lorena is not. The three chefs who don’t advance become the judges.

* Chris attacks the beef first, but Kerry notices Chris’ steaks are small – and sure enough, one is under 7.5 ounces and Chris is eliminated from the quickfire. Patricia is also out with three steaks under the minimum size. How reasonable is it to expect a chef to be able to hit that narrow weight window without a scale? I honestly don’t know the answer to that.

* There’s cross-contamination everywhere. Chefs touching the raw meat and then the Parmiggiano makes me want to bleach my television.

* Hand-grating two pounds of cheese sounds excruciating. This is what food processors are for.

* Takashi passes. Kerry just barely passes. Lorena doesn’t get to finish and is enfadada.

* The two advancing chefs get fifteen minutes to cook. Kerry makes a parmiggiano-crusted filet, pounding them by hand; his pan isn’t hot enough and they start to stick. He serves them with wilted arugula and sage brown butter; Lorena thinks they’re perfectly cooked even though Kerry thought he’d overdone one side.

* Takashi sautéed his beef with a sunny-side up egg and Provençal vegetables. The other chefs are all amazed he could prep and cook potatoes in fifteen minutes. He also gets credit for cooking the meat in time for it to rest so it doesn’t bleed all over the plate when cut, but the chefs all agree his yolk wasn’t runny enough.

* Kerry wins, so (in my view) the weakest remaining chef gets immunity. Coming into this episode, I would have ranked them Chris, Patricia, Takashi, Lorena, Kerry, top to bottom.

* Elimination challenge: Sugar Ray Leonard, a celebrity whom the chefs actually recognize (as opposed to pretending to recognize one for the cameras). On a more serious note, it’s nice to see a retired boxer who still has his faculties – he was mentioned in A Naked Singularity, which includes digressions on a famous boxer who ended up with early dementia – although I can’t believe he’s 56 years old and looks 35.

* Kerry’s immunity means he doesn’t cook in this challenge at all as the other chefs go head to head. Patricia calls him a “bum” for getting to skip the challenge entirely. I thought she was kidding until she told him to “get a job.”

* Round one: Chris faces Takashi, Lorena faces Patricia, which reveals that Lorena is still rather hacked off about last week’s tiff. Patricia wants to fight Chris in the final round.

* Sugar Ray rocks the purple shirt at judges’ table. Maybe James was smart enough to ask for some sartorial advice.

* The other guest judge is Jane Goldman, who founded chow.com, one of the most useful food sites around. Their “You’re Doing It All Wrong” videos are always fun even if I don’t intend to ever cook the dish described, and while I don’t like the tone of most of the restaurant discussions on their message boards, the recommendations I’ve found there are generally rock solid.

* Chris and Takashi’s secret ingredient is bacon. Or is it just pork belly, which would be uncured? Takashi mentions emphasizing the sweetness and saltiness of the bacon, so perhaps it’s cured and unsmoked? These things make a big difference and we should have had more explanation.

* Chris makes an extra everything because Takashi is always so perfect. This turns out to be pretty significant – he has to borrow another egg from Takashi, but then later gives Takashi his extra piece of bacon because somehow Takashi (maybe forgetting that there was an extra judge this time?) ended up a piece short. Chris says he wants to win on merit, not technicalities, which I fully respect while recognizing that this would probably never happen on the regular Top Chef. It’s easier to be altruistic when you’re already among the top people in your profession.

* Chris’ dish is his take on bacon and eggs, with a “cal-mex” twist, including a corn and julienned jalapeño slaw and a wedge of avocado. Everyone says his eggs are cooked perfectly, while Sugar Ray praises Chris’ hand speed – which I thought was a pretty good insight, something a chef might not necessarily notice but a man who lived (and could have died) by hand speed would pick up on immediately.

* Takashi makes a bacon steak with caramelized figs, dried apricots, dates, orange, and fennel salad, Kerry loves the mushrooms, which somehow weren’t mentioned in the original description; I can’t believe how many things Takashi managed to cook in twenty minutes on that small station. Despite that, Chris wins and advances to the finals.

* Lorena talks about putting Patricia in her place. Their secret ingredient is also bacon.

* Patricia, who cuts her vegetables like she’s meditating with them, snipes at Lorena’s loud cutting technique; I agree, as Lorena’s method, which involves lifting the entire knife from the board and hacking quickly at the vegetables, is dangerous. I cut the way Patricia does, balancing one part of the knife on the board and rocking it to cut. Patricia finishes early and starts cleaning up her station, which might be showing off for someone else but seems to just be Patricia’s personality.

* Patricia makes a “BLT,” a bacon, leek, and tomato salad, served slightly warm. Jane loves balance of the favors, James says the leek reduction is “piercingly sour,” Kerry says it really reminded him of a BLT, and Sugar ray says it was amazing. After the judging I felt like I still had no clue what it tasted like.

* Lorena makes a potato and bacon chowder with corn and bacon soffrito. Jane says the bacon got a little lost, but loved the texture and creaminess.

* Winner: Lorena. How did she win by deemphasizing the main ingredient? Either Jane’s comment was an isolated opinion, or the criteria changed. Bacon should be the star if it’s the secret ingredient … or even if it’s not. So my bottom two ranked chefs (ranked from my living room) are both guaranteed to advance, while chefs #2 and #3 have to fight to avoid elimination.

* Finals: Chris and Lorena get sugar as their secret ingredient. This is a huge disadvantage for meat-guy Chris, who makes a zabaglione with summer fruit. Zabaglione is a sweet warm custard of eggs, sugar, and usually Marsala wine, typically served with berries. It’s cooked slowly over a double boiler and the chef must whisk it constantly to avoid having any part of the eggs scramble because it stayed in contact with the hot bowl too long.

* Lorena backs into a three-item dish, making a flourless chocolate cake that doesn’t seem to be cooking fast enough, so she makes a dulce de leche sauce and serves it with caramelized walnuts and seared (and thus also caramelized) pineapple. Patricia and Takashi think making the chocolate cake was foolhardy, but they end up cooking correctly so Lorena serves everything.

* Chris’ dish gets dinged for a touch too much salt, but really, Lorena won this because she made three things and they were all very good. That’s $10K for her charity.

* Patricia and Takashi battle to avoid elimination. Secret ingredient: chicken livers. Patricia makes a warm asparagus salad with chicken liver and prosciutto, James complains – really, his voice can’t merely criticize, but always complains, almost whining – that his liver was undercooked, while Jane says it was perfect and Krista liked the clean pure favors of the dish.

* Takashi sears his livers and serves them with crispy prosciutto strips and pickled red cabbage. Jane praises the combination of textures and the aesthetic appeal of the dish.

* Patricia wins, so Takashi ends up eliminated. Takashi had already won $20K for his charity, so while I would have preferred to see Kerry go, it was a pretty successful run for him. Chris points out that Takashi cooks “better French food than the Frenchies.” I still say Chris and Patricia make the finals, but with Takashi gone I’ll go with Lorena over Kerry for the third spot.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. Still waiting on that blog post I mentioned on the podcast.

This episode might have had the worst first half and best second half of the season for me, although I had the rare personal connection to the elimination challenge to increase its appeal to me.

* Quickfire: Make an ‘aphrodisiac’ dish. Guest judge is something named Dita Von Teese and the winner gets $5k and immunity. This challenge seems designed to embarrass multiple people involved.

* Really, Art, no one cares about your dreams, and no one thinks you’re psychic because you dreamed about chocolate.

* Patricia referring to “hoochie mama outfits” in her obviously-scripted description of who Dita Von Teese is – are we really supposed to think she’s up on the biggest celebrities in the burlesque scene – was another highlight in a season of classic chef quotes, followed later by her “bend over, baby!” during judging.

* Blenders are hitting the floor all over this place. I haven’t seen this much shattered glass since I watched the first season of Breaking Bad.

* Art makes floating islands (large meringues floating in a pool of chocolate sauce) and starts tossing around bad jokes about breasts. Also, did you know he’s gay?

* Lorena keeps talking about sexy. She brings the sexy, she puts the sexy in her food, she has all the sexy on the plate, even Prince thinks she says “sexy” too much.

* Awful Chris makes seared foie gras with fig and champagne sauce. Of course he does. And of course it’s awesome.

* Seriously chefs, Von Teese is just not that hot. I had no idea who she was before this show – apparently she was briefly married to Marilyn Manson, which says a lot right there – but found her mostly sad. The forced double (or sometimes single) entendres, the pouty expressions, the fake breasts … I don’t know what happened to that woman when she was younger, but the whole act screamed “bad self-esteem” to me. Meanwhile, Curtis, who is wearing more makeup than Von Teese is, can’t stop blushing and ends up completely tongue-tied.

* The bottom two: Art’s, which looked like a mess but also suffered because von Teese doesn’t like chocolate that much (so why was it offered as a star ingredient?); and Lorena’s, which von Teese loved but said wasn’t sexy, sort of like The Black Album.

* Favorites: Kerry’s seared tuna with uni, soy, and aromatics, because uni are gonads or something; and Takashi’s chilled oyster with sea urchin and yuzu truffle vinaigrette, which was “slippery and sexy and adventurous.” Takashi wins for a dish that apparently had the texture of a vagina. That’s basically what they said, right?

* Elimination challenge: Out comes Saipan Chutima, chef/owner of perhaps the best Thai restaurant in the United States, Lotus of Siam, which I’ve visited three times and reviewed here. The chefs are asked to put their own spins on classic Thai dishes and will work as one team to open a restaurant in the TC kitchens, each producing one dish while collaborating on service. They’ll dine at Lotus of Siam to prepare.

* The chefs all seem to agree that this challenge is a bit ridiculous between the cuisine and the time to open a place; I don’t doubt the validity of their complaint, but since they’re not cooking live bugs this year, I think they kind of got off easy.

* One dish comes out with pork blood, so Awful Chris proposes to Saipan on the spot, ignoring the fact that her daughter Penny is the attractive one. Meanwhile, Lorena is studying the dishes like a scientist, poking and prodding; if someone had put a live ingredient on one of her plates to move when she poked it, she might have hit the ceiling.

* They go shopping in two stores and once again can’t coordinate to save their lives. Too many alphas. Awful Chris probably shouldn’t be the translator, either.

* Patricia is full of quips this week, saying to Art after he tosses a whole bird at her, “Come on, that was a girl’s throw!” She’s making seared duck breast with masaman curry, grilled eggplant, and green pineapple, then later decides to tear Lorena a new one for using half of the twelve burners. Assuming that was as out of nowhere as it seemed on TV, Lorena had a right to be pretty hacked off at Patricia for that one.

* Meanwhile, Kerry turns expediting into rocket science, mumbling about a fake ticket and confusing the hell out of the chefs working the line. When Awful Chris eventually takes over so Kerry can cook his own dish, he starts expediting like he means it.

* Lorena offers her take on tom kha gai with a pisco chicken soup with galangal, coconut, lime, and cilantro – the judges mostly loved it aside from the garnish, which Grubby Alan said wasn’t edible, and a later complaint that Lorena didn’t poach her chicken in the flavored broth, which seems like a more serious error to me.

* Takashi does a yellow curry with crispy fried noodles. Penny loved the flavors, while Saipan, who suddenly looks like someone just offered her a plate of rotten onions, is unimpressed. Perhaps asking chefs to make versions of Saipan’s dishes for Saipan wasn’t such a hot idea.

* Next course: Awful Chris does his take on beef larb, making a tartare version with 21-day aged sirloin and using most of the same ingredients in larb. Francis particularly liked it, although he felt the flavors were a little understated, to which Awful Chris responds that he wanted the beef flavor to come through most strongly. Saipan is unimpressed and says her two-year-old grandson puts better larb in his diaper.

* Art kind of ignores the challenge, which I’m sure is okay because did you know he lost a lot of weight? His cashew-crusted chicken and crispy rice salad with lemongrass-lime vinaigrette gets mehs all around. Apparently he didn’t grind the nuts enough and I’ll just let that one sit there for you all.

* Final course: Kerry is cooking too slowly, so Patricia ends up tossing the dishes she’d prepared for the judges’ table and firing new duck breasts so theirs will be ready at close to the same time. Unfortunately, she undercooks the new breasts, and James even sends his back to ask for a new one. Meanwhile, Kerry gets high marks for his braised pork belly with mustard greens, Thai spices, and a taro root purée, for which even Saipan offers a grunt of praise.

* Afterwards, Patricia smokes Kerry with a sarcastic “thank you,” and he genuinely feels bad about the whole thing. I think Patricia’s response to stress or anger is to let it all out at once, after which she feels better because the emotion is gone – but she’s oblivious to the effect that her lashing out has on the people around her, which can be lasting. Her dish gets some of the lowest marks of all during judging.

* Aside: The service might have been a little slow, but did anyone else think the comments from the diners on the slowness of the service felt forced, or even scripted? If you’re getting a free meal from these chefs, are you really complaining that your entrees are taking twenty minutes to arrive?

* Back to judging, James seems to make the most salient point of all, that the signature flavors of Thai cuisine (let alone the northern Thai cuisine of Lotus of Siam) were missing. I think he was about to say the chefs’ output was as authentic as the Thai Chicken Wrap at Panera, but Saipan brandished her Kom Kom vegetable knife and put an end to his comments.

* Top dishes: Chris and Kerry. Chris was more adventurous in concept than Kerry and wins the $10K for the Michael J. Fox Foundation, bringing his winnings to $26K total. Kerry does get praise from Curtis for turning taro, one of Curtis’ least favorite ingredients on the planet, into something not just edible but pleasant.

* Bottom: Lorena, Patricia, and Art. Art’s was kind of bland and boring, so he’s tearing up again (drink). Lorena went for presentation but not function, and the photo of her dish, with a whole red chili pepper on top, is a little odd to look at. Patricia’s curry wasn’t intensely flavored, and of course, she botched the duck.

* Patricia hesitates to say why her duck was off, although she’s trying desperately to telegraph to the judges that someone else made her screw up. Curtis then aggressively pushes Patricia to throw whoever it is under the bus. She looks at Kerry and more or less guilts him into confessing, so credit to him for owning up to it when, ultimately, she made the choice to serve it when she knew it wasn’t done (which she admitted to Kerry post-judging).

* Elimination: Art. It’ll make for a less interesting kitchen, and perhaps less interesting recaps; he certainly led all the chefs in personality this season. He seems quite understanding and wasn’t thrilled with his dish; I wonder if fatigue plus exasperation at a challenge so far from his comfort zone did him in. Of course, at this point they’re whacking a good chef every week. I kind of hope his prediction that he and new BFF Lorena open a restaurant together comes true. I’d go.

* I’m still looking at Chris, Patricia, and Takashi for the final three, although I fear Patricia is fading.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I wrote up the Under Armour All-American game for the draft blog.

* Quickfire: Cook for the Indigo Girls, who look old. The B-52s were a weird enough choice, but why the Indigo Girls? They’re judging a group of the best chefs in the country? The challenge is to prepare two related dishes, one with meat, and one vegetarian, with $5K and immunity on the line.

* Takashi tells an interesting story about lacking a fridge in his house while growing up, so they’d get tofu from the “tofu guy” coming by the house. That seems like such an incredible anachronism today … and yet something that we’ve lost too, that kind of contact with our food sources, and the idea of cooking food that was just picked or butchered or in the case of tofu lightly processed.

* Awful Chris, usually the most off the wall of everyone, goes pretty straightforward with a beef bordelaise and a portobello version, both with the same sides. That feels a little like a punt to me – the same dish twice with only one ingredient change? I get substituting portobello – which is just an overgrown cremini and, to my palate, a fairly bland mushroom – for beef, but the mushroom requires different treatment and works with different flavors than the steak does.

* Kerry’s chicken with olives and herb flan with olives looked as boring as hell. Is there a less interesting protein in the kitchen than chicken? I try to cook it as infrequently as possible because unless you marinate it for hours, chicken breast has marginally more flavor than wallpaper paste.

* We get what I think is our first outright failure of the season when Patricia tries to play Beat the Time … and loses, failing to get her broth into her pho bowls in time for judging. At least they allowed her to serve the broth after judging, although I don’t see why, on Masters, they couldn’t just allow her to finish plating after the time while disqualifying her from consideration for the prize?

* Art mentions that he’s from the south. Drink.

* Anyway, the three favorites are Art’s, Takashi’s, and Lorena’s. Art makes two pot pies and his vegetarian version, wild mushroom and arugula with a “Parmesan” and cheddar crust, looked and sounded way better than the regular chicken version with a cheddar biscuit crust, which sounded like something you’d get at Cracker Barrel. My one quibble with Art’s vegetarian version is that it lacks protein, so it’s kind of weak for a main course. I do make pot pies in the winter and usually add some kind of legume, like lima beans, to balance the nutritional content. Lorena goes with arepa dumpling soup with queso and a chicken salad arepa – again with the chicken, but still, arepas rock. Takashi wins with two agedashi tofu (deep-fried tofu cubes) dishes, one with pork and ginger, the other with eggplant and other veg. Obviously I didn’t taste any of these, but I can’t imagine a fried tofu dish coming close to an arepa or a pot pie for pure satisfaction. That’s $15K for Takashi and am-munity per Curtis.

* Elimination challenge: Playmate Holly Madison is having a cocktail pool party and wants a brunch buffet, but with canapé sized dishes and no garlic or onions. Why don’t we just get her views on vaccines too? Chefs have two hours to cook plus an hour to plate the next day.

* Art mentions that he’s gay. Drink.

* Art and Awful Chris are bickering. Drink.

* Thierry is struggling with temperature on the flat top. Note to future Top Chef contestants: Bring an infrared thermometer. I don’t care if you have to smuggle the thing into the kitchen in your underwear. You will be glad you had it.

* To the food. Art makes a turkey burger on a biscuit with a garlic chutney. Holly identifies the garlic as ginger before Curtis sets her straight, so I guess a box of rocks is actually smarter than a pair of cans. Judges love it.

* Thierry makes a croque-madame with bechamel and tomato vodka shooter. Judges can’t figure out how to eat it. The sauce is visibly congealed, almost like melted cheese, and the bread is slightly burned. This was just a poor choice by Thierry – he thought “brunch” but didn’t consider execution. A croque-madame is a croque monsieur with a fried egg on top; he seems to have made a croque-monsieur with a bechamel that he has thickened with eggs, and it’s just a fiasco. That sounds really heavy and disgusting to me, just weight upon weight with no bright flavors.

* Kerry makes a corn and crab fritter with red pepper coulis. Krista’s was slightly underseasoned and slightly overdone, but I do think he had the right brunch vibe with those ingredients.

* Lorena says she “put all the sexy (she has) in this dish.” I’ll take two, then. She makes buñuelos, fried dough balls filled with cheese that I thought were more of a Christmas/New Year’s dish, with fresh berry compote and white chocolate and vanilla sauce. James raves about the custardy texture inside the crisp outer shell. Sounds like Sexychef knows her frying.

* Patricia is massacring her braised pork shoulder and says she can never get “that two handed chopping thing” down. She’s calling this barbecue, which it’s not – there’s no smoke involved. Her pulled pork on toast is a mess; James says the sauce is boring and dull, and the judges all agree the bun was toasted too far in advance and tastes stale. Holly loves the meat. I have no other comment.

* Awful Chris serves a skewer with watermelon, “tuna bacon,” tomatoes, and pistachios, plus some unidentified citrus zest visible on the screen. It’s the most complex dish so far in terms of concept and ingredients. Holly gives it props for being relatively healthful. The criticisms here and at judges’ table strike me as very nitpicky. The flavors may have been slightly unbalanced, but there’s nothing actually wrong with the dish in execution or in the combination of elements.

* Takashi makes a sheep’s milk yogurt panna cotta with fresh berry compote and almonds. One of the guests doesn’t know what a panna cotta is, but knows that the fruit is in a compote. All righty then.

* Art mentions the weight loss. Drink.

* James is undressing and/or ogling the various (apparently waxed?) young men around the pool. Had Curtis done the same with some of the ladies, this would have been offensive, right? I don’t care what team you play for; let’s just treat everyone equally.

* Judges’ table: The favorite dishes are from Takashi, Art, Lorena, and Kerry. Apparently Holly said off camera (or pre-editing) that she liked Art’s dish even with the garlic. The biggest raves seem to be for Lorena’s and she wins $10K for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, giving her $15K so far.

* The bottom three are Thierry, Patricia, and Chris. Thierry’s sauce thickened after leaving the kitchen and the toast was burned. James says pulled pork (Patricia’s) should be fine and feathery in texture, but I disagree – that’s Carolina-style and I find it unpleasant and stringy. Properly smoked meat should still have some of its meaty characteristics yet can be served in larger chunks because the meat itself is tender from the long, slow smoking process. Awful Chris’ dish didn’t resonate with the audience, and the exhibitionist said it was overspiced. Was the challenge to please the non-discriminating pool crowd or the judges? Krista points out that his dish had soft and chewy textures but no crunchy element, which is the only really legitimate criticism I hear on this.

* Elimination: Thierry leaves. I thought Patricia would go based on the comments, but I also think she has a better chance to win the whole thing, so I’m glad she stayed. Thierry’s concept just wasn’t right for the setting. He says, “The chef in the hat is leaving” while acknowledging that he “was totally on the wrong planet” with trying to make a croque-whatever for outdoor, small-bite service.

Thursday’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I wrote a column looking at hypothetical ballots for the five awards on which I’m not voting this year.

* Quickfire: Make a salad in eight minutes. I like this – making good salads is hard, much more than just throwing a bunch of leaves in a bowl. The prize is $5,000 and immunity.

* Patricia avoids the mad rush to the giant salad bar – and am I wrong to look at that and assume that it is covered with germs! – and focuses on the dressing first, going for the best-quality oils and vinegars in the pantry. One, I just generally think she’s really smart, more methodical than most chefs I’ve seen on any iteration of Top Chef. And two, this is the opposite of how most people, even most non-high-end restaurants, think about salads, right? If you make your own, you spend more time picking out the vegetables than you do considering the dressing. We’re lucky to live near an olive grove that presses its own high-quality oil, the Queen Creek Olive Mill, and I always have a bottle of their EVOO in the house, which means I don’t buy prefab dressings any more. Three parts EVOO, 1 part fresh lemon juice, a dash of Dijon mustard (for flavor and emulsifaction), salt and pepper to taste, and you’ve got a dressing to blow away anything that comes in a bottle for $5.

* Awful Chris says that despite being a meat guy, he spends more on produce than anything else at his restaurant.

* The B-52s are guest judges, which would be incredibly cool if this was 1988. Apparently it’s well-known that they’re vegetarians, but that wasn’t exactly the first thing I thought of when I saw them come out on stage. Fred Schneider seems extremely negative, a possible side effect of the producers raising him from the dead for this challenge. He’s also wearing sunglasses inside; he should have just popped his collar for the full effect.

* The three top dishes were Kerry’s salade rousse with yogurt dressing, Chapeau Guy’s blueberry salad with beets and baby arugula, and Lorena’s grilled cauliflower – the only dish that involved a cooked ingredient. They also seemed to like Patricia’s chopped salad with yuzu vinaigrette, largely for including those cheap crunchy Asian noodles. Lorena wins the $5K for her charity, Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which makes perfect sense for a woman who has sold her soul to Taco Bell.

* Please tell Curtis the word is not “AM-munity.”

* I don’t know what was the more shocking revelation of this episode: That Art has lost over 100 pounds in the last two years, or that he’s gay. Really, I can’t believe he kept this stuff from us for this entire season. I have a sneaking suspicion he’s also from the South but is still in denial about it.

* Also, I seriously hope Clark doesn’t prepare ingredients in the same bowl he used to cut his own hair.

* Elimination challenge: The Chairwoman of the Hualapai Tribal Council has invited the chefs to use eight ingredients native to their land and significant in their tribe’s culinary traditions in four dishes cooked outside by the rim of the Grand Canyon. The view is spectacular, as it’s such a grand … canyon.

* As it turns out, most of the ingredients are pretty straightforward, with only two real exceptions – prickly pear and banana yucca, which is actually a fruit rather than a root vegetable. I’ve never cooked with either, but I’ve had prickly pear in a number of things, including lemonade at the aforementioned Olive Mill (I recommend it half-and-half with their iced tea, a “Prickly Palmer” if you will … or if you won’t), and it brings both great flavor and color.

* The chefs are paired up at random into teams of two, each using one protein and one vegetable: Prickly pear with quail, banana yucca with venison, squash with rabbit, and corn with beef. They get two hours to cook and the meal will be served family style.

* Takashi is apparently afraid of heights, and then has to go in a helicopter and walk out on a glass-bottomed viewing walkway over the Canyon. Get thee some Xanax, Takashi.

* Anyone else notice from the helicopter shots how low Lake Mead is? The level of conservation awareness out here in Arizona is absolutely embarrassing. Drought or no drought, we live in a fucking desert. Stop putting grass on your damn lawns, people.

* It starts raining as they cook, although it never quite got to the level of pouring, and I wasn’t sure if the rain was causing issues with their grills or if the issue was wind, which is kind of a chronic thing all over Arizona as far as I can tell. Awful Chris repurposes his grill to create hot cooking surfaces with cast-iron planchas, then allows other chefs to use them as well, which is how you know you’re watching Masters. In the regular edition, one chef would have brained another with one of those surfaces, and on Desserts they’d still be arguing over who put out the fire.

* Chapeau Guy, working with Takashi, ends up pitting and stuffing the banana yucca, then breading and deep-frying them. It turns out he was also supposed to peel them, but I’m not sure how he would have known that ahead of time, since he’d never so much as heard of the ingredient before.

* Clark and Kerry disagree over presentation, and Clark just backs down. That nearly always foreshadows the chef getting eliminated.

* Serving: Art and Lorena go first and take so long to explain their dish that Lake Mead’s level dropped another two feet by the time they say what’s on the plates – quail with prickly pear sauce and slaw, corn dressing, peaches, and mint. They also basted the quail with the sauce while it cooked but didn’t butterfly or otherwise break it down to make it easier to eat. I love quail but it is a ton of work to get the meat off that little skeleton. Anyway, the quail also wasn’t cooked evenly, which seems to be a bigger problem.

* Kerry and Clark serve a beef filet with a raw sage pistou, grilled corn, bacon, tomatoes, and chili. Their beef is grey, as they never got their grill hot enough to sear it, so it looks boiled and gets none of the flavors that come from the Maillard reactions (what happens when you expose proteins to high heat, often mislabeled “caramelization”). Hualapai cooking doesn’t include much chili, but the tribe members at the table seem to enjoy its inclusion. However, every item on the dish is soft, so there’s no texture contrast, and this sounds really unadventurous overall. It’s steak and corn.

* Takashi and Chapeau Guy serve grilled venison and fried banana yucca cake with braised figs. This seems to get the highest marks and I thought sounded the best of the four dishes – if I saw all four on a menu, I’d probably order this one. Francis Lam compliments the mixture of textures in this dish, and the sugar in the figs makes up for the bitterness of the banana yucca skin.

* Patricia and Awful Chris serve “rabbit loin and its bits” with acorn squash and red berry and piñon agrodolce. They used the entire animal, which appeals to me as my own philosophy of the ethics of eating meat has evolved over the years – in particular, that there’s some obligation to eat more of the parts of any animal you consume than we typically do in this country. That’s been an adventure for me as someone who did not grow up eating things like marrow or gribiche, and I admit I still struggle a little with some organ meats (heart in particular due to its texture), but I’ve made the choice to change my eating habits.

* How is Aunt Inez, the oldest of the Hualapai at the dinner table, eating all this food with one tooth?

* Judges’ table: Curtis, Ruth, James, and Francis are all trying to outdo themselves with profound statements on the setting, the tribe’s traditions, the spiritual feeling of the meal, threatening to turn the whole thing into an Insufferable Feast.

* Judges’ table: Patricia/Awful Chris and Takashi/Chapeau Guy are on top. Chris and Patricia seemed to get the spirit of the challenge more, especially by using the entire rabbit, but Takashi and Chapeau Guy win and split the $10,000 prize. Thierry remarks that he won with an ingredient he’d never used before, of which he seems rightfully proud.

* Elimination: Lorena’s cole slaw wasn’t great but everyone loved the prickly pear sauce. Art split some quail but eventually chose to serve them whole because he didn’t want to lose the presentation. Kerry said getting a sear on the beef was hard. Their sage pistou got raves, but the second sauce, a compound butter with berries, separated on the plate. Clark made a corn ragout to “honor the cuisine of the region, “ then says he didn’t want to ruin the dish by making something that competed with Kerry’s beef, but that’s just a flaw in conception – the two didn’t work together to build a cohesive offering. Clark ends up eliminated, so the great tragedy they tried to show us last week of Mark’s separation from his partner lasted just a few days. Clark’s charity, Outright Lewiston, which helps LGBT kids in the community where his and Mark’s restaurant is, receives a donation as well.

* I think Patricia and Awful Chris are pretty clearly the top two chefs here, and have been from the start, with Takashi probably third. I’d be surprised if the winner isn’t one of the first two.