I think there has been and will be as much discussion about the finale’s format as there will be about the result, which is somewhat unfair to the two chefs, but, in my opinion, a little unfair to the format itself. Switching to cooking live in front of an audience and serving the judges one course at a time for what appeared to be on-the-spot decisions was somewhat reminiscent of Iron Chef, although that show’s “live” judging element was merely a trick of the cameras anyway. This Top Chef format was far more transparent than previous finales (and than Iron Chef) because viewers could see the judges’ decisions on each plate and heard detailed opinions from a majority of the judges on each. It also insulated the judges from outside interference, accusations of which have appeared in the past, prompting vociferous denials from Tom. The end result of the format change was a greater emphasis on the food, which is what we want, right?

The main criticism I heard from you on Twitter was that the new format reduced suspense or drama because at the 52-minute mark, when the show went to commercial, it was obvious who had won because there wasn’t time for the opposite result. Given how much criticism the show took this year for the elimination of Kristen, which was painted (rightly or wrongly) as a move to raise interest in the show and in Last Chance Kitchen at the expense of choosing the best chef, I’ll gladly take a reduction in drama in exchange for feeling like the best chef won – and understanding why she did so.

On a related note, does Stephanie Izard go into therapy now? Her entire identity has been cut in half!

* It is so odd that Top Chef is now a brand (or sub-brand) of frozen food. Is that not kind of antithetical to the idea of the show? Chefs get sent home for using frozen or previously-cooked ingredients.

* On to the show – Brooke and Kristen come out from back stage and seem overwhelmed by the space and the size of the crowd. One advantage neither mentioned: They have tons of space to move and for the heat to dissipate. Each has chosen two teams of three sous chefs from eliminated chefs. Brooke goes for skills, choosing Stefan, CJ, and Kuniko (great choice). Kristen says she just wants “good people, no egos” and takes Sheldon, Josh, and Lizzie. Sheldon and Lizzie might have been the two least egotistical chefs of the season, and all three of hers made it very far in the competition. Editing can be misleading on something like this, but I thought Kristen’s team was humming the whole night – we saw no discord, almost to the point where they were quiet, like they’d worked together for ages. Brooke’s team wasn’t loud, but we saw more of them, which is usually not a good sign.

* The format is a five-course meal, judged one course at a time, so the first chef to win three courses wins the title. I’m surprised no one is agitating for a best-of-seven format. Meanwhile, chefs from smaller markets are arguing for a one-course play-in meal.

* The only restrictions beyond time are that the chefs must use scallops in the second round and red snapper in the fourth round.

* Brooke says she’s “going for bigger, bolder flavors.” Kristen is going for “simple and clean, nicely executed, and pretty.” I don’t know that either of these is a clearly superior game plan, but Kristen does “simple and clean” like Greg Maddux “threw strikes.”

* So three hundred people are there to watch three hours of cooking? That’s longer than any of this year’s Best Picture nominees. I hope the conversation was good.

* Gail points out to Stephanie Izard that there will finally be another female Top Chef. Seth Macfarlane is still waiting for the nude scene.

* Brooke’s pig ear salad sounds amazing, and she has it on her menu at the Tripel. I need a report, people.

* Kristen says that at Stir Boston she’s typically cooking for just ten people. I can see why cooking for such scale would be intimidating – look at how many plates they had to do for each course.

* I love how the sous chefs are all so clearly into it even though it’s not their fight. Some of that is professionalism, much of it is probably love of food, and I’m sure a small part is that everyone likes the two finalists. Is there a tradition where the winner buys her sous chefs something, like a quarterback taking the offensive line out to dinner?

* The food! Course one: Kristen does a chicken liver mousse with frisée, mustard, prunes, hazelnuts, and pumpernickel. Emeril loves the mousse and chicory, calling it “very classic.” Tom says mousse was well seasoned. Gail loved the mousse, velvety airy texture, but also admits (in so many words) to being a bit of a chicken-live mousse harlot.

* Brooke serves that crispy pig ear and chicory salad with a six minute egg, apricot jam, candied kumquats. That sounds amazing, probably better in the description than Kristen’s, but it sounds like CJ overcooked enough of the pig ear strips to knock it down a peg. Hugh says the salad dressing was really balanced and that Brooke has a real knack for that.

* The vote: Kristen gets votes from Hugh, Gail, and Emeril and wins the round. I don’t know if that meant she got all three, or if we just saw the three who voted for her.

* Brooke’s scallops are huge so she cuts some in half and begins searing them, which seems to me like a big risk of overcooking them. For years I was just so-so on scallops, but I’ve had several great scallop dishes recently – one at the Catbird Seat in Nashville and one at Citizen Public House here in Scottsdale – and I’m finally coming around.

* Stefan’s harassment of Kristen always kind of annoyed me, even though she seemed cool with it, but his trash-talking here, when he tells Kristen he chose light blue “for the baby’s bedroom,” did make me laugh, mostly because of how he baited her.

* Am I the only one who tends to forget that Kevin Sbraga was a Top Chef? Granted, that whole season had probably the least talented crop, but he did win it.

* Brooke talks more about her phobias, which I’m glad to see, obviously. Exposure therapy is huge.

* Michael Voltaggio with the quote of the night: “I’m jealous, dude. I wanna be down there.” The fact that someone who has already won this title and had real-world success as a result could see that pressure-cooker environment and want to grab a jacket and throw down speaks volumes about his makeup, both positive and negative.

* Round two: Brooke serves her seared scallops over a salt cod-potato puree, crispy speck, a black currant and mustard seed vinaigrette, ground juniper, and deep-fried romanesco (a brassica closely related to broccoli). Tom likes the combination of flavors, works really nicely, his scallop perfectly cooked. Brooks says salt cod is her favorite flavor, which would have made a lot of sense if Top Chef were held in 1896.

* Kristen does a sort of crudo preparation, a quick-cured scallop in citrus and lavender, served with with bitter orange, Meyer lemon, and apple. It looks gorgeous, although I’ve never had a cured scallop of any sort. General praise here too, with Padma saying the dish left Kristen nowhere to hide but that she did the scallops proud. If they hadn’t been cruelly ripped from their shells, that is.

* Voting: Brooke gets votes from Gail and Emeril. Kristen gets votes from Tom and Padma. Hugh is the tiebreaker and goes … Brooke. So far, this is pretty TV-friendly, and we’re down to a best of three.

* The chefs have 34 minutes until they need to serve the next plate, which is the first time (I think) the clock has been explained to us. I was kind of confused from the start of this episode – that was probably my main complaint.

* Kristen says she’s going to taking a trip to Korea with some of her winnings to see where she came from – she mentioned in a previous episode that she was abandoned as a baby and was adopted by a couple in Michigan. In an era where international adoptions have become terribly expensive and endlessly controversial, it’s good to have a positive example offered as a counterpoint to the horror stories in the media.

* I can’t believe Brooke made chicken wings. They’re too damn hard to eat, with so little meat relative to the skin and bone. I buy whole chickens a lot but I save the wings for stock. They’re just not worth effort.

* Round three: Brooke serves vadouvan-spiced fried chicken wings with a sumac-yogurt tahini and pickled kohlrabi fattoush. Past winners are saying it’s “ballsy” to serve something so plebeian in a Top Chef finale, although the way she served it was ambitious. She tells Hugh she wanted to redeem herself from the fried chicken challenge, but was this the way? With wings? Emeril loves it but Tom is a little iffy on the side salad.

* Kristen serves a celery root puree with crispy bone marrow, bitter greens, stewed mushrooms, and barely cooked radishes. Emeril keeps raving about the “earthy tones.” Padma’s wasn’t hot enough. Gail liked it. Tom seems unsure of stewing the mushrooms rather than roasting them for caramelization, as she did earlier this season when she won an elimination challenge for making mushrooms and fried onions as side items.

* Kristen gets votes from Emeril, Tom, and Padma, so she’s one away from the win. Padma voting for Kristen despite the temperature issue was a little bit of a surprise.

* Kristen says she practiced her red snapper dish before she got here and was most confident in this course.

* The producers covered the King Arthur name on the bag of flour with duct tape, but really, if you bake at all, you know that logo and color scheme. I would be surprised if they’d used any other brand.

* Michael Voltaggio again with the great quote, saying Top Chef has “made eating out cool.” Even if that’s kind of an exaggeration, I do think the show’s effect on popular culture, especially our culture of eating, is a huge positive, economically and gustatorially.

* Stefan is distracted by a female fan asking about the location of his restaurant. I assume she’s a plant from Kristen. It would have been even better if Tammy 2 was available.

* Round four: Brooke serves a braised pork cheek and seared snapper with a collard green slaw, pomegranate seeds, and sorrel puree. Hugh’s snapper perfectly cooked, and loves collards as an alternative to kale. Everyone praises the sorrel but no one seems to know how to pronounce it.

* Kristen does a seared snapper with leeks, little gem lettuce, tarragon, uni, and shellfish nage. So Gail says she found the leeks a little harder to eat because they were slightly stringy, and Hugh absolutely smokes her with five words: “I’m good with a knife.” I wonder if Gail knows who the Marlins’ shortstop is.

* Brooke offers what I thought was a pretty gracious comment: “I want to prove I wasn’t winning because Kristen wasn’t around.” You know, everyone who watched was probably wondering about that – at least, would some of the challenges have been closer? – but Brooke didn’t have to acknowledge Kristen in that way.

* Kristen gets Gail, Emeril (who was obviously torn by the knowledge he was about to help eliminate Brooke), and Tom, making her the tenth Top Chef winner, the second female winner, and the first of Korean descent. I wonder if this would be news in Korea, where, according to some prior contestants on this show, cooking isn’t seen as a highly respected profession yet.

* Brooke is disappointed, and it has to suck to spend so much time away from your family only to come up just inches short. She might be the best positioned runner-up to benefit professionally and financially from her time on the show, since she had several weeks as the clear leader while Kristen was in the relegation bracket. Speaking of which, Kristen thanking Tom “for having this whole Last Chance Kitchen thing” belongs on the highlight reel.

* I only watched a little of the follow-up show, but Sheldon won the fan favorite voting and earned a $10k prize. He was apparently talking to Andy Cohen from Maui via a tin can, but I’m pretty sure he said was going to use the money to “pimp up his 2014 Avalon.” At least he’s honest, man.

So it turns out the entire season up to this point was completed over six months ago, which must be agonizing for the contestants. That’s like playing League Championship Series as scheduled in October, then waiting until April to play the World Series. I shouldn’t give MLB any ideas.

We get one glimpse of Sheldon and Brooke acting slaphappy before they leave Alaska, including their versions of a “top-two-plus-one” dance, and Sheldon going all Adam Sandler on the ukulele.

* First we visit Sheldon in his restaurant two weeks before the finale, watching him tear up some pork tenderloins while he’s supposed to be removing the silverskins. (That’s not an easy thing to do, but he could have made cleaner cuts with a chainsaw.) It looks like celebrity has been good for his business. Also, his youngest daughter is pretty adorable.

* Then we visit Brooke in LA a week before the finale. I would like to point out to all the food-snobs who bash Trader Joes that there was a TJ bag visible in Brooke’s house. Good enough for me.

* Brooke and her husband – whom she met when she hired him as a sous chef – run two restaurants, and she says she worries more about paperwork and finances than she does about the food/kitchen. Her special the day the cameras visit is a salad made from fried pig ears, which is one of my new favorite things to eat, especially since I’m not likely to make them at home (you have to braised them for hours, then slice them very thinly, bread them, and fry them). I feel for her when she talks about how hard it was to be away from her little guy, who just turned five, during the competition. Traveling away from my family is the only part of my job I dislike, and she was gone for longer than I’ve ever been apart from my daughter in a single trip.

* They both seem to think Kristen will be the Last Chance Kitchen winner. Sheldon says he’d be shocked to see Josh, while Brooke would be shocked to see see Carla or Josie. Shocked to see Josie, but pleased, I imagine.

* And the LCK winner is … Kristen, which is the least surprising thing ever. This is like a 98-win wild card team getting to the World Series – she belonged there anyway but her path was needlessly difficult. If this were a sports broadcast, we’d be treated to a long argument over whether she has “momentum.”

* The elimination challenge: Create a three course meal to serve at craft LA in just three hours. Tom will expedite and tells them, “Please don’t screw this one up,” since it’s his restaurant. There’s no way the diners are unaware that this is a Top Chef night and not the regular craft menu. Then again, half the customers probably think Tom is personally firing their steaks in the back, so who knows.

* The chefs get their pick of proteins from the walk-in, which is probably the best selection of meats and fish they’ve ever seen. Sheldon says the spot prawns are speaking to him, which I think he meant literally. Might want to ease up on that good reefer, my friend. He’s doing a roasted quail entree that Brooke says “doesn’t sound like him,” but he wants to show how much he’s grown since he last cooked for the judges. I suppose nothing says you’ve grown as a chef than eviscerating a bunch of tiny little birds.

* Brooke is overwhelmed by the quality of the proteins and starts to psych herself out again. This becomes really critical later in the show, and I don’t think this is just a case of lack of mental preparation or toughness.

* Kristen is mapping out space and writing on the counters. Is that something other chefs do? I don’t remember seeing it before, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she were an unusually organized chef given the food she produces.

* Hugh does the kitchen visits Tom would usually do and actually counsels Brooke while asking Sheldon not to burn the restaurant down. I suppose that’s marginally more helpful advice than Tom would have given.

* Kristen is making a chestnut veloute and is focusing on “simple, clean flavors.” Her main is an ahi tuna dish and she says she’ll do some “chocolate … thing” for dessert. She says she benefited from doing Last Chance Kitchen because she didn’t have time to overthink her dishes – meaning she had better balance between the rational and emotional parts of her brain when making decisions. Except that she kind of forgets about dessert here.

* So apparently Tom has dreamy eyes and everyone goes all Debbie Gibson and gets lost in them. I have no idea what to do with this so I’m moving on.

* Sheldon pours a bottle of wine into a pot and says it’s “for my homies, gangster pouring.” Are gangsters more into French reds or Italian? Or do they just drink fucking merlot? I’ve been off the streets for too long, it seems. I’m losing my edge like James Murphy.

* Brooke’s anxiety level is rising. We know Brooke has anxiety/panic issues from her own admissions in previous episodes, so I think it’s fair game to point it out here. The disorientation, the inability to order her thoughts, the catastrophic thinking, these are all hallmarks of anxiety problems, even if it’s hard to recognize them per se as “attacks.” You don’t have to be panicking for anxiety to affect you physically or mentally. If you don’t learn how to manage these thoughts, they take over and you can’t think about anything else, even if you are in a critical situation. I feel badly for her as she flails and her body language and facial expressions betray that inner turmoil. I’m surprised we didn’t get Gail saying, “I can taste the panic in the sauce.”

* Sheldon definitely wins the best vocabulary award when he drops a “mother hugger” on this show, although I was always partial to “mother’s younger brother” when looking for a euphemism.

* Sheldon and Kristen both seem to be punting dessert to some extent, Sheldon because he’s not that familiar with it, Kristen because she just sets it aside in favor of focusing on the first two items. She calls herself a “white person Asian,” a term I am not touching with a 39½ foot pole.

* Tom comes in and asks them to clean up right before service. Is that a trap to break their rhythm just before the first tickets arrive? At least he didn’t turn off the running water or anything.

* Padma’s in a skintight pink dress for the meal. Oh my dayum.

* Sheldon’s starter is spot prawns in court bouillon with radish and Asian herbs. This is a huge hit but it turns out it’s all downhill from here for Dazed and Confused tonight.

* Kristen’s starter is a chestnut veloute with a seared duck rillete and Brussels sprouts. The judges thought it needed a touch of acid, but one guest wants to pick up the bowl and drink the veloute. I have no problem with this, by the way. Etiquette be damned – isn’t that a big compliment for the chef? It’s like saying “your veloute was as good as the milk is after a bowl of Cocoa Krispies.” Because you all know you drank that as kids. Or last week. Let’s move on.

* Brooke’s starter is a crispy veal sweetbread salad with beets and kumquats. Martin Yan – who can cook, if you haven’t heard – says the beets are good but aren’t integrated into the overall dish. Hugh says the sweetbreads aren’t quite cleaned enough and are cut too thin. I heard when she served this on the Walking Dead she got perfect scores.

* Back in the kitchen, Brooke is in the weeds and has to replate some of her starters. It’s textbook anxiety – not to harp on this, but as I watched it it was a little like an out-of-body experience, like, “is that what I look like when I panic?”

* Kristen’s main is a seared ahi tuna with veal mustard jus and lemon curd; the fish is excellent but the curd was too bitter. She says cooking while Tom is expediting is frightening, delivering the quote that should go on her tombstone: “I peed in mah pants a little.” Next week’s finale of Top Chef will be brought to you by Depends.

* Brooke’s main is braised short ribs with Parmiggiano sauce, nettle puree, and squash dumplings. Yan says it perfectly cooked. Emeril loves the nettle puree. The sauce is a smash. From the descriptions and the presentations+, this was the best thing I saw on tonight’s show. That’s a $35 entree, easy, the kind of dish that could be a restaurant’s signature item.

+ So my daughter had to do a big poster on desert habitats and talk to the class about it on Tuesday. It went great, so well that she didn’t even need to use her notes on index cards. She was so excited to tell me that she “got to presentate my poster to the class.”

* Sheldon’s main is roasted quail with pine nut puree and tangerine. Hugh doesn’t love it and says it’s not Sheldon. No one likes the puree. It’s funny that yet another quail dish didn’t work (although it doesn’t have the curse of risotto or burgers on Top Chef), but the problem here wasn’t the quail.

* Brooke’s dessert is a brown butter cake with whipped goat cheese and blackberry sauce. John Besh loves it but probably feels awkward without Malibu Chris making goo-goo eyes at him all evening. Martin Yan loves the texture and balance and calls it yin and yang, spurring some bad puns on his name. There’s no winner named in this episode, but with Brooke nailing two of her three dishes it seems like she would have won again.

* Sheldon’s dessert is a white chocolate mousse with fennel and apple. The raw fennel is overpowering and distracting for the judges. I like fennel in moderation but raw fennel is pretty bold and even harsh, with the bitterness of darker greens along the anise flavor. What’s weird is that he used three ingredients that are all better when roasted to get some caramelization, but didn’t do that with any of them.

* Kristen’s dessert is a curry dark chocolate with cashews. The consensus seems to be that the odd flavor combination really works, but that the dish is too basic and ill-conceived. It’s not even clear to me what this was – a custard? Ganache? An unset mousse?

* Tom the Expediter is like a cross between a drill sergeant and a nagging mother-in-law.

* Besh-a-mel says it was all awesome. Hugh thought everything was easy/safe. These two should be made to duke it out. Yan says they didn’t put quite enough attention into execution; otherwise the meal could have been perfect.

* Sheldon is drinking Red Hook, a local beer, back in the kitchen as they await judges’ table. More local brands on Top Chef, please.

* Judges’ table: Sheldon up first. His app was very successful. The quail itself in his entree was fine, seasoned nicely and cooked well, but the pine nut puree was chalky. It turns out that he didn’t roast them; raw pine nuts are really unpleasant in both texture and flavor. I’m not crazy about most raw seeds or nuts, but pine nuts are one that desperately need to be cooked somehow, even if you’re grinding them into pesto. His dessert was killed by the raw fennel. Emeril comments on how Sheldon tried to present a new version of himself but says, “there was nothing wrong with the old Sheldon,” to which Padma replies “Amen.” Is it just me, or has this whole season felt more collegial than the last few? The chefs are mostly getting along better and on most episodes the judges are more conversational with the chefs and more supportive.

* Kristen’s turn. Her veloute was nice and velvety, the rillette was good, but it was all too one-note for Hugh, who’s playing the hard-ass this week. She said her concept for her tuna entree was to simplify from the last time to avoid what got her bounced from the main show, although she doesn’t point out that what really got her bounced was Josie. The ahi was perfectly cooked, but the lemon got bitter and the combination of the celery puree with that bitterness didn’t work. Hugh said her dessert was “badly thought out pot de crème.” It seems like she has a slight edge of Sheldon; both their desserts flopped, and her entree edged his.

* Brooke’s turn goes better. Her sweetbreads were crispy, and were boosted with a bright note from the kumquats, although she didn’t clean the glands enough, saying she was cleaning to order and couldn’t handle it. Her short ribs were delicious; Emeril loved the parmesan sauce and the nettles. Her dessert was the only successful one of the three, although Tom said it was not a restaurant dessert because it seemed unfinished.

* The summary discussion: Sheldon’s flavors fell a little flat tonight. Kristen’s dessert was a flop. Brooke’s short ribs might have been the best of the nine dishes. She lost some points on the kitchen side, which Tom says was a lack of focus – but that’s what anxiety and panic do to you, robbing you of your ability to focus and think clearly. It’s to her credit that she didn’t melt down or quit at any point. That’s not a job where you can go take ten minutes to meditate and calm yourself down. I get that you’re judged on your food here, not on reasons you didn’t do as well as you should have, but Tom saw Brooke’s demeanor and body language, and might have been a little less quick to criticize because of that.

* Sheldon goes home. He’s very gracious in defeat. Bro hugs all around. I thought Padma might tear up again. She’s gone all soft since she had her baby.

* There are some words for the surviving chefs, though. Kristen gets dinged for playing it a little safe in her concepts. Brooke gets dinged for rough service.

* We have an all-female finale for the first time ever. The guest judges will be Betty Friedan, Sandra Fluke, and Queen Latifah. My pick remains Kristen, but after watching Brooke go all ’75 Reds on the competition the last four or five episodes, this feels a lot closer than it would have before Kristen’s original elimination.

Some admin stuff first…

* I have a new post up for Insiders, ranking the top 20 prospects by expected 2013 impact. The ranking incorporates my best educated guesses at playing time, based on what I’ve been told by team sources, although injuries could obviously change that. And I did a brief Klawchat, abbreviated so I could take my wife to lunch for Valentine’s Day.

* I’ve updated the Arizona spring training dining guide with a few places I forgot to mention.

* alt-J’s An Awesome Wave, the Mercury Prize-winning album about which I’ve been raving since late October, is now just $2.99 on amazon through that link. I reviewed the album in October, and you can listen to it on Spotify if you’d like to test-drive it first.

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Josh’s wife is now a week overdue. I just can’t fathom being in Alaska while my wife was in labor in not-Alaska. She’d be furious with me and, for once, she’d be right.

* Before the quickfire, the three chefs have to fly in a helicopter for about 15 minutes to get to the challenge site – and Brooke’s very real anxiety kicks in almost immediately. She’s in tears, somehow gets herself on the chopper, and spends much of the ride with her eyes closed and clinging to Josh (who gets major points for both helping her and for not patronizing her for her fear). I’m fortunate that my anxiety has never taken that stark a form, but I understand how strong that reaction is, and that it’s not just mental at that point but is physical. Eventually she does recover enough to look out the windows and get absorbed in the views, although I thought that might trigger another round of panic for her.

* Sheldon, meanwhile, thinks this is awesome: “I would die for some good reefer!” You and Tim Beckham, my man.

* They land on Norris Glacier, which appears to be near Mendenhall Lake and Glacier just northeast of Juneau. They’re at a camp where dogsled racers are training for the Iditarod. The quickfire: make a dish using ingredients and equipment found in the camp. It looks like there’s at least a decent supply of fish on hand, but the kitchen is tiny, there are no electrical appliances, and the burners are small and not very powerful.

* I know you’re shocked, but Josh is doing breakfast again – corn cakes with eggs and smoked salmon. He doesn’t have time to fry the eggs and keep them warm when he brings them to the outdoor table, so he scrambles them, which means his plate looks and feels like mush.

* I like that the sled dogs have little dog huts to protect them from the wind.

* Brooke’s pan cools down immediately when she adds the fish, which she says may have to do with the altitude, although I also wonder what material the pan was and how long it would hold the heat (I need a physicist’s opinion here). She made a pan-roasted halibut with lemon zest, smoked sea salt, red currant-beet vinaigrette, and a panzanella with walnuts and crunchy croutons. Despite the pan problems, her halibut has a nice brown sear on the outside.

* Tom’s reaction to Josh’s scrambled eggs – “Really?” – was pretty telling.

* Sheldon does a seared halibut with a chicken broth-tomato sauce, sesame bok choy, and pickled radish. His halibut doesn’t look seared like Brooke’s, but Tom said it was cooked perfectly, instead criticizing the sauce as too salty and very one-note. That turns out to be foreshadowing.

* Brooke wins, no surprise there. Her only real competition at this point is still hanging out in Last Chance Kitchen. That’s her third Quickfire win and seventh win overall.

* So Padma drives the trio back to Juneau after the helicopter ride down, which leads to Sheldon mocking Padma’s driving, saying she’s probably been chauffeured everywhere. A little casual misogyny, maybe?

* Elimination challenge: Cook dinner for the Governor of Alaska and his wife at the Governor’s Mansion. The guest judge is Roy Choi of the Kogi Korean BBQ food trucks (which popularized the Korean taco) and A-Frame.

* Roy and Emeril cook lunch for the group, during which Roy tells about how he was a real stoner into his early 20s, and one day, while high on his couch, he had the Food Network on and saw Emeril braising short ribs in red wine, at which point “Emeril popped out of the TV and slapped [him] across the face” (must have been some good weed), after which Roy started researching culinary schools and turned his life around. That moment felt genuine – I don’t think Emeril knew the story was coming, either.

* Josh asks Emeril one of my favorite culinary-philosophy questions: sugar or no sugar in cornbread. Emeril says no sugar. This is why we like Emeril despite all the “BAM!” stuff. Cornbread with sugar is corn cake.

* The challenge: make a dish that represents the moment when you knew you wanted to be a chef. Brooke says she knew it from age four, so I assume she’s making pureed green beans and Cheerios.

* Josh gets the call from his wife – her water broke, she’s crying on the phone, he’s upset, wife tells him, “if you are still competing you just need to win,” and now he’s crying. Two things: I was surprised that even his wife didn’t know that he was still in the competition, and this reminds me of something I learned when my daughter was born, that only about 10% of pregnant women have their water break before they get to the hospital. Of course, my wife’s water did break, at 5:45 am on a Friday, five weeks before the due date, after which she helped and I had to be peeled off the ceiling.

* Sheldon is making a snapper dish as an homage to Hawai’ian chef Sam Choy (who made an infamous clam flan on Iron Chef America). Tom cautions him not to start cooking the fish too soon, which seems to get into Sheldon’s head … but more on that in a moment.

* Josh’s “moment” was the first time he tasted foie gras, saying its delicate liver flavor changed how he thought about food. He’s making a torchon, foie gras that is soaked, lightly cured and marinated in white wine or brandy, briefly poached, and then wrapped tightly in a towel or parchment paper to dry and chill overnight in a cool place, a process that takes several days but that Josh will try to do overnight. Best of luck.

* Brooke talks about watching Julia Child as a kid and how her mom cooked dinner every night, so she’s making her mom’s braised chicken but is also adding quail to show who she’s evolved into as a chef. Quail has to be high on the list of things chefs screw up regularly on Top Chef.

* Brooke has a lot more ink than I realized, which I bring up because of the debate last week over whether she’s real-life cute or just Top Chef cute. I think she’s real-life cute, for what it’s worth.

* Josh’s wife calls again, obviously in pain and possibly high on medications, crying, “I just want you to be here, I love you, I have to go.” Good luck recovering from that phone call. Anyway, the baby’s born, yata yata yata, back to the kitchen everyone.

* I’m kind of disappointed that Sarah Palin is no longer the governor of Alaska, because maybe she could shoot another caribou for the chefs to cook while asking them to refudiate veganism or something.

* Sheldon starts to cook his fish with 20 minutes to go, but discovers his broth over-reduced and is too salty. He’s hinting that Tom’s comments got in his head, but why the hell wasn’t he checking the broth while he waited to cook the fish? If it’s reducing too fast, take it off the heat, or add some water? Am I missing something?

* He plates first, serving a pan-roasted rockfish, spot prawns, baby vegetables, and some of the dashi (broth) he used to cook the fish. The prawns are great and slightly sweet. Roy loves the concept of the dish. And everyone says it’s too salty. Whoops.

* Wolfgang’s father used to tell him that he’d be good for nothing, which seems to be a common theme among professional chefs – and when Wolfgang became a chef, his father said cooking was for women. Sounds like the damn Father of the Year.

* Moving along rapidly … Brooke serves braised chicken with crispy skin, grilled quail, carrot barley (she cooked the barley in the carrot juice), pickled baby turnips, and mushrooms with pearl onions. Wolfgang says his quail was a little overcooked, an angle I think was played up from here on out through editing to make it look like she didn’t absolutely nail this dish start to finish. Roy says she was “a prodigy in LA” when she first got started. I think her unassuming demeanor masks how extremely skilled she is.

* Josh’s torchon isn’t set up sufficiently and moves it to the freezer. You can hear his death rattle.

* He serves foie three ways: the torchon, foie pan seared on corn purée, and profiteroles with foie mousse. Roy loved the flavors, Gail liked the profiteroles, but the torchon wasn’t set. Tom says you just can’t do it, even if you’re as good as Tom Colicchio. (He may not have phrased it that way.) The Governor says the dish had too little texture contrast, so already he sounds smarter than his predecessor.

* Judges’ Table: Josh says he “wanted to go balls to the wall,” but Tom questions “short-cutting” the torchon and hammers Josh on his core concept. Brooke’s had great flavors, looked simple but was “like origami” according to Roy, and we hear that the quail a little overcooked. Sheldon’s fish cooked perfectly, but he botched the broth. Wolfgang says the fish and prawns were beautifully cooked “like you were the best chef in the world,” so how could Sheldon fail to taste the broth before plating?

* Brooke wins, again. If it weren’t for Last Chance Kitchen, this would be the least dramatic finish for Top Chef in ages.

* Josh is eliminated. I thought Sheldon made the bigger error here, the third week in a row he had a glaring mistake in the elimination challenge and stuck around; Josh used an ingredient he didn’t fully understand (per both Tom and Wolfgang), but it seems like the remainder of his fish was strong. Have they saved Sheldon a little too often?

* LCK: Make Tom a great plate of food. Lizzie wins save-a-chef, so it’s her versus both Kristen and Josh. They get 30 minutes to cook and can use anything in the craft LA kitchen. Josh goes for venison as his protein, claiming he’s “curing” it (impossible in 30 minutes) but really just using a coriander-heavy rub with kale and shaved raw carrot. Lizzie goes for black cod, cooking it with black pepper and vinegar, plus spaetzle and savoy cabbage. Kristen grabs semolina flour to make fresh pasta. Nearly certain she has new tattoos on her arm. She makes caraway orecchiette, with pea tendrils, citrus, brown butter, pomegranate seeds, and fresh herbs. There’s a lot of handwork required to make that shape, although I think that’s part of her strategy – impress the judges by accomplishing tasks they know are arduous or difficult in a short time period. Josh’s venison looks raw, kind of purplish, and sure enough it was cold in the center, so he’s sent home immediately. The winner between Kristen and Lizzie is … to be announced next week, on the show.

* Rankings: Kristen, Brooke, Lizzie, Sheldon. I’ve just lost confidence in Sheldon’s ability to execute in the bigger challenges. The finale really needs to be Kristen versus Brooke in some form; they have nine of the fourteen elimination challenge wins, and they’ve been by far the most impressive contestants this year, blowing just about everyone else out of the water. I know Tom insists the judging is always strictly about the food, but you know Bravo is loving the Kristen storyline, and they figure ratings will be highest if those two women are in the finale.

First, the links to the organizational top tens, with comments, 2013 impact guys, and sleepers.

• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West
• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West

I also did another Klawchat today, and the Baseball Today podcast finale is up as well. Thanks for listening for the last two years.

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So Sheldon thinks Stefan was the front-runner until he was eliminated, but I have a hard time thinking Sheldon or anyone really believed that. Brooke has been cleaning up, especially with Kristen gone, and there’s no way the other chefs in the house haven’t noticed that. As the group arrives in Juneau – the only US state capital with no roads leading in/out of town, and the only one to border another country – Sheldon says he should put extra underwear on to “keep the package nice and warm.” Somehow this is less creepy coming from Sheldon than it did from Stefan. Still creepy, just less creepy. Slightly.

* Quickfire: Sean Brock of Husk is in the house! The chefs must cook at Tracy’s King Crab Shack, “Juneau’s #1 culinary destination” according to Padma, who doesn’t strike me as standard crab-shack clientele. The challenge is to create a dish highlighting Alaskan crab. Brock loves it with a little bit of lemon and dipped in butter. He says that’s too boring for Top Chef, but he’s right – good crab needs very little help to taste great. It’s the candy of the animal protein world.

* Lizzie makes a crab frittata with cherry tomato, garlic oil, and fried capers (drained, not soaked, so it came out very briny). I also feel like that’s a little 1970s brunchy for Top Chef. Brooke does a crab toast, trying to be as delicate as possible with the flavor of the meat, and serves it with a compound butter made from dungeness crab and the Alaskan king crab shells. She tops it with a sweet corn and leek salad for what was easily the best-looking of the four dishes. Josh butter-poaches his crab and serves it with bacon and succotash, saying his food is similar to Sean Brock’s. Along those lines, I think my writing is similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Sheldon makes “miso” with crab innards and two kinds of crab, then uses pine needles to smoke his asparagus. I didn’t realize this was possible, since you can’t smoke using pine wood (or any other softwood) because of resins that can turn toxic when burned.

* Lizzie’s frittata was overcooked and the capers overpowered the crab. Josh served succotash to “a succotash snob,” his bacon overpowered the crab, and the butter sauce broke, after Josh said he thought he had this “in the bag.” Sheldon’s was simple and interesting, per Sean, between the faux-miso and the pine needle-smoking. Brooke’s looked too easy, and Sean says he didn’t want to like it, but it was flat-out delicious. Sheldon wins thanks to his ingenuity and use of the whole crab, grabbing a $5K prize but no immunity.

* Elimination challenge: Cook a dish with salmon and sourdough for guests at the Gold Creek Salmon Bake. Why wasn’t I told about this tradition sooner? /moves to Juneau

* The chefs each get a large tub of a 31-year-old sourdough starter. This reminds me of Gus toting around his ten-year-old sourdough biscuit starter in Lonesome Dove and hating when he has to leave it behind. The chefs make their bread doughs the night before, working them by hand, which is probably bizarre for them since they would all have large Hobart stand mixers in their restaurant kitchens for making large batches. The real problem here, though, is that if you screw this up, there’s no recovery the next morning.

* Looks like they’re doing a warm rise in the kitchen rather than a cold rise overnight in the fridge, which produces more flavor. Or they’re doing two rises and the editing faked me out. It’s not that hard to do that to me.

* Sheldon’s self-description “I’m just a kid that plays the ukulele, came from a small town in Hawaii, started out as a dishwasher.” Also, Scott Brown drives a truck.

* The chefs get their salmon straight off the boat, packed in ice, still intact, with king, sockeye, and chum, at the very least, all available. Given the chefs’ tendency to cook salmon medium-rare if not rare, I’m a little concerned about the anisakis simplex parasite, which loves salmon and can cause some pretty nasty GI reactions as well as triggering anaphylaxis in some people. Other than that, it’s great.

* Sheldon decides to make pea soup for the first time ever even though it’s not his style – why do that? Why take this risk on a dish that, if executed perfectly, will still just be pea soup?

* Josh’s wife is already dilated while he’s working in the kitchen. My wife would have castrated me if I’d tried to travel when she was 8 months pregnant, let alone 9, which she never reached anyway since my daughter came five weeks early. Seriously, though, go home.

* The color of this salmon is absolutely insane – if you like fish, especially cooking it, you’ve got to be going insane with jealousy as you watch this. Lizzie, meanwhile, is doing a beet glaze, which is all about color, not flavor, so she’s going to take this gorgeous red fish and dye it magenta.

* Tom questions Brooke’s decision to poach the fish to order. Searing and holding really risks overcooking it though, and poaching can be quick if you can hold the liquid’s temp. I get this, plus Brooke executes almost every time out. Mostly Tom just likes to freak the front-runners out, I think.

* And we’re at the Gold Creek Salmon Bake. There are bears in the trees. Bears. In the trees. Why is no one concerned about this? Have they never heard of Timothy Treadwell?

* Hugh is back! And Sean sticks around for the elimination challenge, so why is Gail here with four serious chefs (those two, Tom, and Emeril) in the house? (That’s rhetorical, people. I know the answer – both answers, really.)

* To the dishes, starting with Brooke, who does a lightly poached sockeye in seafood broth with mustard-seed caviar and grilled dill sourdough. The broth is really nice with a good amount of acid, although Hugh says the mustard seeds looked weird when they broke down. She nailed the bread, with the dill tying in to the salmon. This reminds me of a place that used to be in central Arlington, Massachusetts, called Blue Plate Express, that did an unbelievable rosemary flatbread, grilled to order. I’ve never had anything quite like it – thicker than a fresh pita, but still clearly a flatbread.

* Sheldon makes a green tea and chive sourdough, then uses both chum and sockeye in his pea soup, which has a king crab, shrimp, and salmon bone base. Padma doesn’t like the green tea and chive together, and Emeril says the bread didn’t have any salt. Everyone says the salmon is too smoky. Sean is offended to see Sheldon mishandle (or manhandle?) the fish with his tongs. He likes the soup, but Hugh thought it was too thick, saying it reminded him of baby food: “Good baby, healthy baby, well-flavored baby.” Hugh, baby food doesn’t actually have babies in it. Some locals are acting like chum is an inferior fish and can’t believe Sheldon used it. Isn’t that the trend now, though – using less-glorified species that are more plentiful or sustainable, just like using the whole animal instead of just certain portions? That’s very much Sheldon’s ethic too.

* Emeril says when Katrina was coming, his chef brought the sourdough home, took it when he evacuated, fed it, and had it ready when they reopened three months later. That’s dedication.

* Josh does a roasted garlic and sourdough soup, sockeye salmon, and black olive croutons. The salmon is well cooked, the soup has a ton of flavor, but the two don’t go together very well, with the garlic overpowering the salmon. I’m just shocked that he didn’t serve it in a bowl made of bacon.

* Lizzie figures that with everyone else doing some kind of soup, she should do something not-soup, instead making sliders on sourdough rolls, with citrus- and beet-glazed salmon sliders with poppy seed butter and red onion and cucumber pickles. The bread is a clear winner, with huge marks from all judges and the locals, but the fish was bland.

* As the judges walk off, apparently into the forest to go foraging, a woman shouts, “Bye Emeril! I love you!” I can just assume they edited out what was hollered at Padma.

* The judging – Lizzie gets big praise for the roll’s crust and for hand-rolling them, and even for nicely cooked salmon, but it just wasn’t seasoned. She writes her own death warrant when she says she didn’t taste it all together, just tasting the components by themselves. I also thought she might have had too much roll vs filling, although if the filling wasn’t seasoned it wouldn’t have mattered. I love fish, but it needs salt just like every other protein does. Sheldon’s bread was just so-so, and the salmon was too smoky, but the fact that he used an ingredient (chum) that the locals typically feed to their dogs may have been his saving grace, even with too much smokiness in the fish itself. They rave about Brooke’s broth more than anything else in her dish. Sean was “crazy about that bread.” Yeast-raised flatbreads are awesome, really. Josh gets big praise from Emeril for bread soup and his use of garlic (shocker); Hugh says the salmon was awesome, but it got lost under the garlic. So Josh executed but the concept wasn’t there. This all seems pretty straightforward so far – Brooke is clearly going to win, and Lizzie or Sheldon will go home.

* Winner, both with judges and “nearly all the locals” the judges spoke with, is Brooke. Green Mountain Coffee is sending her and a guest to Costa Rica. This is her fourth elimination win and sixth win overall. She and Kristen have combined to win (or, in one case, share the crown) eight of the 13 elimination challenges. Besides those two, only Sheldon has multiple elimination wins (2).

* Now the interesting part, the debate over who goes home. Josh had “a balance issue” (per Tom), Lizzie’s was too bland (Tom) and too simple (Sean), while Sheldon didn’t do a great job with either of the key ingredients (Padma). In this discussion, Sheldon comes out the worst, with talk of bitterness in the fish.

* Lizzie ends up eliminated after all. Padma sounds upset as she tells Lizzie to hit the road. Lizzie cooked the least ambitious dish, and then she didn’t taste it, which had to offend the sensibilities of the chefs on the panel. We had a chance for an all-female final with her, Brooke, Kristen, but it wasn’t meant to be.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Both chefs make fish stews. Lizzie’s dish was so good Tom said she would have won the elimination challenge with it, but Kristen wins anyway, of course. Tom took just one bite of Kristen’s and seemed to be laughing to himself over how complex it was. Maybe Lizzie ran into a buzzsaw. I wonder if she’ll win the Save-a-chef contest against CJ now; she’s certainly more likeable and fared better in the main competition.

* New ranking: Kristen, Brooke, Sheldon, Josh. The only elimination that would surprise me next week would be Brooke. Josh seems weaker than Sheldon, but Sheldon’s had execution issues in the last two elimination challenges. Anything other than Kristen vs. Brooke in the finale would be a disappointment, though.

I broke down the Justin Upton trade today for Insiders, and I did a Klawchat as well.

Top Chef: The Aftermath. We begin in the house where Brooke says that she would have said something if she thought there was any chance Kristen would be sent home … which I ain’t buying. She was in the room for the judging and never said anything, not even after they sent Kristen home (which would have been a good time to say something, too). Maybe Brooke figured seeing the strongest competitor sent home wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe she didn’t want to talk back to the judges. But she couldn’t have stood there and thought Kristen was completely safe.

Then Josie is tearfully defending herself to Lizzie, who has “STFU” tattooed on her forehead for the entire conversation. Or whatever they say instead of “STFU” in South Africa.

* Quickfire: Create a sushi dish to impress Katsuya Uechi, master sushi chef. He says, mystically, “Don’t touch too much, don’t mix up too much ingredients … make people happy.” It sounds like an empty plate that with positive qi would be a better dish than some raw fish and rice. Immunity is off the table, but the winner gets $5K.

* Josh says he doesn’t crave sushi like bacon, and he’s making some weird sushi breakfast sandwich thing that Stefan calls “so fucking dumb.” I love sushi, but bacon really checks all the boxes.

* Stefan is the only chef we see smelling the fish on the table, which is smart, especially after Lizzie nearly got sent home for serving scallops that were off.

* Josie has done parties where they served sushi on naked women, saying “it’s kind of fun.” If by fun you mean horribly degrading, then yes, I agree.

* Lizzie says sushi is “an art, it’s not my art,” except it sounds a million times better when she says it.

* Sheldon says he doesn’t “do sushi that much,” going sashimi, lemon charcoal – grilled, blended, turned into powder.

* The dishes … Stefan: Yellowtail with grilled shiitake and mustard, and raw lobster with seaweed and unagi. Josie: halibut with yuzu and bacon aioli. Not enough punch for Katsuya. Lizzie: Lobster soup, micro greens, pickle ginger, yuzu sake broth, fresh ginger. Could have had rice underneath. Brooke: Octopus, yuzu, fresh wasabi, sliced shiso, EVOO. Josh: Tempura bacon, omelette, salmon belly, yuzu-koshu aioli, sandwiched between two bricks of rice. Sheldon: hamachi sashimi, fresh ponzu, mitsuba, lemon charcoal – grilled the lemons then ground the charred peel into a powder. Katsuya approves: “Burning lemon? That’s interesting.”

* Lizzie and Josh are on the bottom, neither of which is a surprise. Brooke and Stefan are on top, with Stefan the winner, his first win of any kind this season. Wikipedia says Stefan served as a judge on the Finnish version of Top Chef. Am I the only one who’d watch international versions of the show if they were subtitled in English? They’ve done two seasons of an “Arab World” edition, which would probably be fascinating, and I’d love to see the Portuguese version (bacalao ice cream!) too.

* Elimination challenge: Make fried chicken for an all-star collection of chefs, including Tom, Emeril, Wolfgang, Michelle Bernstein, David Chang, and the guys from LA’s Animal and Son of a Gun, who love fried chicken. Dinner is that night, so there’s not much time to prep or marinate the chicken.

* Stefan, discussing what I thought was chicken: “I like breasts a lot … you can hold on to the thighs much better.” Subtle.

* Josh says “danger zone” for no apparent reason, so I’ll assume that’s an Archer reference.

* Josie is talking all kinds of smack, saying she’s “got this one in the bag” because she’s from the south. Josh points out, correctly, that south Florida isn’t actually the South. Burn.

* Tom makes a crack about Wolfgang opening a chain of fried-chicken restaurants called “Wolfgang Cluck.” I’m not sure how the General will like the competition. Any last words, Clucky?

* Brooke’s plan is to remove the skins, fry them, and use them (ground, I assume) in the breading. Then she doesn’t have time to fry the skins, which I don’t get, since they should cook in a flash in the hot oil.

* Lizzie talks about wanting her mom to buy “one of those tubs” of fried chicken when she was a kid. If she had, she might never have come to the U.S. in the first place for fear she’d starve to death.

* So … I actually like fried chicken a lot, but rarely make it at home because it’s a big mess to do it right, usually in shortening in a big cast-iron skillet, frying at a relatively low temperature for about 45 minutes in total, with oil spattering everywhere. But I’ll order it when I’m out at any place that seems to do it right: Crispy exterior, so much so that it cracks or shatters as you bite into it, but that won’t slide off the meat itself. And dark meat, please.

* Service. Josie, who was sent home last time around by Michelle Bernstein, does a “southern style” chicken with black garlic, cayenne, and rice flour, along with a daikon salad. The judges then mock her for fake-south nonsense by serving on a banana leaf, with the chicken too oily and greasy and the breading underseasoned. Michelle says “I had to put it down … I just, I can’t.” We might all finally get our wish here, people.

* Sheldon does it two ways, umami-style legs (brined with bacon, shiitakes, and bonito, then dipped in a buttermilk-konbu mixture before it’s breaded) and Momofuku-style wings, although he has to toss the first batch of wings because they cooked too quickly on the outside. Everyone loves what he served and his out of the box thinking, but they complain that he didn’t serve enough. Pretty ballsy to serve “Momofuku-style wings” to the chef from Momofuku.

* Lizzie does a fried chicken breast with coriander, black pepper, and brown sugar rub, with a side of cabbage and pickled peach slaw. Judges like the flavor, but call it “shake and bake” (which it does, unfortunately, resemble), and Tom says it’s just not fried chicken.

* Stefan does chicken cordon bleu with garlic aioli. It sucks. I hate chicken cordon bleu anyway.

* Josh smokes his chicken first, then fries it and serves it with hot sauce and blue cheese. Tom loves the concept, so even though it’s not that crispy – was it breaded at all? – it gets the highest marks.

* Brooke does a dukkah-crusted chicken breasts on a bed of wilted escarole and tomato salad. She cooked the chicken too early, then refries it to serve, which is a terrible idea that produces terrible results. Wolfgang says it’s not Top Chef, and he “wouldn’t even call it the apprentice.” The Animal guys also reveal that Brooke interviewed them years earlier for a job at one of her restaurants but turned them down. Isn’t that a bit unfair to tell her now? Great for the cameras, but why not just kick her in the stomach while you’re at it?

* The chefs from LA only served breasts. Wolfgang says “it’s LA, plastic surgery everywhere.” Someone needs to point out that chicken breasts are, in a rather significant reversal, the least interesting part of the bird.

* Top three: Josh, Sheldon, Lizzie. Lizzie fried hers really well, producing a crispy crust that wasn’t greasy; it wasn’t truly fried chicken, but when says she’s not so familiar with it Padma jumps in with a “That’s fair.” That’s significant when we get to the bottom three. David Chang says Josh’s was a clever take on a traditional recipe. Sheldon’s two types, one savory one sweet, also get high marks, with the only criticism that there wasn’t enough of it. Josh wins over Sheldon in what I think was a mild upset, and I’m not sure what we didn’t hear that would back that up.

* My wife, on Josh: “Can I cut his mustache off in his sleep?” Not sure why she’d be sleeping with him, but maybe I can give Padma a call now.

* Bottom: Brooke, yeah, whatever, no way she’s going home. Then we get The Josie Show: She blames the fryer, she blames the clock, but never blames herself. Tom closes his eyes, puts two fingers on his forehead, and makes the “You have got to be shitting me” face. (We need a GIF of this.) Then he starts mocking her for running out of time and nails her for “wasting time.” She argues with him and says everyone (that is, her competitors) who tasted it said it was “delicious,” after which Tom says that clearly the judges were the idiots here. He looks at Josie like she’s the bad penny of Top Chef. Hey, you could have sent her home last week, pal. This one is your own fault.

* Stefan then says fried chicken isn’t “European,” so Wolfgang, who is European, says fried chicken is a classic Austrian dish. Tom calls cordon bleu a “bad banquets” dish and Emeril says it wasn’t even good chicken cordon bleu. He has the best line later, when Padma asks when anyone had seen the dish on a menu, saying “I had it two flights ago.”

* So the three chefs leave the room and Padma says, “such a bullshitter, such a bullshitter!” except that I wasn’t sure if she meant Stefan or Josie. Turns out she meant Stefan, who she says was lying about not knowing about fried chicken. My wife’s response: “If they’re gonna start sending people home for lyin’, there ain’t gonna be nobody left.”

* Josie is eliminated. Josh speaks for all of us when he says, “Thank God the Josie Show has been cancelled.” The fact that she even reached the top 6 is insulting; she won one Quickfire, never won an elimination challenge, and finished in the bottom seven times in eleven episodes, avoiding elimination in week 3 because she had immunity. I watch Top Chef for one reason more than any other – to see the food. I like watching the process, and I like getting ideas from their innovations. Every week Josie was on instead of someone more imaginative made the show worse. Don’t let the kitchen door hit you on the way out.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Kristen wins the grudge match, which was very satisfying to watch. Leave it to Josie to screw up and start making more excuses.

* Rankings: Again, Kristen remains the favorite. Of the five still in the big house, from top to bottom: Brooke, Sheldon, Lizzie, Stefan, Josh. I’d be happy with a final three of Kristen, Brooke, and Sheldon, although Kristen has to run the table to make that possible.

My breakdown of yesterday’s three-team deal involving Michael Morse and John Jaso is up for Insiders.

Usually I don’t discuss a Top Chef episode’s elimination until the end of the post, sticking to the chronological order of the notes I took while watching the show in real-time (well, DVR real-time). This time, however, a few reader tweets spoiled the ending for me before I’d even started watching, and so I had a pretty skeptical eye going from the start. Nothing happened in the episode to change my mind, not even Tom’s after-the-fact post explaining how they had “no choice” but to send Kristen home. Not only do I disagree with him, which I’ll discuss below when I get to judges’ table, but, for the first time, I think viewers who are questioning whether the judges’ decision was truly independent of the producers’ input have valid reasons for their doubts, not just the kind of tin-foil-hat thinking that I may joke about but haven’t really taken seriously.

* Stefan says Restaurant Wars is always a shitshow. He’s not wrong, although it turns out that this year’s edition was a shitshow for entirely different reasons than previous years’ versions. He ends up handling front of house duties for Team Sheldon, which seems like a good fit since he’s kind of a schmoozer by nature.

* The biggest twist: there are no kitchens. The chefs must build them from scratch, outside in the open courtyard area between the two dining rooms.

* Josie really not getting along with anyone. I may have just copied and pasted this from every previous recap.

* Stefan is shopping for flowers. Who cares? I don’t think it’s “gay” as Stefan said; I just think it’s a waste of time, especially when you’re a man down compared to the other team. Also, a lot of idiots would say cooking for a living or for pleasure is “gay” too, so, you know, maybe not using that word would be good.

* Stefan and Josh are at least saying the right things about working with a cuisine they are completely unfamiliar with, even though Josie would already be preparing her excuses for why her version of someone else’s menu didn’t work.

* Kristen says her menu is “ambitious,” and is inspired by when she watched French cooking shows when she was five and would try to mimic whatever the chefs were doing on screen. When I was five I was still watching Write On and Read All About It!. Then again, I’m a writer, so maybe this all makes sense now.

* Josie talks about roasting her bones on the day before, then never does it, even though Kristen asks her to do so more than once. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.” Roasting bones isn’t exactly hard, you know; you oil them and stick them in the oven for an hour, more or less. Failing to do that is just laziness.

* Josie wants to preplate at least some of the items, including the fish for her bouillabaisse. Kristen wants to prepare everything to order. Josie thinks that can’t work for so many people. Josh predicts cooking fish to order will sink them, but I think cooking fish before the fact is pretty much the worst idea ever. Some things can be prepared the day before. Fish ain’t one of them, unless you like chewing on old tires.

* Other than Josie being Josie, Kristen’s team looks quite organized, and the other three chefs are getting along fairly well. Kristen might be micromanaging a little bit, saying she wants to “touch” every plate that goes out, but she views this as taking responsibility – and the judges wouldn’t hesitate to slam a team leader if a restaurant is sending out sloppy or unfinished plates.

* Are you sick of reading about Josie yet? Because I’m sick of writing about her, and I’m far from finished.

* Sheldon’s team is doing six dishes, two per chef, which seems incredibly ambitious given their disadvantage. That said, Sheldon’s laid-back temperament – I would call it a Hawai’ian stereotype, but we were just there in November and just about everyone we met acted pretty much like that – is a perfect fit under what could be a soul-crushing degree of stress. He even recruits the dishwashers to help with prep.

* This is really the all-Josie episode; if the producers wanted to craft a new villain with John gone, they got their material here, as Josie is all excuses, all the time, when she’s not flat-out lying to Kristen about what’s been done. She did the broth the day of service, not the day before, so it’s so late that she can’t use the gelatin Kristen wanted to add before charging the broth in the iSi canisters. When Kristen hears this, she says virtually nothing but drops a serious WTF face before telling Josie to switch to cream and soy (milk, I think?) and forget the gelatin.

* During the first seating, Stefan seems to be ideal in front of house, all schmoozing, keeping guests liquored up, saying the right stuff … which makes it so much more surprising when his service falls apart in the second seating.

* Here come the judges. Good grief is Padma’s skirt short. And her heels high. There are interstate highways that don’t go on as long as her legs.

* The judges start at Kristen’s restaurant. The first dish is Lizzie’s twist on charcuterie: rabbit rillette, pickled turnips, and beets, in a roasted chicken and rabbit broth. Total acclaim here.

* Then we get what turns out to be the pivotal moment in the show: No one even tested the mounted bouillabaisse broth in the iSi canisters, so the foam doesn’t work; Brooke, who was handling front of house duties, is standing there working the broth with an immersion blender while in a dress and heels. Kristen says she’d prefer a dishwasher to Josie, which is a clear insult to the dishwashers on Sheldon’s side who are doing actual work without making excuses.

* The result of all of this is that it takes way too long to plate and serve Josie’s course, a bouillabaisse with halibut, Dungeness crab, and scallops. The dishes don’t have anywhere near enough broth, and the fish is unevenly cooked. It’s a disaster dish, with Tom saying later (but before judges’ table) that Josie should go home for it.

* The other result is that we see service breaking down in Kristen’s kitchen, with tables getting the wrong dishes and tickets coming in incorrectly. Given the editing, it’s hard to see this as unrelated to the stinkbomb Josie dropped in the kitchen by being in it.

* Kristen’s main dish is a take on beef bourguignon, a Burgundy-braised short rib with garlic purée, glazed carrots, pearl onions, and mushrooms. The dish has nowhere near enough sauce or acidity; what’s on the plate is good, but the consensus is that she didn’t reinterpret the dish far enough, so it feels like an incomplete version of the original.

* Brooke’s cheese course has fresh baked gougeres (made from choux paste and usually deep fried), cheese, roasted radish, and an espresso truffle … plus something else that isn’t included in the online recipe but that the judges said was impossible to chew.

* Kristen’s dessert is her take on the two types of macarons, the French version with almonds and the American version with coconuts (called macaroons). She does an almond cake macaroon with coconut custard and salted buttercream, and no one particularly likes it, saying it’s not reminiscent of either of the original pastries and was too heavy to recall the French version (although to be fair, French macarons are light, but are usually filled with buttercream or ganache, which isn’t). Overall, Kristen’s restaurant was generally disappointing, but not a flop other than Josie’s dish; Lizzie is the one team member who’s very clearly going to be safe.

* Back to Sheldon’s restaurant, we see Stefan dropping the hammer to get the first seating out and clear the big backup at the entrance, which continues to grow regardless.

* The first dish is Stefan’s kilawen, yellowtail crudo with three sauces: cilantro, spicy chili, white soy. He seems to have a knack for raw fish, and the judges love it.

* Josh’s take on balut has a poached egg, duck confit, and a foie gras mousse. Stefan didn’t explain the dish enough, although if he’d said what balut really is – a fertilized duck egg, poached and eaten in the shell, looking a bit like a grey chicken fetus – that might not have helped. Padma says it was executed beautifully, while Tom says it doesn’t read filipino at all.

* Sheldon’s miki has prawns with tapioca roll/pasta and achiote. Stefan wasn’t there to explain it and then comes and “scolds” the judges after it – a bizarre misstep for a guy who usually is willing to suck up to the judges for his own benefit. It’s like no one told him he’d have to work a doubleheader today.

* Sheldon’s adobo pork belly with mung bean purée and pea shoots salad gets praise from Tom as the best dish all day, with Danny Meyer largely agreeing. I don’t think this was mentioned on the show, but that braised pork belly was deep-fried first. That might have helped its flavor a little.

* Josh’s dessert, a take on halu-halu, has coconut sorbet, avocado mousse, bananas, and shredded coconut. It’s another hit, and it’s clear by this point that Team Sheldon is going to win.

* Stefan’s dessert has ginger tea and a dark chocolate confection with macadamia nuts, ginger, and peppermint oil. Those are some seriously strong flavors fighting each other, and I’ve never liked the chocolate/ginger combination even though I’m a big fan of both.

* Now we see Padma saying Stefan should go home for service, while Tom says Josie should go home for bouillabaisse. If only.

* Judges’ table: Brooke gets praise for her front-of-house performance, while Lizzie gets praise for starter. Josie gets killed for her bouillabaisse and immediately begins blaming Kristen for her dish. Kristen has the chance to explain the gelatin being scrapped because of Josie’s screwup, but declines, which was a fatal mistake.

* Stefan gets crushed for service but owns up to it quickly, largely because that’s what he does with the judges. Tom says Sheldon’s adobo pork was the best dish all night; Team Sheldon wins and he gets a new Toyota Avalon. Padma tells Stefan he’s very lucky, since he would have been sent home had Kristen’s team won.

* Lizzie and Brooke are told they’re safe, while we hear Kristen saying “bite my tongue” under her breath as Josie makes excuse after excuse. Kristen falls on her sword and takes all of the responsibility, which I suppose I should respect greatly, but I don’t think it’s abdicating responsibility if you stick to the truth about an employee (figuratively) who didn’t do her job.

* Josie: “I’m an easy target.” Yes, because your food sucks.

* So Kristen is sent home over Josie, in what Gail revealed afterwards was a split decision. This entire discussion felt extremely contrived, with Padma’s sudden anti-Kristen sentiment looking horribly forced. The judges missed two extremely obvious points when conducting this fake debate over who to send home. First of all, Josie’s dish was the only one on either side that was served late, and with Josie doing that twice previously this season, some basic deductive reasoning would tell you that she was the cause, not Kristen. Second, their behavior and body language at judges’ table spoke volumes: Josie was all excuses and emotions, while Kristen was calm and took responsibility while deflecting attempts by the judges to get her to pin the blame on Josie. I’m not buying Tom’s claims afterwards that they had no choice or didn’t have all of the available information; their own expressions on the show implied that they knew just what was going on, and were trying to get Kristen on the record. I also don’t think the judges needed to send Josie home on the basis of her season-long incompetence. The only excuse I can make for the judges is that neither Brooke nor Lizzie chimed in to support Kristen, perhaps for competitive reasons. Overall, this was a new low for the show, an embarrassing episode that has, unfortunately, given the show a lot of the wrong kind of attention. It is very hard for me to accept that the show is all about the food when the chef who dominated the entire season is sent home for someone else’s cooking failure, and while Kristen comes off way, way better on TV, it undermines the entire show to see this. I’m usually just acting fake-angry about stuff on the show – it’s a reality show with no impact on my life other than entertainment – but now I feel like I’ve been had. We get more drama, but the best chef is gone. That’s like trading Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez.

* Having Josie in the final six is like having Willie Bloomquist on the WBC Team USA roster. She’s far and away the worst chef left, and with Kristen winning Last Chance Kitchen (I can’t even be bothered with an LCK recap), she’s still the best chef sort-of standing. Of the six in the main competition, Brooke is the new #1, followed by Sheldon, Stefan, Lizzie, Josh, the Mariana Trench, and then Josie.

My ranking of the top 25 big leaguers under the age of 25 is posted for Insiders, and I’m chatting today at 1 pm ET. We’ll also have a new Baseball Today show later today, with an interview with special guest Nate Silver as well.

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No one’s really broken up by John leaving, partly because his personality had become a problem, but I think also because there’s some recognition that he had the ability to keep advancing – he was one of the few chefs here with any kind of vision, although I think in recent weeks he’d started to run out of inspiration and his dishes started to look more derivative. I’m really shocked the whole glasses-on-the-forehead thing hasn’t become a national fashion craze, though.

* Quickfire: Cook a dish emphasizing ginger in 15 minutes, judged by Wolfgang Puck. This morphs into an ad for Canada Dry … which I admit is my preferred ginger ale for mixing, actually. (I also like ginger beer, but they’re two different drinks.) Puck mentions a popular ginger creme brûlée dessert at his restaurant, which is right up my alley. My wife loathes ginger in all its forms, which I think is some sort of genetic defect on her end, but needless to say this was pretty close to the Quickfire of her nightmares.

* Kristen infuses ginger into ingredients using a pressurized CO2 canister, which most of us would recognize as a whipped cream dispenser. I have one very similar to this iSi model and love it, mostly because it avoids the mess of whipping cream with a hand mixer. Anyway, this kind of thing is why I think Kristen is a huge favorite to win – she’s operating on another plane from the rest of them, conceptually and technically. I was surprised she didn’t make the top three here, as Padma and Wolfgang liked her dish and praised her creativity.

* The bottom two were Sheldon for a stir-fried skirt steak with ginger and oranges that Wolfgang called “pedestrian Chinese food,” and Josh for a white chocolate ginger soup with peaches and tarragon that Wolfgang said was “underwhelming.” I like how Wolfgang asks for vocabulary help as if he hasn’t been here for 30 years. His English is good – I just think he likes messing with people.

* Top three are Brooke for a ginger caramel squid with fresh lime and chili powder; Lizzie for a cold watermelon-ginger soup with fresh mint, using ginger ale with pureed watermelon for the base; and Stefan for an ahi tartare with lemongrass ginger vinaigrette. Stefan butters up Wolfgang by switching to German, so apparently he’ll flirt with anyone. Brooke wins for her dish, something I’d expect to see on the menu of a fine-dining Vietnamese restaurant, assuming Americans would actually be willing to pay $10 for a Vietnamese entree.

* Elimination challenge: Restaurateur Danny Meyer is in the house for the setup to Restaurant Wars. Each chef must come up with a restaurant concept and make one dish that encapsulates it. There will be two winners, each getting $10K, and one chef sent home, so we’ll have 4 vs 3 in the actual Restaurant Wars episode next week.

* Meyer’s advice to the chefs: “Do it from your heart because you can’t fake soul.” How is that remotely useful advice? “Do it from your heart, not your spleen.” And is faking soul at all like faking the funk?

* Micah’s concept: raw foods. This is an obviously terrible idea – you’re going to build an entire menu around food that isn’t cooked on a competition that’s about cooking? Raw food quality is entirely about ingredients; if the fish isn’t incredibly fresh, you’re toast. He hits the market and finds no meat he can serve raw, which should have immediately led to a change in concept, but he’s determined to fail.

* Kristen’s comment “I need to show them I deserve to be here” was some serious unintentional comedy. I don’t think anyone’s questioning whether she’s still here on merit.

* Four of the eliminated chefs return to work as sous-chefs for the remaining eight, and Stefan picks Carla because “she is super fast and her butt is always cute.” Unless he’s going to slow-braise her butt with some red wine and figs, I don’t really see how that helps him.

* He then tells Tom that in “every Quickfire I’ve been sloppy seconds.” The man is incapable of discussing anything without resorting to at least one reference to sex. He then spills liquid all over a guest with yet another blender explosion.

* Brooke’s concept is “Unkosher” – traditional Jewish items expanded without the limitations of kosher requirements. Tom says “it’s like my mother-in-law’s Seder every year.”

* Josie says her croquettes aren’t done and that she wants to shoot herself in the head, although I think most of us would settle for her duct-taping herself on the mouth.

* Why is Gail judging this competition instead of Wolfgang? Gail doesn’t bother me like she does some viewers – although horizontal stripes are really not her friend – but is there any question whether Wolfgang would provide better insight into the food?

* To the dishes: Josh serves a seared ribeye on cauliflower purée with a red wine mushroom sauce and barley. Aside from the steak being slightly underseasoned, this goes over well with praise for its “earthy” flavors. It doesn’t seem particularly innovative to me, though. Is there anything here you couldn’t whip up at home?

* Lizzie does a mustard green canaderli (a central European dumpling also known as knödel, often made from leftover side starches) with fonduta and crispy speck. She’s going for northeastern Italian, a regional cuisine that draws heavily from Austrian, Hungarian, and Slovenian traditions because the area has changed hands so many times over the last few centuries. The flavor is great but the judges all agree it’s too heavy.

* Hat Guy Thierry is in the house as a guest.

* Sheldon serves a Filipino dish, sour tamarind soup with pork belly, shrimp, and snapper. This gets raves, I think because it’s got huge, bold flavors, and because (per Padma) he took a dish that’s usually ugly and made it elegant without losing its authenticity. This is one of those dishes I think future competitors should sit up and notice – there are successful formulas for winning challenges on this show, and they don’t change much over the years. But hey, go ahead and make yet another sloppy risotto. That’ll work too.

* Stefan does a “German-Thai” fusion thing with a lobster bisque with shrimp dumplings along with a dessert lollipop of Bavarian cream. I know this is shocking but the two don’t really play well together.

* Micah’s plate of raw fail has thick slices of four (I think) types of raw fish along with mizuna and raw vegetables, along with not enough of the vinaigrette over the top. This is a cold mess. There’s no cooking involved, no risk, and, per Danny Meyer, it offers no improvement over our palates’ raw-fish standard of good sushi.

* Kristen does an onsen egg (poached in the shell so the yolk just barely sets) with a Camembert mustard sauce and buttered radishes. Everyone says she nailed the eggs. She’s the only chef here who went really upscale, which is also something that tends to succeed here. She’s a lot like Michael Voltaggio without the tattoos and antisocial behavior.

* Josie is busy talking and not serving, again, which is really painful to watch. She serves a puerco asado with a black bean sauce and chorizo croquette. Judges are visibly annoyed at her act, and even more so when the pork proves to be flavorless and dry.

* Brooke does a matzo ball soup with duck confit and black rye bread. The duck broth is good but Gail says the matzo ball is “offensive to my people,” after which Tom suggests that she should have used the rye bread in the matzo. As someone who grew up outside of New York and loves rye bread in almost any application (I suppose bread pudding would be an exception, although I’m open-minded), I’d definitely eat this dish if she made that switch.

* Judges’ table: Kristen, Sheldon, and Josh are the top three, at which point it seems obvious that Kristen and Sheldon will win because they were way more creative than Josh, who’s here for execution. Sheldon gets the win on his 30th birthday, while Kristen is now up to $45K in winnings.

* The challenge now is to move right into Restaurant Wars, with less than 48 hours until judging. Their spaces are completely empty and they must pick their staffs now in stew room before they learn who’s been eliminated.

* Kristen takes Brooke, Lizzie, and Josie, in that order, while Sheldon takes Josh, Stefan, and Micah – that is, boys versus girls. I thought Kristen made one mistake here, taking Josie over Micah, because Josie seemed at least as likely to go home, if not more so, and because if Josie doesn’t get eliminated, then you have to work with her, which is probably worse than working with no one at all.

* The bottom three are, unsurprisingly, Micah, Josie, Lizzie. Micah tries to shift blame to the store for lacking the kind of meat he needed, which is a great way to dig your own hole a little deeper. Lizzie’s dumpling should have been cooked more, and was pretty heavy without any relief in it. Josie’s pork was bland, greasy, overcooked. Tom refers to the “Josie show” and I think he’d like to see it put on hiatus.

* Micah is eliminated, which I understand, since he had such a terrible concept, but I would have sent Josie home – her concept was no better, and she didn’t execute it either. I’m disappointed in Micah, though, because I thought he showed more upside in his concepts, but he ends up leaving primarily because his concept this week was so poor. This leaves Sheldon’s team one chef short for Restaurant Wars, which means they’ll probably have just two guys in the kitchen and one out front – although I assume they’re responsible for one fewer dish as a result.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Micah and CJ have to do a raw meat preparation. Micah’s dish looked really unappealing with a large triangular blob of duck breast tartare, placed on top of a bison carpaccio in part to hide the fact that he didn’t slice the latter item cleanly. CJ’s looked more appealing and he did something novel by pickling the duck skin and subcutaneous fat, which made it fairly obvious he’d win his sixth challenge in a row.

* Top three: I’ve still got Kristen, a big gap, and then Brooke, with a pretty big gap to everyone else at this point. Brooke’s concepts aren’t as out there as Kristen’s, but they’re fairly evenly matched on execution. Sheldon would be my pick for the third spot over Stefan, only because Sheldon’s shown more upside (albeit more downside too). Josie is the clear bottom once again and yet survives for another week, with Josh and Lizzie in spots 5 and 6.

Sorry my recap is a little late, but I had trouble finding a flat keyboard on which to type this.

* Stefan is moisturizing and cursing about his wrinkles. This isn’t creepy, I think. I may have also lost my appetite.

* Sheldon sharpens his knives every day, saying, “it’s what separates a good chef from a great chef in my opinion.” He may have been subtly threatening to slit the throats of his competitors, which is an alternative path to victory assuming you use the blood for black pudding.

* Quickfire: Testing knife skills, coincidentally. “Master bladesman” (that is, artisan knife-maker) Bob Kramer is the judge. His carbon-steel blades sell for $500 per inch, so John Holmes would have been worth a fortune.

* The challenge is a relay race involving three teams of three chefs each: turn dull knives razor sharp, then tourne 50 potatoes, then work against your ex-teammates to French racks of two rabbits, with immunity and a Bob Kramer blade at stake.

* Stefan says “I always wanted a $4000 knife. Who doesn’t?” I’m not sure I’d turn down a $4000 anything you offered me, even if I only intended to sell it on eBay the moment you turned around.

* If you cut yourself, you’re DQ’d. I’m going to laugh at this while pretending I didn’t put a 1/4” gash in my index finger two weeks ago while slicing ribbons of kale.

* As much as I love the show and recognize the importance of good knife skills and handling, watching chefs sharpen knives is not good television.

* Kristen gets mad that her teammate John called “check” before she was ready, but then HIS knife was the one to fail the test – making a clean slice through a sheet of paper. That’s about the closest we’ve come to seeing Kristen get mad or even irked about anything.

* Using a chef’s knife strikes me as dangerous, since it’s not a knife designed for precise cuts. There is such a thing as a tourne knife, also known as a bird’s beak knife, but a paring knife would also do the job. No one severs a finger here, although Josie does nick herself and is disqualified, which leads to her team losing by just two potatoes to another team that still has all three chefs.

* Am I the only one weirded out by a race involving knives? I’m fine with grading knife skills, but encouraging chefs to work faster with extremely sharp objects seems a little dicey, pun intended.

* The final challenge is to French two rabbits, which isn’t as deviant as it sounds and can even produce some serious flayrah. Frenching means trimming the meat and fat off the ends of rib bones or chops, typically with racks of pork or lamb, so that the bones are exposed like handles. The meat can then be cooked as a whole rack or broken down into ‘lollipop’ chops. If you’ve seen meat with little paper hats on the ends of the bones, you’ve seen a Frenched rack. Doing this on tiny rabbits with giant knives is like asking the infield coach to hit grounders to the shortstop by using a cricket bat. (I’ve never done this, but I’d reach for a boning knife for the job.) Josh ends up making a hash of his rabbit racks. Micah says Frenching the racks is a “very Zen moment” for him, and he wins pretty handily.

* Elimination challenge: Each chef is assigned a memorable moment from the previous seasons and has to cook a dish based on that moment while making it healthier than the original dish was. The winning dish will inspire future product placements and earn the winner a cool $15K. The guests at the dinner will be Top Chef “Superfans” who live in their mothers’ basements and dissect Top Chef using spreadsheets.

* The first moment they show has to be the most famous – Fabio’s comment that ‘it’s Top Chef, it’s not Top Scallops.’ We also Carla’s chicken pot pie screaming moment on Jimmy Fallon, which might have been the main reason she ended up on that daytime food/talk show she’s on.

* Another, er, classic moment: “I’m not your bitch, bitch.” Two offensive connotations in one five-word sentence!

* The chefs are then shown eating the product placement entrees from the microwave, which I’m sure thrilled them to no end. They also discuss the pea puree moment.

* John claims Anthony Bourdain based a character in the absolutely essential book Kitchen Confidential, Jimmy Sears, on him. It sounds like it’s true, but given John’s reputation and his showing these last two episodes, would it surprise anyone if Bourdain came out and said John was full of shit?

* Micah has Beverly and Heather’s duck breast from season 9, a moment memorable primarily for Heather throwing Beverly totally under the bus in front of judges, reducing Beverly to tears.

* Lizzie’s scallops don’t smell fresh, which is seriously bad news. What I missed was whether she smelled them when she bought them – a good fishmonger will allow you to sniff the fish you’re buying, since that’s an immediate clue if it’s not fresh. (Fresh fish or shellfish should smell of the sea, not “fishy,” which is actually the odor of fish that has already started to degrade.)

* We’ve got a murderer’s row of judges, including Wolfgang Puck, Wiley Dufresne, Jonathan Waxman, and Chris Cosentino. Wiley needs a haircut in the worst freaking way. Long hair on men is fine – not on me, since I think I’d look absolutely absurd like that – but straight, shoulder-length hair while it’s thinning on the top is like a deliberate attempt to look bad.

* John says risotto isn’t hard to cook, but has a bad track record on Top Chef, so he’s making it anyway. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.” It also shows a delusional degree of self-confidence. No one else has been able to do this right, but I can.

* Service: Josie (whose moment came from S1) serves roast chicken with parsnip puree and steamed root vegetables. Stefan (S2) has a roasted red pepper soup with bacon and grilled cheese, which is about as healthful as a cup of trans fats. John (S3) does an umami risotto with dark meat chicken, salmon roe, burdock root, and a carrot puree emulsion to simulate the color of sea urchin. Josie’s chicken skin isn’t crispy, and the dish isn’t exciting. Stefan’s grilled cheese is greasy but tasty. John’s risotto is not cooked consistently, with some grains overcooked, some undercooked. Of this group, I expected both Josie and John to end up on the bottom, more so Josie because her dish wasn’t that good and it was boring as heck.

* Sheldon (S4) serves beef carpaccio with poi aioli, mizuna (Japanese mustard green) and mushroom salad, and a silken tofu foam. Lizzie (S5) has seared scallops with a roasted fennel and orange salad. Josh (S6) does a soy-glazed pork tenderloin, cashew puree, heirloom peaches, and thai basil. Josh cooked the pork really well, grasped the “healthier” portion of the challenge, and his smoked cashews and peaches get praise from Wiley. Sheldon’s beef is not eye appealing, and his tofu had no flavor. Lizzie’s scallop quality is “dubious,” per Wolfgang Puck, and there’s no discussion of anything else. My immediate reaction was that she was toast. You can’t serve ‘off’ seafood and survive. In a restaurant, you’d send that stuff to the compost bin.

* Brooke (S7) serves hot-smoked salmon with forbidden black rice, pea and parsnip puree. Kristen (S8, Carla’s chicken pot pie) does a poached chicken breast with carrot puree and a garlic/tofu/soy milk emulsion, emphasizing that it’s dairy- and gluten-free. Micah (S9) does duck breast with miso polenta, sriracha jelly, and pickled cherries. Micah’s duck is cooked well; Waxman hates miso with polenta, but Tom likes the cherries. Kristen’s dish is light with a lot of flavor and earns praise for her rethinking (almost a deconstruction) of pot pie, although Chris’ dish doesn’t have enough sauce. Brooke’s was nicely cooked throughout with a good smoky flavor and that’s about all anyone says about it.

* The judges bring out five of the nine chefs. Josh, Brooke, and Kristen are on top, with John and Lizzie on bottom. Brooke’s salmon was perfectly cooked and lightly smoked. Kristen’s was homey without homey presentation. Josh finally nailed a pork dish and the judges say his flavors were really well done. Unanimous winner – the chef who took Top Chef history into account and elevated the moment to a healthy dish – is girl-on-fire Kristen, who has won three of the seven elimination challenges where the judges named at least one winner, plus one Quickfire. This seemed to be a clear win for concept, as all three chefs executed but Kristen was the one who was by far the most creative in her reimagining of the original dish and who did the most to reduce its fat and caloric content.

* John’s risotto was improperly cooked, after which he makes an excuse about the pots in the kitchen not being “flat” enough while saying it’s not an excuse or a copout. It absolutely is an excuse, and a copout, and a failure to take responsibility: If he’d tasted the risotto as he went, he would have known it wasn’t cooking evenly and he would have adapted. Josh then throws him under the bus, which would bother me if John hadn’t thrown Stefan under the bus in an earlier episode for using frozen fish. John’s money quote here (it gets better) was “Equipment was an issue.” Even weasels cringed at that wording.

* Lizzie admits “the scallops must have been old,” at which Tom appears ready to pounce on her only to have Wolfgang interrupt. I think in most episodes, this would have been Lizzie’s death warrant, but this week the bottom two chefs will cook against each other in a challenge based on this season’s memorable moment: the spicy dill pickles where CJ and Tyler made a burger that got them both eliminated. Josh is mocking John in the back room, asking if he can find a pan flat enough to cook a burger in?

* John makes a harissa lamb burger, which sounds to me like we’re moving in the other direction, making something unhealthy because it’ll taste better and win the challenge. Lizzie, relieved that she gets to cook again, gets ground chicken, saying it’s tricky to make it juicy.

* John used all of Lizzie’s fresh dill after she said he could use some, but then says he’s a good guy because he shared the pickles. Lizzie wants to “beat his bum,” which also isn’t as deviant as it sounds.

* John serves a lamb burger with fried egg and a spicy pickle, tomato, and pomegranate salad. Aioli of dill and cream cheese. Wolfgang’s burger isn’t moist enough, and Chris questions how adding an egg makes sense on a dish intended to be healthier. Lizzie makes a chicken burger with a goat cheese ricotta cream and a dill pickle roasted red pepper salad. The white meat is moist and flavorful, and the only criticism is Chris saying he “just wanted a whiff of salt.” Chris, Wolfgang, and Tom all pick Lizzie to stay, so John goes. He’s “not bitter, but this is bullshit.”

* John, in the confessional, is still talking about having all the pickles. All your pickles are belong to John. You have no chance to survive, make your time. Had he hoarded the pickles, isn’t it more likely that the chefs would have axed him on principle?

* LCK: This wasn’t much of a fight, with the chefs allowed to do whatever they want but forced to cook in cheap vessels found at nearby yard sales. John rushes for pans, while CJ focuses on ingredients. John goes heavy in his dish, CJ went lighter, and CJ was the pretty clear winner, only issue was using too much chili oil but his flavor profile was more unusual. John’s choice of lobster and foie gras seemed a little cliché, like the lamb burger with a fried egg – he was pandering a little to the judges. John’s comments during and after LCK are a 180 from his comments during the main show. When adversity strikes, his personality flaws really show through. He hates taking responsibility for mistakes, and is quick to blame others, or even inanimate objects, when he’s ultimately at fault. You can win Top Chef with that attitude as long as you never screw up, but John ran out of steam three episodes ago and never bounced back.

* Top three: Kristen remains the clear leader, with Brooke in a somewhat distant second. I had John making it to the finals, but he’s out, so I’ll restore Micah to the top three in his stead. Josie remains the bottom chef, and I think the format saved her from another bottom-three performance this week.

So the drama is building, leaving viewers to decide which chef is less of an obnoxious ass between Stefan (who can actually cook a little) and Josie (who spends more time making up cutesy names for her dishes than tasting the food). Meanwhile, Kristen, who is the ’27 Yankees in this group, allows herself to sound slightly confident in the confessional. After Humble Paul in season 9 Bravo must be dying for a contender with some arrogance to him/her to show up at some point.

(Speaking of season 9, it’s $9.99 for the full season in SD on amazon Instant Video right now, which is way below what past seasons cost the last time I checked.)

* Morning quickfire: Chefs must drive to Bow, Washington – did you know they were driving Toyotas? I’m surprised half the chefs didn’t die in some horrible accident involving their Camrys en route – and harvest fresh oysters for the challenge. The chefs are actually very fired up, putting on waders, eating oysters as they harvest them. I grew up on Long Island (sorry, I’ve mentioned this before) during a time when raw oysters were contaminated by God-knows-what and we were told every day in the news that it would kill us if we so much as looked at a local oyster, so I still shudder a little as I see this. I know they’re a chef’s favorite, but a little voice in my brain tells me they’re poison.

* Josie sinks into the mud, calling attention to herself yet again. Micah, who helps rescue her, reveals that his father was a pastor and he grew up kosher, so he didn’t eat shellfish until he was an adult. I didn’t realize that there were Christian sects that obeyed kosher rules.

* John grew up on the east end of Long Island. I knew I liked that guy for some reason, but he clearly grew up when local shellfish was safe to eat.

* Bart went to cooking school at 12. At 12 I was in 8th grade and worrying about high school and playing cheap video games on a Commodore 64. I wasn’t planning my future career.

* The actual challenge: Prepare oysters on the half shell for Emeril, without being distracted by Padma looking gorgeous. Half the chefs must do a hot preparation, the other half must do a cold prep. $5000 prize. 25 minutes to cook.

* The chefs have to grab one of the red (hot) or blue (cold) aprons to pick which kind of dish they’re preparing, which is always weird – are we testing cooking skills here, or reflexes? What if at some point they had a chef with a disability? Am I overthinking this as usual? Anyway, the red aprons go first, which surprised me because chefs always seem to want to do raw oyster preparations on Top Chef and not cooking the oysters would save some time.

* Micah says cooking for Emeril is like Moses meeting God. I’m going to go “argument by false analogy” on that one, since Emeril, while obviously talented, falls a bit short of Omnipotent Deity for me.

* Stefan smoking oysters in a Ziploc bag might be the most interesting thing anyone did, followed by Lizzie using red currants, which made me imagine oysters with grape jelly.

* Josie says she’s making “Spanish roc-a-fella.” Enough with the fucking names already. And then her sauce broke in the pan, which is God’s – or Emeril’s – revenge for the fact that she wasted brain waves on coming up with a bullshit name for her dish. As it turns out, her chorizo-cilantro cream sauce might have been delicious if it hadn’t broken and hadn’t blown the oyster off the plate.

* Bottom: Bart, whose champagne-butter reduction was too rich, losing the champagne and masking the oyster. Josie, for obvious reason. John, whose oysters poached in garlic butter with Swiss chard and a Parmiggiano-garlic foam had “no pop.” Also worth mentioning that Josh and Brooke both ended up with a little shell in their oysters.

* Top: Lizzie, who took a chance with the currants and succeeded, even to Padma’s surprise. Micah, also risky piling spices on the oyster, but they “popped” according to Emeril. Brooke, whose salsa verde had all kinds of beautiful flavors that didn’t take away from the oyster. Winner: Micah finally comes through for me, slightly justifying my optimism about him earlier in the season.

* Elimination challenge: Cooking for “one of the hottest sports teams in Seattle” – the Sonics! I mean, a roller derby team. There’s really such a thing as roller derby? And people go to the matches? That’s the second-weirdest sports thing I’ve heard this week.

* Chefs divide into teams of two to cook the food for the league’s wrap party, which I assume is held in the basement of a Chuck-E-Cheese. Stefan grabs Kristen, by what body part I’m not sure. The dishes must be inspired by the unbelievably lame nicknames of the five rollergirls in the room, like “Tempura Tantrum.” I’m sure someone was up all night coming up with that. They don’t want “fussy food” but not “concession food” either, which is a surprisingly constructive remark.

* Josie was a pro football player. Whatever you think of women’s football (non-lingerie division), it’s better than roller derby.

* So the chefs go to a match and the other nine get mad at Josie for being loud and obnoxious in the one public place where it is acceptable and even encouraged to be loud and obnoxious. Sorry, guys, I’m with Josie for once. Get off your asses and scream a little.

* After the game, the guys are talking shit about Josie at the apartment while she’s lying on the couch in the next room. An “I can hear you” would have sufficed but she goes apeshit, including the line, “This tree right here, you don’t want to bark up,” which was either Confucius or Sun-Tzu, I always mix those two guys up. Then she says Micah is “hiding in a closet,” so apparently she’s convinced he’s gay (and was she saying that she is too?). Josh’s deadpan “what just happened?” might be the line of the year so far.

* Lizzie says “I still have scars on my knees” from roller skating when she was younger. With all the dogs in the room, no one comments on this? This song came to mind, certainly.

* Josie, teamed with Bart, wants to go aggressive with the spice. Bart definitely has a different concept of “bold” and doesn’t want to overspice. This is like a matter/anti-matter thing where the entire Top Chef kitchen collapses into a singularity at the end of the show.

* Sheldon/Josh are doing tempura-fried dessert; Sheldon says the batter should be like a pancake batter, “lumpy as shit.” Good to know.

* Kristen points out that when Stefan was 14 in 1986, she was 3. Doesn’t seem to mind him hitting on her every episode, though.

* Bart/Josie do a makeshift grill of cooling rack over a foil roasting pan with coals in it. Nice strong direct heat. I might try that by resting the pan on fire bricks in the grill, which would get the food closer to the heat than I could otherwise get.

* Hugh gives Padma the roller-derby nickname “Padma Smacks-me.” I have no real comment for this.

* The dishes are judged by Padma, Tom, Hugh, Emeril, and the girl your dish was named after, which is about as strong and tough a group of judges as we’ve had.

* Tasting time, starting with Brooke/John: Thai beef with lobster jasmine rice and Thai cole slaw. Hugh likes the building flavors and the kick of acid in the slaw.

* Josie/Bart: Teriyaki steak, forbidden rice with beet blood, and a green papaya salad. Hugh thinks it’s a little “unique crappy.” Tom questions skewering the meat since it can’t be properly seared. The rice is overcooked and looks like a liquified brick. Padma asks why they buried black rice in red liquid. This seems like a fail all around.

* Micah/Lizzie: Crab-stuffed whole jalapeno pepper (fried) with avocado crema and onion and pepper relish. The judges are surprised that they love it. Crispy, great flavors. The rollergirl likes that they rethought a “party food favorite,” which was a pretty insightful comment too.

* Stefan/Kristen: “Chicken inside-out” for their rollergirl’s nickname, Eddie Shredder. Corn puree under chicken liver with a port wine reduction under phyllo dough under a sunny-side up egg. Tom says it’s a dish of missed opportunities. Emeril’s egg was slightly overdone but the corn puree and liver were perfect. This seems a little unadventurous to me.

* Josh/Sheldon: Tempura yuzu curd with shiso, fresno chili, sweet potato, and vanilla sauces (“tantrums”) smeared on the place for the diner to run the tempura through. The judges agree that it was a great idea, the sauces were great, but the tempura wasn’t fried enough. Emeril thinks the small fryer couldn’t hold temperature, which should have occurred to Sheldon (who says he does tempura every night in his restaurant) before they started. So I ask this all the time: Where are the damn thermometers? Were they not frying with a thermometer in the oil at all times?

* Stefan is right, for once: Padma is hot. He says he bought season 9 just to watch her in snippets. She was hottest post-baby in (I think) season 7.

* Judges’ table: Top teams are John/Brooke and Micah/Lizzie, no surprise on either one. Brooke/John’s lobster was cooked perfectly, as was the meat. Micah/Lizzie’s pepper was hot and delicious but the heat didn’t overpower the crab. Brooke and John are the winners, third win (quickfire or elimination) for John, and third for Brooke as well. I think they won for the more adventurous concept, with roughly equivalent execution. Micah and Lizzie reinvented a dish, but Brooke and John invented one.

* John says in the confessional that winning was great, but “it would have been sweeter if I’d won it alone.” Really? Who says that? That’s about as gracious as a sledgehammer to the forehead.

* Bottom: No surprises here either as it’s Josh/Sheldon and Josie/Bart. Josh/Sheldon had a good concept but blew the main element, underfrying the tempura. Bart/Josie had problems throughout the dish, and it’s clear one of them will go home. Tom kills them for underseasoning the rice, saying, “If something is properly seasoned, and something is bland, you put it together, you end up with bland.” Hugh calls the rice portion of the plate “beet espuma syrup on top of boring porridge.” Put that on your menu and smoke it.

* Josh does the second-dumbest thing you can do at judges’ table – the dumbest is refusing to accept responsibility for your dish – by asking why a competing dish was on the top. Tom gives a great explanation of the stuffed jalapeno being not concession food conceptually, after which Padma gives a perfectly concise follow-up on their execution.

* Josie says in confessional that she doesn’t “want to go home for someone else’s mistakes,” ignoring how the judges didn’t like anything she cooked in the dish either.

* Bart goes home. It should have been Josie, although I didn’t see Bart potentially winning the whole thing either – he’s a charming guy and I’m sure he makes a great waffle, but his dishes never stood out in the least. Bart says that “Josie talks to the judges and puts on the Josie Show,” except that I’d rather watch Heil Honey, I’m Home! than The Josie Show and somehow The Josie Show never gets cancelled.

* LCK: So another rollergirl comes through Last Chance Kitchen and CJ blatantly watches her ass as she goes by, saying the skater’s buttocks “were amazing, like two Parma hams.” You can think this stuff – I’ve thought worse, certainly – but good grief, man, the red light means the camera is on.

* Anyway, the challenge is to take chicken breast, which is bland and boring, and make it delicious. I thought leaving the skin on the meat was a gift, because rendered and crisped it’s a poor man’s duck skin (crispy with hints of sweetness from caramelized carbohydrates), but CJ removes the skin and never uses it. Bart goes bold, seasoning heavily, using paprika and either cumin or turmeric, then crushing speculoos (the Dutch cinnamon cookie sold here under the Biscoff brand) and sprinkling the dust on the top. CJ wins, even though his dish was less complex, less adventurous, and far less attractive on the plate. Tom dings Bart for going too bold, saying the flavors would have been great for venison, but the challenge was to go bold. I know flavor is king here, but it seems like Bart’s concept better met the challenge, and again, it looked way better on the plate.

* Top three: Kristen still blowing away the field, followed by John and Brooke, same as last week. I’d like to see another good week from Micah before moving him back into consideration ahead of Lizzie, who’s been very steady, occasionally on top but rarely below par. Josie is still on the bottom for me, with Josh at #8.