I did not recap episode 3, since I didn’t even watch it until five days after it aired. I’m just jumping ahead to episode 4 and should be on schedule with every episode at least until spring travel begins.

So we start with some comments from Tesar on how Katsuji “gets a hall pass for being an asshole.” And that’s why 1) he’s back on the show and 2) I’m not happy to see him on the show. What Katsuji seems to think of as gamesmanship is borderline harassment. It’s not good TV and it has nothing to do with food.

* Quickfire: The new EIC of Food & Wine, Nilou Motamed, is here as the guest judge. Each chef has a box in front of him/her, and must use everything in the box – the gag is that it’s “not quite everything you wanted for Christmas.” The boxes contain cooking tools as well as ingredients: pressure cooker, tequila, pomegranate, wasabi, melon baller, chocolate pretzels, squab, and so on. We’re ripping off Chopped here, right?

* Jim says melon ballers are “from a pantry in the 1950s” but I use mine constantly to take out the seeds of apples. Cut the apple (or pear) in half, then use the baller to carve out the half-sphere with the seeds and tougher flesh from each half of the fruit. I don’t use them for melons, though.

* Shirley’s using white chocolate in place of butter. I’m not sure how that’ll work – white chocolate is fat plus a lot of sugar, while butter is fat, milk solids, and water.

* Emily has never used a pressure cooker, which I find hard to fathom. Tesar points out that they use them on this show all the time, so basically don’t come on this show without learning. Also, how do you not own a pressure cooker when you’re a chef? You don’t cook at home, ever? This isn’t some sort of novelty device. I just used mine two nights ago. They’re fantastic.

* Jim’s stand mixer bowl is smoking … it would have been nice to know why. I’m just sayin’.

* Shirley burns her squab in a tequila fire – although that can’t be what actually happened. Tequila is usually 80 proof, and that’ll burn if vaporized (like, say, heating it in a hot pan), and of course if it’s bringing any sort of lipids with it those will burn too. But 80-proof tequila shouldn’t just burn on its own, and even if it did the fire would be cool enough to slip your hand through it (not that I recommend doing so). I once created about a three-foot high flame by adding rum to a pan that was much hotter than I realized, and it didn’t ignite anything else – not even the wood cabinets the flame touched – or leave any scorch marks anywhere. So I guess I’m really wondering what was in that fire to char the exterior of the bird.

* We only see a few of the dishes here, I guess for time’s sake, not that we’d want to see more food on a show about food. Katsuji made braised squab in tequila and soy with pretzels, pomegranate, and wasabi in his salsa … Tesar made a pan-seared squab with mole and an avocado and pomegranate salad; he calls avocado “light and refreshing” which it’s not, with about 75% of the caloric content of an avocado coming from fat … Brooke made a pan-roasted squab with a clove, tequila, and pomegranate stock, and some melon-balled squash … Emily made a pan-roasted squab with a soubise, and Padma delivers the deadly compliment, “well, the squab is cooked nicely” … BJ made a pretzel-encrusted squab with wasabi cauliflower puree, tequila, and pomegranate; Nilou asks if that was the texture he wanted from the deep-fried squab, so we know what that means .. Jim made a roasted squab with beets, fennel broth, and a smoked pretzel and tequila whipped cream (that’s what was in the stand mixer, I suppose) … Casey made a smoked chili, tequila, and squab soup, then compressed pineapple with several of the other ingredients from the box … Shirley made a roasted squab with wasabi rapini and flambe tequila. She didn’t use the melon baller because she didn’t have hers – Sheldon appears to have taken it at some point. Then Padma makes a bizarre comment about hoping it’s not a sudden death quickfire. If Sheldon took her melon baller, shouldn’t he be eliminated (hypothetically) rather than Shirley? And the fuck is Padma talking about here anyway?

* Bottom three: Shirley, really because she charred her squab “to within an inch of its life” … Emily’s soubise was gummy, and now they’re saying she was not “kind to that protein” … BJ’s squab was very tough. Top three: Brooke, Casey, and Tesar. The winner is Casey, again, so she gets immunity.

* Anyone else see a little bit of Kristen Bell in Casey?

* The guest judge this week is Mike Lata of Fig, a very highly-rated restaurant in Charleston that made Eater’s list of the 38 most essential restaurants in the country for 2016. Also, he used to be Emily’s bossn and fired her once.

* The elimination challenge is based on the Italian feast of the seven fishes. I never had this growing up, even though I’m ¾ Italian, and I’ve never had it as an adult because my wife is allergic to shellfish. The twist on this episode is that the chefs are going to use “trash fish,” incidental catches that are often discarded because “consumers aren’t familiar with them,” which makes them good for chefs interested in sustainability. Jim seems comfortable with the concept, though, having won the Great Ameircan Seafood Cookoff in 2011.

* Casey gets first pick of the fish and chooses amberjack, which I’ve never thought of as a trash fish; if you’ve had the kind of sushi or sashimi called “kampachi” or “kanpachi,” you’ve had amberjack. The remaining chefs are combined randonly into teams of two. Tesar gets Katsuji, the only person Katsuji didn’t want to work with, although later they’re bickering like buddies in the confessional. Shirley’s paired with Sheldon, but they’re getting along fine in Whole Foods. BJ’s paired with Silvia, Silva with Neck-Tat, and Jim with Amanda.

* The other fish available are tunny, blackbelly rosefish, gray tilefish, triggerfish (which Lata was the first chef in Charleston to serve), mullet, and barrelfish.

* Tesar wants to use canned tomatoes; Katsuji wants to use fresh heirloom tomatoes. Each is acting like the other is insane. But doesn’t this depends on the time of year? If tomatoes are in season, you’ll never beat fresh. If they’re not, then they’re not going to have much taste, if any.

* Shirley wants to use mullet shank, the tail end of the fish, which has fewer bones (?).

* Emily is deferring to Brooke on everything, so Brooke ends up the de facto head chef on their team with Emily playing the role of a line cook. That could go either way – Brooke’s probably the best competitor on the show this year, one of the best they’ve ever had, and Emily appears increasingly to be a train wreck as a contestant.

* Silvia is making pane carasau, a traditional yeast-raised flatbread, similar to pane guttiau (which you might have seen at Trader Joes). Both are Sardinian, with the former using yeast and the latter not. To Americans, they’re more like crackers – I’d compare pane guttiau to what matzoh would be like if you made it with something like puff pastry dough, so it shatters rather than breaks.

* Tesar and Katsuji are now each making a sauce with the tomatoes, and then each ends up plating some of the dishes with his own sauce. This should have been a disaster.

* Sheldon & Shirley made a Sichuan peppercorn (a Chinese spice that isn’t a true pepper) braised mullet with tofu, celery, and buttered radish. Tom seems to have gotten a small bone, but says he loves the dish, especially the use of the Sichuan pepper. Blais likes the combination of tofu and fish together because their textures are similar. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had mullet, although it seems like the most familiar name among the trash fish after amberjack (I’d never heard of triggerfish or barrelfish before this show).

* Hugh is back! Judges’ table is always better with his dark Canadian humour.

* Silva and Neck-tat had Tunny. I’ve heard the term before, because it can refer to a couple of fish, but I’m assuming this one is little tunny, a fish in the tuna tribe (Thunnini) but in a separate genus from the fish we eat as tuna. That Wikipedia article mentions anecdotal reports of ciguatera poisoning from eating tunny, so I’ll pass on this one, thanks.

* Lata says he’d go calabrian with tunny, making a spicy preparation because the fish itself has such a pronounced fish flavor. The team made a ras el hanout-dusted tunny, seared so it’s nearly raw in the center, with melted leeks, parsnip puree, wild mushroom ragout, and xo jus. Graham Elliott says is “looks like a $30 tuna steak dish.” Hugh deadpans that “we were all guessing that you’d fail miserably.” One thing no judge mentioned was the taste of the center of the fish. If tunny is oily and has a strong fish flavor, and the chefs didn’t address that throughout the fish, what happened when the judges got to the middle of those “steaks?”

* Brooke and Emily made roasted blackbelly rosefish with fiddleheads, marble potatoes, leeks, corn, coconut, and tamarind sauce. Lata says it’s a tough fish to work with and needed more than just the sear? All the judges seem to agree that the dish was totally confused, with a bunch of different ideas all on one plate. Brooke won’t throw Emily under the bus, however, even though Emily contributed nothing to the concept of the plate. Tom says “leek sauce all day, all this other stuff get rid of it,” which I suppose would be great if this were a leek challenge.

* BJ and Silvia made a barrel fish brodo with leeks, kale, cauliflower, and pane carasau. They poached fish, but as it dried outside of the poaching liquid, it seized up and became tough; Tom suggests they could have flaed it back into the broth, although if the broth was still hot enough to be safe, wouldn’t it have continued to cook? The broth was apparently excellent, but there wasn’t enough of it, and Silvia’s pane carasau is probably the most-praised aspect of the dish.

* Tesar and Katsuji made trigger fish with chili sauce, fennel puree, bottarga, and breadcrumbs. Tom says the sauce is terrific and the fish was cooked beautifully. Hugh says they bridged a monumental gap to put aside their egos, which also says to me that it’s no accident that these two chefs were asked to return this season.

* Jim and Amanda made a gray tilefish with tomato and fennel broth, and some apparently very undercooked beans. Tom asks, “Who cooked the beans?” and Amanda responds, “I did. Why?” She looks like she just ran a marathon.

* Casey’s amberjack dish is a catastrophe, but we never really saw anything about why? She barely cooked it at all, and her rice porridge is gummy and tasteless. So what was she doing during her allotted time in the kitchen? She thinks she’d be sent home if she didn’t have immunity, so what the hell happened?

* Tom: “There’s a reason why these fish don’t usually end up on a table – they’re very difficult to work with.” For some of these fish, that’s almost certainly true – tunny being oily and fishy is going to be a deterrent no matter what chefs or fishermen do, but gray tilefish is supposed to be lean and mild-tasting, and amberjack is lean and firm like mahi-mahi or swordfish. Some of the problem is just education: consumers only look for a few common types of fish, like salmon, because they’re familiar with those and know how to prepare them.

* The top three are Sheldon and Shirley, Jamie (Neck-Tat) and Silva, and John and Katsuji. Katsuji’s sauce was amazing. S&S’s dish ate like something they’d cooked before. The mullet had a lot of bones, but they made the best of it. Every component of Jamie and Silva’s dish was done very well and it showcased the fish. John and Katsuji win, and Katsuji wins the individual honor for the sauce. He even tears up, I don’t think he expected that. I’m sure he’ll handle the victory in a quiet, professional manner.

* Padma says Casey “really needed” that immunity. The other three teams are on the bottom, by default. Jim and Amanda’s dish died for a few reasons, but Mike says in his kitchen one of his commandments is never serve undercooked beans. The inclusion of mussels also took the dish away from the star ingredient. Brooke and Emily’s dish just had way too much going on, and it obscured the fish. Silvia and BJ’s fish tasted like overcooked chicken. BJ made the broth, Silvia did the bread, but the fish was both.

* While the chefs go back to the stew room to wait, Katsuji starts going after Emily for failing to tell everyone more about Mike Lata’s preferences. What a dick move.

* Mike says the barrel fish (Silvia/BJ) was overcooked, while Tom says BJ overreduced the sauce. Brooke and Emily put too much on the plate, but it seems like the judges are giving them a pass because the two were “too nice to each other.” Jim and Amanda’s fish got lost in “all that stuff.” Tom says that could be the worst dish because of the beans, which Amanda cooked. At this point I assumed she was gone, given the emphasis on the beans, and also, how do you serve undercooked beans on Top Chef and survive?

* Yet BJ is eliminated. He could have gone home last week, or the prior week with the pork that he cooked poorly, a move that tanked his team because it took so much of the team’s budget. That’s three rookies out and one veteran who was just barely eliminated in four episodes. I thought Amanda had ‘earned’ the elimination, given what we heard from the judges, but it’s hard to weep for BJ with him on the bottom so many times already. But we’re now at seven veterans to five rookies, and two more of the rookies (Neck-Tat and Emily) seem perpetually close to elimination.

* I guess it’s time to rank ’em … Brooke is the clear #1 in this group, and of the rookies I think only Silvia has shown the potential to catch her. I’d go Brooke, Silvia, Shirley, Sheldon at the top. Bottom three: Emily, Amanda, and Neck-Tat.

* I’ll catch up on LCK later this week. In the meantime, have a safe and Merry Christmas.

Oh, we’re still at the slave place. Cool.

* The guest judge is Frank Lee, a low-country cuisine specialist and someone with absolutely no vibe of the celebrity chef, which is kind of refreshing. There’s a low country boil ready for the chefs to eat, so they spread it on a table and dump some on the ground because who the hell cares about wasting food.

* The elimination challenge: The chefs will be split into two teams, rookies versus veterans, and will each eat a family-style meal at a local chef with Charleston roots, and then prepare a dinner the next day using that meal as inspiration. Rookies versus veterans is a bad idea right off the bat – it confers way too much of an advantage on the vets, who also have one more person.

* The rookies eat at the house of Carrie Morey of Carrie’s Hot Little Biscuit, whom I found really condescending to the chefs from the get-go (to say nothing of those bizarre shoes she was wearing that seemed to make it hard for her to walk straight). The veterans eat at the house of BJ Dennis, a personal chef and caterer with Gullah heritage.

* I haven’t read it, but Morey has a cookbook out called Callie’s Biscuits and Southern Traditions that has great reviews on amazon, especially for the buttermilk biscuit recipe. Obligatory self-promotion: here’s my annual list of recommended cookbooks, from beginner level to home expert.

* Dennis serves a meal with a shrimp salad with mayo and mustard, collard greens with coconut milk and peanut butter (whoa), an eggplant stew, and a red rice gumbo that he says New Orleans people would hate “but this is OG gumbo.”

* Morey says biscuits were made with every meal, but her mother doubled the fat because when you’re going to eat a biscuit, eat a damn biscuit. The dough she’s using looks extremely wet compared to any biscuit dough I’ve ever made or seen. She serves pork chops breaded with parmesan, egg wash, and crackers, which I don’t get at all, not least because either she’s wasting some good, expensive cheese, or she’s using garbage. There’s also some sort of collards, hoppin’ john, squash casserole, a “permanent” slaw, and tomato pie, which is covered like a pot pie. She mentions a cobbler, which is kind of biscuits on hot fruit anyway, but I didn’t see what kind.

* Here’s a shocker: the rookie team is a hot mess. There’s no leader, no discussion of dishes, no coordination of shopping lists. Usually the trips to Whole Foods on this show are pretty boring, but it was cringeworthy watching the rookies get to the front of the store and realize they’d spent way more than their budget while buying far too much of some basics like eggs or butter. Have they never watched the show before?

* After the shopping trip, BJ suggests that they might “take one on the chin” for not doing it, which is great timing. They’re trying to pressure Jim, who has immunity, to do the biscuit as his dish, but he stands his ground. I wonder if they also thought the nerdy guy would be a pushover.

* Brooke is making biscuits for the veteran team, but there are no racks in the ovens in this kitchen. How is that possible? Did they remove them and hide them somewhere? She has to sit the pans on the oven bottom, and you can guess how well that’s going to work out.

* I adore Silvia’s accent, like when she says they are in “Char-less-ton.” It reminds me of my cousin in Genova telling me in 1999 while we were visiting them that the “Sant’Antonio Spurs” had won the NBA championship.

* The rookies are a disaster, as you might have expected. Annie is trying to make a tomato tart in two hours, but can’t find room to work or time to rest the dough sufficiently. BJ cooks his entire pork loin whole and it’s 30 degrees below where it needs to be, so he cuts it into chops and sears them off to finish. Neck-Tat burns some of his vegetables for the second week in a row. I know it’s the format and some artificial constraints, but boy have these two episodes made the rookies look like kitchen noobs.

* Rookie dishes: Padma notices right away that there are no biscuits. Carrie says, “I guess I didn’t inspire biscuits,” which I thought was a bit snotty, while Padma says “it is a glaring omission” from a southern dinner. Jim made grits with charred asparagus, ham hock, spring onions, and hen of the woods mushrooms … Silvia made hoppin john with farro, crispy skin, refried beans, carrot puree, but Tom said the farro was overseasoned and Chef Dennis just didn’t like the upscale version … Emily made pickled shrimp and dressed cucumbers, which the judges loved, but did she actually cook anything here? … BJ made cornmeal-crusted pork with peameal bacon and pickled peaches, but the pork is inconsistently cooked, with Gail’s portion way below rare … Annie’s tomato tart with smoked tomato vinaigrette is a disaster, as expected, with the crust basically raw … Sylva made a cornish hen with dark meat rice, adzuki beans, and a Haitian-style “permanent slaw” that’s more of a chow-chow … Jamie’s summer squash casserole with raw and roasted vegetable salad on top is also a mess, as the custard itself seems to have broken. Chef Morey spoke to the local paper in Charleston about why skipping biscuits was such a mistake.

* Veteran dishes: The plates look better right off the bat, like maybe these chefs have been here before. Shirley made a pork belly and oyster stew with sweet potato, potato, and pork crackling … Tesar made Carolina rice with caramelized okra, green onion, and jumbo lump crab gravy; Tom, who hates okra, sort of liked it, although I think this is hackneyed Tesar work, throwing a fancy or expensive ingredient on at the end to boost an ordinary dish … Brooke made sweet corn biscuits with salted benne butter and dulce de leche, and, shocker, they were inconsistently cooked, some overdone on bottom, some underdone in the center … Amanda made a whole fish ceviche with old Bay, cayenne, sorghum, and lemon pepper … Casey made collards with turnips, coconut, peanut, crispy chicken skin, bread crumb, trout roe … Sheldon made eggplant stew with tomatoes, fish sauce, okra, and bitter greens … Katsuji made a shrimp stew with hot (spicy) pineapple sauce … Sam made a vinegar and tea-brined fried chicken with pickled yellow beets and hot sauce, which gets good reviews all around. Dennis approves of this meal way more than Morey did of the rookies’.

* Judges’ table: Veterans had the better meal, obviously. Tom says it was the best family-style meal he’s ever had on the show, and given how it looked I’m not that surprised – it just looked professional in a way most meals on this show don’t. The top three dishes were Casey’s collards, John’s okra, and Sheldon’s eggplant. Every single person around the table loved the greens. Tom almost grudgingly admits he liked Tesar’s okra dish. Frank says his chefs tell him (did I hear that right?) that “Your job is to make the food taste like what it is,” which has that ring of folksy wisdom that ultimately falls apart when you’re thinking about, say, a basic broiler-fryer that is all about how you cook and flavor it. Anyway, the winner is Casey and the collards.

* Their least favorite dishes were BJ’s pork loin, Annie’s tomato pie, and Jamie’s squash casserole. Jamie’s looked good, but when you cut into it, the custard broke apart because the squash released too much liquid. It just seems like Neck-Tat struggles with some fundamental execution, at least in the time constraints of the show. BJ’s pork was a mess – badly cooked and cut to varying thicknesses, which I assume is because he was rushing. Annie says her dough took longer than planned, so the crust was undercooked, and I agree with Tom that the crust should be the star of any pie, sweet or savory.

* I thought Sam commiserating a little with the rookies could have been an interesting scene, but instead we got just one sentence of it.

* The judges’ decision seems to come down to poor technique by BJ and Neck-Tat versus poor decision-making by Annie, trying to do a tart in a timespan that couldn’t accommodate it. I really thought Jamie deserved to go home more based on their commentary and this idea of execution versus concept, but Annie gets the boot, which is doubly brutal given that she didn’t want to do that dish in the first place (although she could have chosen a different twist on the tomato-pie concept). That’s two rookies out in two weeks.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Gerald versus Annie, with their cooking time determined by the ingredients they choose in a two-minute “shopping” spreed in the pantry. The catch is they have use everything they pick up. Gerald gets 33 minutes, while Annie gets 25. I’m going to fast-forward here to the end, because Annie failed to use one ingredient and was automatically disqualified, giving Gerald the win. I’m going to go on a limb and say I don’t think he’s going to go very far either.

* Very early rankings: I think Brooke is clearly the best of the veterans and probably the best chef here overall. Shirley’s my sleeper pick among the vets. Among the rookies, I think Silvia’s going to go very far given her pasta-making skills, and Jim is two for two so far, but none of the others has done anything to separate him/herself from the pack, and a couple have looked overmatched. Those would be my top four right now, with Brooke the current favorite – unsurprising since she nearly won her original season.

We’re in Charleston! Great food city, beautiful downtown. I wish I had more work reasons to go there and catch a Riverdogs game (they have great food there). I’m glad Top Chef chose Charleston now before climate change pushes the city underwater.

One bit of self-promotion first – I posted my annual list of cookbook recommendations on Monday, and it includes the work of a few Top Chef alumni, including two past winners.

* Half of the sixteen chef-testants are returnees. We get Brooke, who lost to Kristen Kish in the strange live-elimination format. John Tesar is back. There’s Sheldon, who got to open two restaurants post-TC. Casey, who’s been on the show at least twice before, is back for more. Were they having trouble finding enough new chefs to compete?

* Katsuji’s back, and asks “Am I getting subtitles on Top Chef this year or not?” I don’t think he needs subtitles so much as he needs a cap on his ingredient count.

* The chefs are split into two groups of eight, so first the new chefs compete. We meet a few of them, including Jamie, who is immediately Neck-Tat Guy; and Jim, the Executive Chef of the state of Alabama, a big Star Trek and Buffy fan whose voice is even higher than mine.

* First (rookie) quickfire: Testing everything from knife skills, time management, presentation. The chefs get one hour to creating as many dishes as you want featuring … a chicken. The loser of group one will face the loser of group two and the loser of that gets eliminated.

* Alabama wants to make three dishes, including something with the skin and the innards, because when he was a kid he would often share a box of fried chicken livers with his dad.

* Gerald is smoking a chicken breast and talking about a soup that might include a 63-degree egg. I do not want a 63-degree egg any more than I want a 40-degree day.

* Padma asks Neck-Tat: “Are you tattooed everywhere?” He says, “Almost everywhere. 75%.” This makes me uncomfortable. Then he tells the confessional that his former boss used to call him Rodman and claims the ink is his defense mechanism against the corporate world. Sure thing, buddy. I don’t think the corporate world is fazed.

* The Italian-born Silvia Barban is making pasta without a rest period for the dough. If she pulls this off I’d say she’s an immediate favorite to get to the finals, because the judges always love fresh pasta dishes. It got both Nina and Sarah G to the final two in their seasons.

* Charleston-chef, Emily, says she’s been fired from a couple of jobs because of her attitude. During their visit to her station, she tells Tom & Padma “anyway stop talking.”

* Tesar says “Top Chef is all about the clock.” The eight vets are watching the rookies on TV in the stew room are all yelling at them to plate. They’re sort of rooting for everyone, and remembering what it was like to be in the rookies’ place.

* Silvia gets the first dish out – fresh tagliatelle with chicken ragout and crispy chicken skin, mascarpone, and orange.

* Neck-Tat burned his vegetables. That’s a rookie error.

* Gerald says his dish “doesn’t represent me as a chef.” Alabama says it’s “totally worrisome” that he only made livers after these grandiose plans for two or three dishes.

* Here comes the food. BJ made a chasseur-style thigh with mushrooms, bacon, liver, and pressure-cooker stock. … Jim (Alabama) made fried innards with aioli, butter lettuces, strawberry vinaigrette; Tom says “I wish we saw some more” … Emily made buttermilk/black pepper biscuits with fried chicken, thick bread and butter pickle, and slaw; plus an Asian BBQ wing with tamarind and chili glaze … Gerald made a smoked, buttermilk-poached chicken, chicken jus, wild mushrooms, and a vegetable fricasee; he tells Tom & Padma “it looks easier on television” … Jamie (Neck-Tat) made a pan-roasted breast and a stripped-down chicken grand-mère with glazed spring vegetables and crushed potatoes. … Sylva, who’s Haitian, made a paprika and chili-marinated buttermilk chicken with grated corn pudding. I thought this had the best presentation … Silvia’s second dish was a corn, jalapeno, heirloom tomato salad with balsamic-marinted chicken. I love how she pronounces the “h” in heirloom, and Padma praises her for two dishes … Annie made a pan-seared breast, with a panzanella and a black garlic jus. Tom scoffs at her and says it’s not a panzanella. The vets all feel bad for her as they watch her face fall.

* Favorites: Silvia’s pasta, where they loved hint of orange and the texture of the crisped skin; Emily’s chicken wings, which were simple with a lot of flavor; and Jim, whose livers had a lot of flavor, crunch, and acidity.

* Jim wins, and gets immunity. Already we have weirdness in the judging – Silvia made two dishes that the judges liked, one they loved, and managed to execute a fresh pasta dish in a very short period of time, while Jim made just one dish and wasted almost the entire bird and won.

* Least favorites: Annie’s chicken was nicely cooked, but her “panzanella” was sloppy and just “a bunch of croutons” according to Tom; Gerald, whose sauce was greasy because his quick stock appears to have emulsified; Neck-Tat, who killed his vegetables by overcooked. Tom says Gerald’s was the worst, so he’s up for elimination. Gerald says in confessional it’s the least favorite dish of his he’s ever cooked.

* Silvia says in confessional that she “always had a little crush on Sam” Talbot, from season 2, who’s also back.

* Graham Elliott is the new fourth judge for this season. The veterans’ challenge is to get creative with shrimp and grits, with thirty minutes to make their versions of this classic dish. Casey says grits can barely be done in that time. The only way I know to make polenta, which is essenitally yellow-corn grits, takes a minimum of 35.

* Brooke is using ground shrimp rather than sausage to wrap and cook a Scotch egg, which seems risky just because the traditional method means there’s plenty of fat in the ‘wrapper,’ while shrimp is so lean that a ground shrimp mixture could dry right out unless she’s adding fat to it.

* We got a lot of foreshadowing stuff here that ended up going nowhere. Katsuji’s scorching tomatoes and peppers on the burner but appears not to be paying attention. Sheldon’s hand blender doesn’t work. Amanda hasn’t been cooking in almost two years due to a back problem. Here’s a spoiler: None of them lost.

* And the food: Brooke did make that shrimp Scotch egg with grits, lemon fennel salad, and espelette … Sam made shrimp with coconut milk grits, blackened tomatoes, vinegar, chili, and maple syrup … Shirley made her “bowl of hug,” shrimp and grits with steamed egg custard made with shrimp stock, fresh corn, and bacon; Graham said it had “explosive” flavor and noticed touch of sesame at the end … Katsuji made adobo-style shrimp and grits, with fish stock, charred tomatoes and peppers; Padma said – who saw this coming – that Katsuji “could use a little editing” … Casey made coconut shrimp and grits with corn, smoked tomato sauce, peach and fennel salad; she cooked the shrimp and corn in coconut oil, and corn ended up the dominant flavor … Tesar made Korean shrimp and grits with faux kimchi … Amanda made head-on shrimp with tasso ham, pickled raisins, peaches, and kale chiffonade (why?) … Sheldon made dashi-poached shrimp and miso grits, yuzu miso broth, and pickled cabbage; the judges felt this was a little flat.

* Favorites: Amanda, Brooke, and Shirley. The judges praise Brooke’s technique, especially the perfect cooking of the egg at the heart of the dish. Tom said Shirley’s “gave you a hug after it slapped you.” The winner is Brooke, unsurprisingly, given the risk she took.

* She mentions in the confessional that there’s an “old wives’ tale” that whoever wins the first TC challenge has a better chance of winning the whole thing. I could look it up but I’m too lazy.

* Least favorites: Casey’s fell flat; it was tasty, but not at the level of others. Tesar’s dish didn’t seem to make much sense to the judges, and Tom couldn’t figure out what the kimchi was doing there. Katsuji didn’t include enough of his pickled vegetables to get them in every bite. Tesar is the bottom and has to face Gerald in an elimination quickfire.

* Tesar is 58. I don’t think he looks that old, and he doesn’t act that old. Katsuji advises him to mess with Gerald’s head, but to Tesar’s credit he doesn’t seem interested in that kind of gamesmanship.

* Gerald says – I think I got this right – that he used to live in his car when he and his wife were going through a separation because he couldn’t afford two residences, one for his wife and five kids and one for himself. I rewound this twice and still am not 100% sure if that was past tense.

* The elimination challenge takes place at Boone Hall Plantation, a working plantation that is also a sort of museum of slavery, with tours available for people to see the slave quarters. The main house reminded me of Django Unchained, but that was filmed in Louisiana.

* Padma explains that “since the 1950s it’s been open to visitors … to honor those who worked and toiled here.” Those were slaves. Just say the word. In fact, shout it. Don’t gloss over it as “work.” And maybe this wasn’t a great place for an episode.

* Elimination quickfire: Apparently this plantation is home to one of the world’s largest oyster festivals. Tesar and Gerald each have 20 minutes to make an oyster dish, and there’s a fire going for an oyster roast.

* Tesar brought truffles and busts them out for his dish. Apparently Top Chef allows contestants to bring a few ingredients with them. Other chefs are all “whoa,” but 1) truffles are the most cliché ingredient imaginable and I hate when judges give chefs credit for using them and 2) I doubt every contestant has the cash to buy a truffle or the access to ‘borrow’ one.

* Gerald only puts a couple of oysters on the fire, which looks like a rookie mistake, and when the first batch turn out to have little crabs in them (ew) he has to go cook a second batch. I had to look this up, but apparently these are called oyster pea crabs, and they’re both edible and considered a delicacy. Wikipedia linked to this 1913 NY Times article (PDF) about the little bugs, and a quick google search turned up this Delmarva Now story about them. I guess Gerald should have kept the crabs and used them?

* Tesar made an oyster “stew,” with cream-poached oysters, truffle butter, hot sauce, shaved truffle. He put the raw oyster in the bowl and poured the hot soup liquid over it to “poach” it, although that’s a stretch on the definition of poaching. Tom says “the oyster is totally raw.” … Gerald served roasted oysters with thai-style mignonette and tomato compote. He jokes that he “can’t do too much. I didn’t bring truffles.” I think the judges are underwhelmed by the concept – it’s a very basic preparation.

* They send Gerald home, saying his Thai flavors weren’t hot enough – that if you’re selling something as Thai, it should have some heat. I’d have preferred to lose Tesar and see someone new stick around longer; Tesar’s act wore thin last time around, and it’s not as if he made it to the finals like Brooke did.

So, Jeremy won more challenges than anyone else this season? I wouldn’t have guessed that, other than that as the only contestant left who appeared in every episode he’s had more opportunities. I feel like I remember his failures (restaurant wars, hot chicks taco stand) more than I remember his successes.

* Tom is going to cook a meal for Jeremy and Amar, which he says the first meal he’s cooking on Top Chef … except didn’t he cook a meal in eight minutes once, determining the length of a quickfire?

* Still, he’s making a multi-course meal including fresh handmade pasta, so I don’t think the guys have any complaints here. He makes crab and sea urchin with finger limes (not actually limes or even citrus, but the source of “lime caviar”) for the first course. Squab, honey-glazed onions, turnips, smoked peaches for the second. Potato agnolotti with leeks and caviar for the third. Wagyu beef, chanterelle and lobster mushrooms, aged soy bordelaise, shishito peppers for the fourth. I’m full just watching this.

* He says the meal is about ingredients that get him really excited, and wants the chefs to think about the ingredients that do the same for them. This got me thinking about what ingredients I might choose; I’d pick some number from duck legs (skin included, of course), peaches, chocolate, wild mushrooms, short ribs, or eggs. I’d have said pie, but that doesn’t scale well if they’re asked to cook for 100 people.

* Padma does not age. Someone should look into this.

* All the chefs are in the house, so the two remaining contestants draft their sous chefs. Amar takes Kwame, Jeremy takes Carl, Amar takes Marjorie (thinking about the dessert course), Jeremy takes Angie (saying she’s the fastest prep cook). The challenge: Create a four-course meal highlighting four specific ingredients, one per course, of their choice. Serving at craftsteak in MGM, which is spectacular if you haven’t been – they serve the short rib dish that made me realize how much I love short ribs after years of thinking I didn’t like them.

* In walk their mentors, Charlie Palmer and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. JGV says he sees himself in Jeremy, which is a little weird given Jeremy’s laid-back, dudebro personality. The mentors are here to help prep and cook as sous-chefs, but will sit with the judges for service.

* So we get to see Palmer and JGV walking through Whole Foods. No big deal, I’m sure they do this all the time.

* Jeremy declines JGV’s advice on the foie gras duo. This doesn’t seem like a good thing.

* Palmer, while doing line cook work, says, “No one’s too good to do anything.” He also says there’s a difference between being confident in what you do and being a complete asshole, and Amar had crossed the line back in their time together.

* Amar’s making risotto! This also doesn’t seem like a good thing.

* I would really watch a five-minute online clip of Charlie Palmer trimming (the word is “frenching,” unfortunately) that rack of lamb.

* Amar says his style is fewer elements, better flavors, less explanation, as compared to Jeremy’s more technical and more complex approach. I happen to like both when I’m eating out, but recognize that they’re going to come from very different places.

* Amar admits he’s making sashimi after giving Jeremy shit over multiple crudos because “they always win.”

* First course: Jeremy’s dish is foie gras two ways (one warm, one cold), with chili, passion fruit, and marshmallows. Amar’s is seared tuna tataki with habanero coconut dressing, compressed pineapple, toasted peanuts, and crispy rice.

* The chefs’ parents and siblings are there as a surprise. Sad to see how badly diabetes has debilitated Jeremy’s mom, and Amar’s only got his mother and brother there as his father passed away a few years ago.

* Jeremy’s two-day foie gras torchon worked, as did his duo overall. Go figure – maybe he’s good at this whole cheffing thing?

* It seems like some of the judges/diners think Amar’s dish is a little too spicy? I would think this plays right to Padma’s palate. You hear more complaints on this show about dishes that aren’t spicy enough.

* Jeremy’s fish fillets didn’t all cook through, leading to a brief panic in the kitchen. I want to know why he made the fish look like some cheap St. Patrick’s Day entree.

* Second course: Jeremy’s branzino, slow-cooked with an herbal lime vinaigrette, lime zest, squash, and cherry tomatoes. Amar made an uni risotto with butter poached lobster, jicama, finger limes, and shellfish froth.

* Dominique Crenn (the French-born executive chef of San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn) loves the risotto, and Tom says everything in it is perfect, which, given the history of risotto on Top Chef, is some pretty high praise. Reading between the lines of the comments on Jeremy’s dish, though, it seems like his green sauce overshadowed the fish. It looks like someone threw up a shamrock shake on the plate.

* Jeremy waited too long to fire the duck for the third course. Says it’s “duck hell right now,” and has no time to let it rest. Meanwhile, we hear Marjorie say to Amar that she thinks the lamb needs “two more minutes,” but he says it’s perfect even though it’s bleating as he slices it.

* Third: Amar’s plate is harissa-rubbed lamb racks with braised lamb pastilla (a Moroccan-Andalusian kind of meat pie), date-ginger puree, and a yogurt harissa emulsion. Jeremy made duck with roasted maitake mushrooms, smoked chili, buttermilk, and lemon.

* Amar’s lamb is indeed a little undercooked. Padma loves the lamb jus, which Charlie says he had a hand in making, although I thought he was making a “you lika the juice” joke. Dominique says the lamb is “poorly undercooked,” which sounds even worse when said with a French accent. Jeremy’s duck is definitely undercooked. There’s just raw meat everywhere.

* Does Tom look stressed describing these two dishes? He seems almost pained at how close the contest is so far.

* Amar’s mocking all of Jeremy’s “spears” and “cones” … he says that’s all been done before, and he wants to make dishes that are amazing, not interesting. It seems to me like Jeremy’s style of cooking generates a ton of waste, especially plastic, which really should be a thing of the past.

* Fourth and final course: Amar made a coconut financier, mango sorbet, passion fruit curd, tropical fruit salard, brulée meringue, and lime zest. Jeremy made a cheese course, a ricotta and mozzarella cheese cylinder with spiced fig jam, pumpernickel toast, and honey “bubble.” There’s no question I’d want to eat Amar’s dish rather than Jeremy’s.

* Blais says Jeremy’s technique led the dish, not the ignredients. Emeril calls it “intellectual.” I wouldn’t think that was a compliment, although he seems to mean it that way.

* Amar’s financier is a little dense, but everyone loves the flavors. A financier is a small sponge cake, like a madeleine but made with brown butter, lifted with an egg white foam, and cooked till brown around the edges; it’s often made with almond flour but I think Amar may have used coconut flour here, which could explain the change in texture.

* Blais asks Amar if the tataki was “too safe” a dish for the finals. Tom praises Jeremy’s torchon. In the second courses, Jeremy’s dish needed more lemon, and the tomatoes were the star ingredient … which should be a point against him, right?

* Amar gets big praise for making a risotto. Gail says it’s the best risotto they’ve had on TC in “many, many seasons.” Has anyone else made a truly successful risotto on Top Chef? Or won a challenge with one?

* Jeremy says he was going for med-rare to medium with his duck, but then tries to dance around the criticism that it was short or rare. Just acknowledge the mistake up front, dude. Amar’s lamb was rare to undercooked, when he wanted rare to med-rare, but at least he owns it right away. Both dishes were badly cooked meat surrounded by other great elements.

* Amar’s dessert had great flavors, but the financier was dense; Blais says the name might have been the problem because everyone expected the light texture of a financier. Jeremy’s cheese log was great, but the honey bubble was a failure. I’m still trying to fathom what a mozzarella cheese “log” would taste like but keep imagining that awful string cheese they sell in individually-wrapped landfill fodder.

* Padma says they still haven’t decided on the winner, by which she probably means Tom hasn’t decided.

* They’re praising Jeremy’s technique and details, but seem to like Amar’s flavors more. Padma even says it specifically – one chef’s meal was technique-forward, the other’s was flavor-forward. Technique is great, but don’t you have to love the food too?

* Jeremy says off-camera, “Top Chef is not about the money to me.” Kind of the wrong/privileged thing to say, especially when your opponent came from a third world country and has made himself into a successful chef from meager beginnings.

* The winner of $125,000 and the title of Top Chef is … Jeremy. “No fucking way.” You tell ’em, dudebro.

* This is the first time since I started watching the show that I can say I’m disappointed in an outcome. We don’t taste the food, so I don’t know who actually deserved to win, but I can’t escape the feeling that we’ve seen Jeremy’s kind of food on this show before, many times in fact. I don’t think he had a dish, even a winning dish, all season that made me say “I’d want to make that,” or even “That gives me a great idea.” (Actually the best dish all season from that perspective was Karen’s Asian steak salad from Restaurant Wars, which I made for dinner yet again a few hours before this show aired.) The chefs who impressed early in the season were long gone by the finale, and while Amar makes the food you’d be more likely to want to eat, the judges appear to have gone with the fancier techniques. They’re not wrong – how could I say they’re wrong when I didn’t eat the food! – but it’s not the outcome I wanted, to say the least.

* Gail gives Amar a kiss on each cheek, and he says, “Finally! I’ve been waiting all season for this.” Well, it’s a decent consolation prize for losing $125 grand, I guess.

Amar is the winner of Last Chance Kitchen, so Carl, who I thought was a clear top 3 coming down the stretch, is out. No Kwame, no Carl, and possibly no Marjorie in the finals? Is this a good thing? Is it fair to think that we might not get the best chefs in the finals when we haven’t tasted any of the food?

* The winner of this first challenge goes right to the finale. The chefs each get a pantry at random and must create a dish inspired by the limited pantry you’re dealt. Marjorie gets the royalty pantry, so she can choose from all four pantries, not just her own. Amar gets only the peasants’ pantry, so he can’t use any pantry but his. This sounds like a new worker-placement game, and like most games of that ilk, this challenge will take three hours.

* They’re serving 150 people in just three hours from the start of the challenge, but they do get help from the last four eliminated chefs. Marjorie takes Karen, Isaac takes Carl, Jeremy takes Kwame, so Amar gets Phillip. Jeremy can’t believe the first two chefs passed on Kwame. I still can’t believe Kwame didn’t make it to the finals.

* Is it just me or does the top of Padma’s red dress here look like lingerie?

* Marjorie has salmon and dry-aged steak available to her. I’d hope she’ll be judged along a higher standard given the inputs she’s getting. I do want to know how she was trimming that salmon – she sliced something off the top of the fillet, which I haven’t seen before.

* Amar’s protein choices are chicken livers and beef tongue. He’s downplaying the livers, but liver cooked properly can be delicious. It needs other flavors, but I’ve really grown to like it.

* Isaac is trying to cook his fish to order for 150 people, which seems very difficult to do, especially given what’s on the line this episode.

* The judges go to Amar’s station first for his sauteed liver and onions with root vegetable puree and crispy leeks. The judges all seem to like it, but whatever other flavors were in there, we didn’t hear about them. Liver and onions does not excite me but he apparently did something novel with it.

* Jeremy made butter-poached chicken with togarashi, zucchini puree, chicken cracklings, and pickled sweet and hot grapes. Gail loves the grapes, and of course everyone loves the cracklings. Crispy chicken skin has been ‘in’ for a couple of years now – I’ve even seen it in vinaigrettes – but I don’t think it’s just a fad, because it’s very satisfying to eat (thanks to the crunch) and because it fits in the new philosophy of using as much of the animal as possible. I nearly always save mine and cook them separately if I’m not cooking them with the meat.

* Isaac made seared black cod with caramelized fennel, eggplant, and red wine vinegar. He served it with toasted slices of bread, but they were too dry to soak up the sauce. I grew up Italian, so to me, one of bread’s primary functions is as the sponge you use to clean your plate before sending it to the sink.

* Marjorie made seared salmon in vadouvan beurre monté with a Meyer lemon purée and shaved vegetable salad. Meyer lemons and yuzu are two of the most overused ingredients on Top Chef. At least I can get Meyer lemons in Whole Foods – yes, they’re good, but 95% of the time regular lemons would work just fine – while I’m not sure I’ve ever seen yuzu in any form.

* Padma’s super cheerful this time. Tom likes that they’re not eliminating someone this challenge. I think he’s happy because he has a restaurant in Vegas and every time he goes there he remembers how much money he makes from it.

* Rick Moonen loves the comfort food aspect of Amar’s dish, while Tom likes the ingenuity and simplicity. They loved the Meyer lemon puree in Marjorie’s dish. Tom praises Jeremy’s poached chicken despite the natural blandness of poached chicken, crediting the grapes in particular. Butter-poached chicken isn’t any poached chicken, though.

* The winner is Jeremy, who goes to the finals and gets a $25,000 prize. Two of the three remaining chefs will end up going home. Padma makes a “Leaving Las Vegas” joke for which she should have to pack her knives and go.

* Illusionist David Copperfield is there. Can he make Donald Trump disappear?

* The second challenge is to make a dish that “leaves the judges spellbound.” I don’t like how this sounds. Is this Top Chef, or Top Showman?

* Jeremy sounds gracious in victory, saying of the double elimination here, “I’m sure it’s in the back of each one of their minds, it’s the end of the road. It sucks.” For a guy who cops a bit of a bro attitude, he’s come across as way more mature and thoughtful the more he speaks in the confessionals.

* I wonder how often the chefs just make a dish they make all the time at their restaurants and cook up a narrative for the judges or the cameras.

* Amar is making a cauliflower white chocolate ganache. This sounds … terrible, really. White chocolate is sugar and fat. It has no cocoa solids, so it has no chocolate flavor. If you wouldn’t add sugar to a savory dish, don’t add white chocolate. I hate white chocolate, by the way.

* Marjorie is using liquid nitrogen for the first time, which is a very bad idea. She tastes something she made with it, and “burns” her tongue, so she can barely taste her food. LN is around –196 degrees Celsius – that is, nearly 200 degrees below the freezing point of water – and can freeze human tissue on contact. This is not a toy.

* She plates first, trying to put on a show, talking as she goes … which has Tom looking totally bemused. They did tell the chefs they had to entertain, right? She’s nervous as hell, but she’s powering through it.

* Marjorie says she’s never used liquid nitrogen before and it makes her nervous, to which Padma says, “it’s making me nervous.” You’re twenty feet away, Padma. Simmer down.

* The dish is roasted duck breast a l’orange with braised endive, orange cells, caramelized romanesco, fennel puree. The screen said “romesco,” which is a sauce, but I think the item was actually romanesco, a close relative of the cauliflower with a bright green color and fractal form to its pointed florets. The endives are good, but the dish didn’t have enough orange flavor, perhaps because she was struggling with the LN.

* Isaac is up next, making his “chicken-fried steak” with crispy chicken skin attached to the steaks. He’s not talking to the judges, which shouldn’t matter but might, although he finishes with a cute if silly magic trick. The actual dish: dry aged ribeye with chicken skin, “quadruple” fennel puree, and yuzu hollandaise. The flavors are great but the puree wasn’t smooth enough.

* This seems like the perfect challenge for molecular gastronomy, or even just a Jacques Derrida approach. I had a dish at ink. last week that would have fit the challenge: a deconstructed apple pie that looked like a bit of a mess, but when eaten all together had all the flavors of a real apple pie. It included a “burnt wood” semifreddo and bits of apple gelée. Richard Blais’s restaurants often have dishes like this too, where your eyes tell you to expect one thing but your palate gets something totally different. That’s the kind of illusion I expected given the challenge.

* Amar serves his dishes under a glass cloche with smoke in it. The dish is roasted squab with the aforementioned ganache, whipped balsamic, and potato rings with onion flavors in the breading. He also had dabs of LN-frozen squab sauce with mole flavors in them.

* Judges’ table: Tom says Marjorie’s story was good, the duck and endive were great, it needed more orange flavor but was otherwise “terrific.” She had the most showmanship, I think. Amar’s plate “looked like a terrarium” (Tom) but worked, although the praise is about the flavors, and we don’t get any real breakdown of the various techniques he used. I also really wanted to hear something about that ganache, which sounded vile to me. Isaac tried the magic trick, which gets him some points. He needed more skin on the filet, but gets some points for going well out of his comfort zone.

* Padma boosts Marjorie for the performance. Amar’s dish had the best elements of surprise, the most technically difficult, but didn’t have her showmanship. Isaac’s concept was good, and Tom says it was better than real chicken fried steak.

* The winner of this challenge is Amar, so we have Amar and Jeremy in the finals. It does seem like he did the best on this challenge, but to have Marjorie gone is very disappointing given how well she did all season and how much more versatile she was than anyone else this season.

* Amar gets very choked up afterwards, having just lost his first ever boss, Gerry Hayden, and remembering his father, who died of brain cancer when Amar was a teenager.

* Jeremy’s reaction to Amar walking in is priceless: “I was hoping it wasn’t you, motherfucker!” Jeremy has done so well on the more sophisticated, fine-dining sort of challenges, but was so uninspiring in some of the earlier challenges that were either more basic or that let him do one crudo after another. I think I’m pulling for Amar at this point, as long as he doesn’t sous vide another chicken breast in the finale.

We start with Isaac just heaping praise on Kwame as a super-talented, very promising chef. Again, Isaac is just the freaking best. Maybe he could do video blogs next season.

* Quickfire: Traci des Jardins, who always looks pained even when she’s smiling, is the guest. The challenge is to make artisanal toast. Artisanal toast is very San Francisco, in that it’s pretty good, wildly overpriced, and borderline annoying about itself. Also, Italians have been doing this forever and calling it bruschetta (among other names), so shut the fuck up already about your “toast program.”

* Oh, joy, a sudden death quickfire – the bottom two chefs are up for elimination and will face each other, with the loser going home. Let’s definitely eliminate one of the best chefs of the season because of something my daughter eats for breakfast before school.

* Marjorie is making hers the way I make lots of “toast” dishes – rubbing olive oil with her fingers on sliced country bread. This is the ideal way to make grilled or broiled toast to as part of fett’unta con fagioli, which is the Italian version of beans on toast, usually white beans cooked with rosemary and garlic. It’s highly flavorful and very filling even as a main course, although it’s traditionally a starter.

* The dishes – er, the toasts: Jeremy did chicken liver mousse, pickled cherries, white raspberries, jalapeño, and arugula on ciabatta … Marjorie used a sourdough baguette and made dungeness crab salad with a pancetta fennel marmalade … Amar made a duck breast with foie gras, fig marmalde, crispy prosciutto, and a balsamic and truffle reduction on sourdough … Carl did grilled sourdough with burrata, blistered cherry tomatoes, and shrimp … Isaac made a butter-fried ciabbata, percorino, prosciutto, red pepper spread like romesco.

* Winner is Jeremy, and he gets a Rational oven as a prize. Carl and Amar have to face off; Amar’s was “heavy-handed,” while Carl ended up on the bottom because he put fish and cheese together – and I agree that those things do not go together, ever. In Italian Catholicism, it’s taught that you’ll go to hell for that.

* For the elimination, Tom is there as a third judge – as he should be – and the two chefs have 30 minutes to cook anything they want.

* Amar says, “I do not wanna make a crudo, I came here to cook!” I respect this. Crudo – the Italian word just means “raw,” although now it primarily refers to raw fish – has become such a Top Chef crutch that it’s gotten ridiculous, but as some of you have pointed out, it’s become a crutch because the judges keep rewarding it.

* Just from how he speaks, I think Amar snores.

* Amar did a pan-roasted sea bream, watermelon radish cooked in dashi, pickled mushrooms, plums, and brown butter. Carl made a salad of raw thai snapper, corn, nectarines, and chiles. Padma sneers, “Another crudo, huh?” but then votes for him. Tom votes for Amar, but Amar is eliminated when Traci votes for Carl.

* Elimination challenge: Hubert Keller cooks dinner for the final four. He hosted the first ever quickfire – and did anyone else notice how young Gail looked in that clip? Or Harold, who ended up winning the season, getting the boot? The actual challenge is to make a tribute dish to Fleur de Lys, Keller’s just-closed restaurant in SF. Keller cooks them an Alsatian stew called a bacheofe, with pork, lamb, and beef marinated overnight, with a rope of dough used to seal the lid to the pot.

* Carl wants to make a torchon of foie gras, a process that requires three days, when he only has three hours. The foie gras must be dry-cured or marinated so that it doesn’t have the texture of putty, and the fat used has to be melted and then given time to set up. Marjorie points out the folly of this idea.

* Tom can’t get over the risks Isaac and Carl are taking, making dishes that should require much more time than the chefs have for prep and cooking.

* Where do these chefs get the foie they always seem to use on the show? I don’t think Whole Foods sells it but we never see them buying it anywhere else.

* Isaac serves first. He made a duck ballotine (a type of terrine) with chicken liver forcemeat, lentils with porcini, figs, cherry and aged balsamic gastrique. Padma says, “That’ll be all,” as if he should return to the servants’ quarters.

* The flavors in Isaac’s were good, but the dish needed more sauce. He also cooked it too fast at too high a temperature, so the duck meat was overcooked and the skin wasn’t crispy. We’re off to a roaring start.

* Marjorie made roasted lamb saddle with artichoke puree, artichoke barigoules (braised in a wine/water broth), squash, tomatoes, and niçoise olives. She cooked the lamb boneless, and Tom seems very unimpressed by this decision.

* Keller said she nailed the flavors of Provençal cuisine. But the artichokes were underseasoned and the lamb was improperly cooked, so it sounds like her dish wasn’t really any better than Isaac’s.

* Jeremy made branzino (filet de loup) with potato puree, heirloom tomato, vin blanc, and pommes souffles. This was the only dish of the four that the judges actually seemed to like. He also shaved truffle over the potatoes, because of course he did. The dish tasted good and was technically strong.

* Carl’s foie gras torchon en gelée with black pepper, strawberries, and fines herbes. He confited the foie first, then wrapped it as a torchon. It … did not work.

* Keller says Carl set himself up to fail. Harold says it’s not doable in three hours. The center was almost raw, which makes it pretty clear where we’re going from here.

* Keller and Tom both think the chefs all tried too hard to impress because it was the last-ever meal to be served at the site of Fleur de Lys. I doubt the setting was what intimidated them so much as the part about not getting eliminated from the show.

* Judges’ table: The winner was Jeremy, of course. No one else made anything even edible, if we read between the lines of the judges’ comments.

* The other three chefs all have to wear it in front of the judges. Gail’s comment afterwards, that she’d rather eat overcooked duck than undercooked foie gras, seems like the tell on the elimination – and I have to agree, especially since I don’t care for any meat cooked only to rare. Raw liver sounds all kinds of disgusting.

* Padma does that cruel thing where she says someone’s name – Marjorie – and then announces that that chef is going to the finals, not going home. I would always assume this was at the producers’ direction, but maybe Padma just enjoys putting the chefs through a little emotional torture.

* Carl is eliminated. It’s kind of a shocker to have him and Kwame get bounced before the finals.

* LCK: First, the three chefs have to make one sourdough dish in 30 minutes. Carl makes apple and tomatillo gazpacho with shrimp, only using the ready-made bread; Amar makes beef wellington, starting with the raw bread dough, enough to impress Tom given the time constraints; Jason makes smoked salmon bruschetta with lots of stuff on top, which leads Tom to criticize the lack of seasoning on the turnips and radishes. Tom keeps praising Amar for a “ballsy move” in trying to make something so complex in a half hour. His favorite was Carl’s; second was Amar, so Jason’s big winning streak comes to naught. His eggs were a little overdone, apparently.

* Second, Tom implies it’s a raw challenge. Carl has a good line, saying his foie gras was “sort of a crudo.” The chefs have 12 minutes to prepare a fish dish, starting from a whole fish. Amar grabs the loup de mer because he’s familiar with it, while Carl grabs the snapper because it looks the freshest. Amar decides to make an onion soubise – like a béchamel with onion purée – to which Tom says “good luck with that!” I thought that took about half an hour to make sure you don’t brown the onions. Amar made a crispy loup de mer with onion soubise and yuzu caper brown butter. Carl made grilled red snapper with apricot and ginger marmalade. The real message here is that when the chefs have only 12 minutes to cook but all manner of ingredients, they make dishes you’d eat – food that sounds great, but that you might make at home or order at a restaurant that isn’t $100 a head.

* Rankings: Marjorie, Carl, Isaac, Amar, Jeremy. Obviously one of Carl/Amar won’t be there, but regardless of who comes out of LCK, I think this should be Marjorie’s to lose.

My ranking of the top 25 prospects for 2016 impact is up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat yesterday afternoon.

* Quickfire: Chef Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook and Martin Yan Quick and Easy fame is the guest judge. The man is 67 years old and still full of energy, at least on camera. He explains that during the California gold rush, a lot of miners came from Guangdong (Canton), where his father also came from. The intersection of cultures led to chop suey, an iconic Americanized Chinese dish. (Wikipedia’s entry on the dish offers a more detailed explanation of the dish’s roots, tracing it back to a dish common Taishan made from leftovers.) The chefs must make a version of chop suey, cooking at a typical wok station, which is at least five times stronger than a professional kitchen burner. So we get a quickfire challenge that is just about cooking!

* I remember seeing Yan as a judge on ICA maybe ten years ago, and he was very big on “texture contrast” in every dish. I’d imagine in chop suey that’s as critical as anything, because you’re cooking vegetables so fast that they should remain crisp.

* Kwame is blanch-frying the vegetables in oil the wok, which apparently is a traditional technique. I can’t imagine cooking on a burner with that kind of power, because it seems like food could burn in a matter of seconds, and any aerosolized oil droplets would ignite right in front of you.

* Jeremy makes a Dungeness crab with bok choy, red chile, long beans, and onions … Marjorie makes lobster with ginger, thai chili, and orange … Carl does a Szechuan-style lobster with snow peas, ginger, and I presume a lot of chiles … Amar does pork (not chicken!) with vegetables and Szechuan peppercorns … Isaac makes General Tso’s chicken with cracklings, sambal, and orange … Kwame serves crispy beef with eggplant, long beans, carrots, cabbage, and noodles. Yan recognizes the oil-blanching technique right away.

* One other thing I remember from Yan’s appearance on ICA, because it’s evident here too: He’s just very kind. He couches everything he says with an almost educational context, and his criticisms are almost apologetic.

* The least favorites: Carl’s should have had more vegetables. I assume that’s an authenticity thing; when meat was expensive and limited, you’d fill up with cheap vegetables? Kwame’s blanch-frying technique made the vegetables greasy, and Yan says the eggplant soaked up the oil. Isaac used too much starch in his sauce.

* The winner is Marjorie, apparently because she had the best balance of all the ingredients.

* Elimination challenge: Guest judge is the founder of Umami Burger and 800 Degrees, Adam Fleischman. I’ve been to both places, as well as the now-defunct Umamicatessen; what the two existing concepts have in common is that they serve good food relatively fast, turning over tables quickly, and offer alcohol to boost profits. The challenge for each of the chefs is to come up with a fast casual concept that “would work in any city in North America.” Each must make one dish for 150 diners and potential investors, and to create an entire menu for the concept. Six of the eliminated chefs are there to be sous chefs. Marjorie, as the quickfire winner, gets to pick her own sous.

* Marjorie picks Angelina because she’s “a beast with prep.” She also gets to assign the other five sous chefs, although I wondered if she was spiteful enough to take full advantage. She assigns Jason to Jeremy, Chad to Carl, Karen to Amar, Wesley to Isaac, and Phillip with Kwame. That last one she did on purpose, since they’d sparred and she sees Kwame as competition, although I don’t think anyone wanted Phillip.

* Amar is making rotisserie chicken. Has he never heard of Boston Market?

* Kwame wants to do chicken and waffles that are easy to eat. I love the concept … and then he says he’s going to buy frozen waffles. What. The. Fuck. My man, Kwame, have you never watched Top Chef before? Frozen means pack your knives and gozen.

* Marjorie worked at Per Se and learned pasta there; she now wants to adapt that to fast casual. She’s doing olive-oil poached tuna with pasta, a very classic northern Italian combination. Pasta’s tough for fast casual, though, because it doesn’t travel or reheat well, and I think too many Americans hear pasta and think “tomato sauce.”

* Isaac says that he “got a couple of ideas I shoot to myself, then I shoot them down cause they’re stupid.” He has to be a top 5 most entertaining chef in Top Chef history. I’d love to do play-by-play with him of any sport, regardless of whether he knew it, because I think he’d be hilarious – maybe more so if he knew nothing about it. He settles on gumbo, of course. Three hours is not a lot of time to make gumbo, given the time required for the roux.

* The other chefs are mocking Kwame for buying frozen waffles while they’re all in the checkout line at Whole Foods. This is beyond foreshadowing. Kwame is toast, pun intended.

* Carl’s concept is a Mediterranean place that will showcase some lesser-known flavors of the region. (Isn’t this a little like Zoe’s Kitchen?) He’s making the lamb stew of his imagination.

* Amar’s concept is called Pio Pio, which is an actual rotisserie chicken place near Orlando that is very good.

* Jeremy’s concept is Asian-style tacos. Tom points out that the taco market is already very crowded. He’s frying pork belly strips with nam pla caramel and serving with wontons or lettuce wraps.

* Adam and Tom look at Kwame like he’s a complete idiot when he says he’s using frozen waffles. I mean, you see people making their own waffles at crappy free hotel breakfasts all the time. You can’t make your own on Top Chef?

* Marjorie needs pasta baskets (inserts for the pots in which she’ll cook the pasta) and finds none. She decides to use the fryer as a boiler. I saw something like that at Sotto in Cincinnati and they made it work beautifully, although it was built for that purpose – it had two chambers, one for gluten-free pastas and one for wheat pastas.

* Kwame immediately gets the biggest line, because who doesn’t love fried chicken and waffles?

* Blais is back as the fourth judge, always a welcome sight.

* Carl’s concept is SavoryMed, which he even acknowledges might sound like a health-care company. Blais compares it to Chipotle without saying that name (Chipotle without the sick employees!). The dish is lamb and piquillo pepper stew over couscous with yogurt, feta, fresh herb salad. The menu would offer the modular approach of Chipotle and its imitators. The judges all love the dish and the concept. Tom questions the feasibility of an herb salad, but that is serious nitpicking.

* Isaac’s concept is called Gumbo for Y’all, and his dish is gumbo ya-ya with chicken and sausage. What I think really sells the judges here is when he describes the concept as one that suits takeout and even catering – go buy a bowl of gumbo, or a couple of gallons to feed a crowd. That’s a food that reheats well and even gets better the next day. Hold your surprise, but Isaac’s gumbo is good, by the way.

* Kwame’s concept name is Waffle Me, which is great, but it’s all downhill from there. Customers would customize their waffle, topping, and spice level. He’s serving a whole wheat waffle topped with fried chicken, maple jus, mustard seeds, and an ancho chili crust (on the waffles, I think). Blais says the dish is a “disaster of a business model” because the bites are way too small. The frozen waffles weren’t good, of course.

* Marjorie’s concept is called Pasta Mama. One idea is to have a pasta extruder in every store, but I assume she’d ship the fresh pasta sheets from a central facility? Making pasta fresh on-site seems like a tall order for fast casual. Tom notes and admires the use of the fryer as the pasta cooking vessel. Her dish is olive-oil poached tuna with spaghetti, chili, garlic, lemon bread crumb. Tom says the tuna is cooked well. He and Blais are already working on commercials.

* Jeremy has the worst concept name, “Taco Dudes.” Adam says the menu has too many unfamiliar terms on it, although Tom sees a social media campaign around them. I think I side with Adam – you don’t want a menu to intimidate a customer who has just walked in without knowing the place already. Jeremy’s dish is crispy pork belly with nam pla caramel glaze, lime aioli, cabbage slaw, and pickled habaneros. Jeremy starts describing the place as a gastropub with a rooftop garden and “hot chicks serving you.” That gets a look from Padma, as it should, because he’s apparently a pig. Are you selling tacos or boobs? The food is good, but the concept isn’t.

* Amar’s Pio Pio has a very simple format and menu; his dish is chicken with Spanish yellow rice, four bean salad, and a choice of four sauces – I caught two, romesco and a chimichurri sauce. Rather than serving whole chicken pieces, he’s shredded the meat and mixed the white and dark together, which I think is a terrible move because there are people who, for health or taste reasons, prefer only one kind. Plus shredding is more work for the kitchen. Blais says Amar didn’t sell the concept well enough and the chicken doesn’t have the rotisserie flavor it should.

* Top three were Marjorie, for the dish and the concept’s “great branding opportunities;” Carl, for a “very articulate vision” of the restaurant (yeah, because we’ve seen something a lot like it before); and Isaac, who I think had the best concept, and of course the judges loved the gumbo.

* Kwame’s chicken and waffles were “nothing special” compared to others the judges have tried, his portions were too small, and have I mentioned that he used frozen waffles? Amar’s concept isn’t novel, although the sauces were good. Jeremy’s concept was “half-baked” and the judges say they’ve seen plenty of Asian taco places before. One thing I’ll say in Jeremy’s defense is that I think the Asian taco concept is still largely limited to major cities, maybe even just major cities on the coasts; it’s definitely not in small-town America very much, although I see no reason it wouldn’t work everywhere.

* Judges’ table: Majorie and Carl at the top. She’s not Italian but the judges just loved the concept. Adam says it’s hard to do pasta in fast-casual environment but she twisted it and “made it your own,” whatever that means – it doesn’t explain how she could execute fresh pasta in that type of restaurant. Carl’s food looks healthy and colorful, and the menu focuses on flavors Tom says are popular right now.

* Carl wins. He was the overwhelming favorite of the diners too.

* The bottom two are Kwame and Jeremy. Jeremy’s had a “few flavors missing,” and the concept was flawed. Tom can’t get past the “two dudes” name and explanation, saying that that story goes with fish tacos rather than pork. But the whole concept – in a gastropub, with a roof garden, with hot chicks – was a mess. Kwame’s dish required “too much technical precision” for fast-casual … and hey, frozen waffles, dumbass. Tom points out that the menu showed sweet-potato waffles, for example, and if Kwame had made those, he would probably have fared much better.

* Kwame is eliminated. Frozen anything gets you sent home. He gives a thoughtful thank-you speech to Tom, where he started at Craft as a waiter. You could see Tom was both very surprised and touched.

* LCK: Tom starts by saying Kwame is there because of the frozen waffles, so it’s a breakfast challenge, even though he says chefs hate working that shift and concedes that at home he’ll even serve frozen waffles to his kids. The chefs have fifteen minutes to make a creative breakfast.

* I grew up eating Eggos quite a bit and they do still have a nostalgic appeal to me, although if we have waffles in the freezer at my house, they’re probably leftovers from a weekend breakfast I made from scratch. Just lay them out on the counter on a cooling rack until they reach room temperature, then put them in a freezer bag. If you put hot waffles in the bag without cooling them, you’re trapping all that steam you want to lose first and the waffles will get soggy.

* I think it’s weird Kwame doesn’t have a waffle recipe off the top of his head. Even I do. They’re really just pancakes with more fat.

* Kwame is making egg bhurji, an Indian dish with lots of savory flavors and spices. Jason is making migas, a Spanish dish usually made from leftover bread that’s stale. He’s using fresh bread and just tearing it, rather than throwing it in a food processor to grind it a bit.

* The chefs in the peanut gallery are all acting very silly, or just drunk. Probably drunk, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

* Jason deep-fries the eggs rather than skillet-fry them, which is easier to manage and also gives the white a nice crispy, brown edge. Is poaching an egg in 15 minutes too risky because you can’t redo it? I think the Alton Brown method I’ve used requires about 12 minutes, so it’s doable, but you’ve got just one shot.

* Jason’s migas has sausage, pine nuts, currants, and thyme, and it’s kind of like a big hash where you break the egg yolk and toss it all together. Tom loves it. Kwame serves the egg scrambled with the bhurji like a thick sauce over brioche with cilantro. Tom seems to like it too. He’s surprised there’s no curry in the eggs but I think the sauce is so flavorful that he thought the eggs were spiced too. (Side note: Every recipe I found for eggs bhurji includes hing, the spice also known as asafoetida, an Indian spice famous for its fetid smell. I’ve actually never seen the spice here, although I imagine it’s easy to find in Indian groceries.)

* Tom loved both, but says “if I had to travel” to go eat one dish again, it would have been to Spain for Jason’s. So Kwame, who seemed like he was lapping the field before the ten-years-ago challenge, doesn’t even reach the finals.

* Ranking: Marjorie, Carl, Jason, Isaac, Amar, Jeremy. Carl’s stayed very strong throughout the season, but I think this is Marjorie’s to win right now. Jeremy was saved by Kwame’s disastrous choice this week, but he’s had more flops this season than any two other chefs remaining combined.

I have a new draft blog post on possible first-rounders Robert Tyler and Kyle Lewis up for Insiders.

So the remaining seven chefs are all acting like they’re going to miss Phillip … no, they’re not. I think they all made it clear they didn’t really like him, and how could you, given how he acted? Kwame says “I understood him,” after which Marjorie, the one honest soul there, says, “I didn’t.”

* Quickfire: They’re in Oakland and MC Hammer is here. (Where’s MC Slammer and Vanilla Sherbet?) I don’t see the point of having Hammer here, although at least he drops a “Go A’s, go Warriors, go Raiders” on us. The challenge is for the chefs to come up with their own rap names and create a dish that visually and conceptually expresses that name. Hammer says he made sure it “personified how hard I hit the stage.” Yeah, nothing says “hard” to me like “Help the Children.”

* It’s actually kind of painful to watch this. Kwame seems like the only chef there with any sense of rap culture at all, given the name he picks and what eventually happens during judging.

* Kwame says he did shows when he was a teenager and dropped a couple of mixtapes, when he had “a very short-lived rap career” where he’d give away food at the shows to get people to show up.

* Carl picks the name “Dr. Funky Fresh,” which would have sounded dated in 1988. Marjorie’s “Miss Punch-a-Lot” is almost as bad.

* The dishes: Karen (rap name: “Pink Dragon”) made a hot and sour soup with pork meatballs, shiitakes, and morels … Carl (I had to mute him rapping) made a beef tartare lettuce wrap … Amar (“Santana Lovah”) made a soy-glazed sea bass with dashi broth … Marjorie made a fried chicken sandwich with honey sriracha and marinated watermelon radish salad … Isaac (“Toups Legit”) made scallops with BBQ sauce and grits … Jeremy (“Spicy J-Rock 305” … what the fuck is that) made spicy dungeness crab in broth with grilled summer squash and halibut cheek … Kwame (“Baylish”) did a seafood broth with grilled lobster and dungeness crab.

* Kwame drops a few rhymes and at least sounds somewhat current – way better than Carl.

* Least favorites: Amar’s plate was just fish; the bread on Marjorie’s andwich just “sucked up the spices;” Kwame’s dish was fine but other plates were “simyular” to his yet better.

* Favorites: Carl, Isaac, and Karen. Hammer’s comments are kind of worthless and I truly don’t see why he would be a guest judge here. Why not invite Alison Barakat of Bakesale Betty’s and challenge everyone to make a fried chicken sandwich?

* The winner is Isaac, again, and he gets immunity.

* Elimination challenge: Guest judge Jonathan Waxman, who seems to pop up once a season here. Each chef must cook a dish from a specific place and time in history. The chefs get to pick off a globe that has at least ten options on it, so even the chef picking last gets a choice. Isaac picks the Viking age. Carl picks ancient Greece. Amar chooses Paris’s Belle Époque (roughly contemporary with our Gilded Age). Marjorie picks ancient India. Kwame takes the Han dynasty of Beijing. Jeremy chooses the Gold Rush in San Francisco. Karen, picking last, takes the Empire of Japan. No one wanted the Italian Renaissance?

* The chefs get two hours to research at the SF library … which does not make riveting television.

* The chefs go drinking at an old-fashioned kitsch tiki lounge. And suddenly Jeremy is banging the drums and giving us the metal horns. Honestly, I kind of wish his food read more “metal.” He’d be much more interesting.

* Amar gets to make classical French cuisine, which is a mixed blessing – I’m sure it’s food he knows, but it’s also food every chef who’s going to judge his food knows.

* Kwame’s dish has four ingredients: duck, eggplant, a duck “jus,” and lapsang souchong, a black tea that is dried by smoking it over burning pine wood. He goes to serve a “sample” to Tom/Jonathan and his duck is raw in the center. He says he roasted the duck for 16 minutes … is it just me or is that barely enough to get the duck to room temperature?

* Waxman’s enthusiasm is great, especially when Tom can seem a bit cantankerous in the kitchen and many guest judges don’t bring much personality at all. Also, Waxman agrees with me and says he would have chosen Italian Renaissance “in a heartbeat.” Of course, he did write a book on Italian cooking, so he may have a better handle on it than I do.

* The dishes: Carl made marinated mackerel and calamari with olives and grapes, seasoned with garum, an ancient Roman fish sauce that, as far as I know, no longer exists. (He probably used Asian fish sauce or colatura, a modern Italian descendant of garum.) It’s a big hit. Marjorie made a lamb kebab with heart jus, curried split peas, and paratha (an unleavened Indian flatbread). Padma likes the balance of spice/heat in the dish, but the paratha was too greasy. I’m wondering if Marjorie only fried it, rather than baking it partway and then frying it. Waxman says her lamb should have been cooked all the way through to be authentic.

* Isaac made a cumin- and mustard-seared venison with caramelized onion “grautr” (I assume this is grøt, a sort of porridge often made with barley) and pickled beets. There’s a great texture/flavor to venison. Kwame made a coriander-crusted duck with black sesame jus, lapsang souchong “cream” with silken tofu, and eggplant. Waxman loves the coriander. Tom says duck is nicely cooked, which is a nice comeback from the kitchen debacle. Of everything we saw in the elimination challenge, this is the dish I’d most want to eat.

* Jeremy made halibut with shellfish chowder. Tom says it’s not a chowder and is more like a sauce. Waxman says it’s not authentic at all, since miner food would likely have been rustic and hearty. Karen made soba noodles in a mushroom dashi with pickled mushrooms and wagyu beef. Padma says the broth more Chinese than Japanese. Waxman says she should have stopped with the clear broth, and Gail says she should have kept the dish simple.

* Amar made roasted squab with sweetbreads, foie gras, tourné vegetables, and a lot of truffle sauce. The sauce seems to be the key, and Tom says it’s a very concentrated sauce for only three hours of cooking time.

* Marjorie, Karen, Jeremy are on the bottom. The other four all did well.

* Kwame, Amar, and Carl were top three. Waxman loved Kwame’s sparseness and restraint. Amar showed off a lot of technique. Tom praises Carl’s dish, saying how every ingredient mattered. The winner is Amar. His dish may very well have been the best, but he also got the easiest challenge, cooking in a style any chef who went to culinary school or trained in a high-end restaurant would have learned.

* Karen’s dish had too many components, plus it wasn’t really authentic. Waxman said it’s a chef’s job to edit, and she didn’t. Marjorie’s lamb didn’t have enough char. Padma says the paratha got too crispy when Marjorie fried it. Jeremy’s dish didn’t have the flavor depth of a chowder; it was definitely not a miner’s chowder and was too fussy.

* Karen is sent home. How is it not Jeremy? I understand Karen’s dish wasn’t very authentic, but neither was Jeremy’s, plus it seems like hers tasted better.

* By the way, that’s easily the most emotional goodbye from other chefs we’ve seen this year. She’s struck me as a little glib on screen, but she must be much more genuine in person than I thought.

* LCK: Teppanyaki challenge. Ten minutes to prep, ten to cook and put on a show. We end up with the chefs doing shots of sake. It’s just so much more collegial in LCK than on the main show.

* Karen calls and audible and changes her dish to lobster fried rice when her omelet cooks a little too fast. She serves it with a quail egg, mushrooms, and asparagus. It looks very messy but like it has a zillion flavors. I would also eat this.

* Jason says he’s a “natural performer” and is into drag … with an actual character he’s named Sissy Chablis. He makese seared wagyu NY strip with shiitakes, asparagus, and quail egg, topped with “dancing” bonito flakes. It seems like his dish was a little better executed and he gave a little more entertainment, so he wins again, his fourth in a row.

* Rankings: Kwame, Marjorie, Amar, Carl, Isaac, Jeremy. How many chances can Jeremy get? Outside of his crudo dishes, he hasn’t really excelled, and he seems to be trending downward as the challenges progress and the competition gets better.