Top Chef: What Kind of Top Chef Doesn't Know How to Make a Dessert?

It's not every day that an agnostic with a passion for eating the dead flesh of animals is invited to celebrate Passover with his Jewish friends in the form of a meatless lasagna cook-off, but that's exactly what I did last night as cheftestants competed in Chicago and on my television screen to become America's next Top Chef. In a way, I guess my friend and her current love interest's rivalry over whose matza lasagna is better kind of parallels what takes place every week on my favorite cooking competition. In the end, despite the fact that the love interest presented a tasty eggplant and spinach rendition of the classic, I had to go with my friend's "old world recipe," which pretty much just involved a shitload of cheese. I love cheese. If I had to choose any food to get stuck on a desert island with forever, I'd choose Natalie Portman smothered in cheese.

By the time I got home at 10:45, I was disgustingly stuffed and ready for Top Chef. This was one of those weeks you didn't want to miss. Every season, cheftestants are eventually asked to make some sort of dessert, but every season the cheftestants, as I've pointed out before, show up pretty oblivious to the fundamentals of their culinary art -- like the classics, like technique, and, surprise, dessert. If you're an athletic person with dreams of winning a triathlon, you don't train at the running and cycling parts of the race, but skip the swimming because you don't like water, do you? Then why do the cheftestants not prepare beforehand by learning three or four dessert recipes, just so they aren't left bitching to the camera about how desserts aren't their thing. Even Padma pointed out desserts have always been the Achilles' heal of chefetestants. Why? Again, they've all seen previous seasons. They know what's coming. The fact that some of them bomb the Quickfire Challenge is just survival of the fittest, as far as I'm concerned. When it was all over, Richard, who might as well just be crowned Top Chef right now, won the challenge. I want to get rich and hire this guy to live in a room off my kitchen, seriously.

The Elimination Challenge was decidedly cooler, as the cheftestants had to visit the Second City improv club in Chicago, where the comics asked the audience to shout out random colors, emotions, and foods to "help with one of their skits." Instead, the suggestions were compiled into themes for a five-course meal, like "yellow, love, vanilla" and "magenta, drunk, Polish sausage." Split into pairs, the cheftestants went to work taking the mandate of the challenge either seriously, like Dale and Richard who made a "perplexed" tofu steak grilled in beef fat, or bitching about their trio of words and making whatever they felt like instead, like Antonia and Lisa who both hated Polish sausage so much they made chorizo and fish instead. The judges weren't amused, and called Antonia and Lisa and Stephanie and Jen, who also fudged the rules, before them. Since neither team followed the terms of the challenge completely, a decision was based simply on whose dish was worse and that was Stephanie and Jen's.

And Jen was asked to pack her knives. Looks like she didn't have to wait a whole season to see her girlfriend and outcast cheftestant, Zoi, again!

Recommend (0) |

Comments (0) |

Email  |

Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us