Hell's Kitchen 6-18 (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

Excellent point, Hippy. Taking the spaghetti from the trash was a deliberate act that indicates a horrifying lack of judgment and standards. If I knew of a chef that had done such a thing, I would never eat in his/her restaurant again.

You gotta admit though, that the bad crab is right up there. As Diogenes said, they should both be gone, but for the fact that Aaron is also out (the show has a fixed number of weeks after all). But it is over for Jen, not just on the show, but who in the industry will hire her now? Apparently even the despised Waffle House has standards higher than hers.

I’m sure that both kitchens were serving the same crab, it’s possible that someone on the red side pulled their’s out of the fridge too early and left it at room temperature too long – it’ll turn on you pretty quick.

D’ja notice, also, that when Joanna gave GR the names, she nominated herself (attempting to look like she was taking responsibility for her screw-ups), but blamed Julia’s nomination on the other women? Yeah, they all took part but she was part of the ‘all.’ It smacks of her recognition that it was a stupid nomination, especially in light of the fact that they had openly discussed the garbage spaghetti.

On the men’s side Rock seems the most competent to me but he’s participating in all of the posturing and strategizing as well; he chose to nominate Josh instead of Aaron last week, and it ended up costing him an extra body in the kitchen this week (actually more than one – Eddie may have had competence issues, but Aaron was a serious negative force, screwing up whatever he did, being in the way, walking off in the middle of tasks). Rock chose to keep Aaron around an extra week! Now that I think of it, that’s why Ramsey didn’t overrule his nominations last week: He was telling Rock “If this is your choice, you get to live with it.”

I predicted Melissa for the final last week. I’m sticking with that, and I think she’ll be up against Julia, who can handle pressure and is starting to stand up for herself. It’ll be interesting to see how good her palette is next week – is she one of the smokers?

22

I have seen tests done before that look like the palate test they are doing next week. It seems that very few people can actually distinguish flavors when they don’t know what the food is. I saw one where a group of people were given chocolate flavored yogurt and told it was strawberry, and 10 out of 10 people swore up and down that it was indeed strawberry flavored. Even after they were told what it was later, they insisted it was strawberry. This is especially true for foods that don’t have a distinct smell, apparently our brains decide a lot about a food based on its smell and the way it looks. I would bet that most of the contestants are going to get many many things wrong, and that the producers knew that ahead of time.

I recently saw an episode of “Dinner Impossible” where a professional chef (I forget which one, he is very famous and on the Food Network) had to re-create dishes by tasting them and trying to figure out how they were made. Even he had a really tough time and was missing some key ingredients.

23

Great posts this week! I enjoyed the whole thread. My only comments at this point are good riddance to Aaron, and I can’t wait to see the nominations that Gordon overrules next week.

24

I was glad to see Aaron go. I usually have compassion for the Reality Show Weakling, but he was just too much.

25

Maybe we already know which sex it is, but I’m going to wager that the two girls who always try to nominate Julia will do it again at a time when one of the two of them screwed up royally.

26

About the crab: I’m sure the team was deliberately given rancid crab. It was a little test/trap for whoever ended up on apppetizers: do they pay attention to what they are cooking? What do they do if they notice it? Panic? Tell Ramsey in a business-like way?

They’ve had other ‘gotchas’ in the past, this time Johanna drew the short straw and failed the test.

27

Why? I’ll agree that trying to serve a customer food from the trash is a Very Bad Thing, but what is there in the trash that makes the food inedible? Unless it came in contact with raw meat or the rancid crab, what gets thrown away that would ruin the food? And Jen did attempt to sterilize it in the boiling water.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that serving food from the garbage and serving rancid crab are both Bad Ideas. But if offered the choice, I would take food from the garbage over rancid crab any day of the week. Rancid crab means a nasty bout with food poisoning and a trip to the hospital. Food from the garbage means a bout with the screaming heebie-jeebies. (And that’s only if I were told.)

28

Aaron had some sort of issue he was either hiding or not treating, something repeated a number of times before this show that he regards as completely normal. He repeatedly dismissed his episodes using the word “cloudy” to describe his mental state, as though he thought it were something everyone experienced. Very odd.

I love how the snobby ones rag on Julia for not having a clue about “proper ingredients”, which apparently include rancid crab and wastebasket pasta.

If you get BBC in your area, and haven’t seen it, look for a repeat of the four-episode series, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares”, or its follow-up “Revisited” series.

Ramsay knows that good recipe-dsign skills make up a very small percentage of the skills needed to run a successful restaurant. Most of it is knowing how to make lots of food of consistent quality, choosing to cook things your target clientele actually want to eat (also serving it in a healthy and appealing fashion), and keeping costs and serving times down without sacrificing quality.

I knew Julia had him when she called out for the plate to be put together by the time the omelette was done. She knew the meat would stay hot through set-up, just in time for the fresh-from-the-pan eggs. I think Ramsay would say that knowing how to get an omelette and breakfast meat dish piping hot to the customer time after time is going to be a 99% better indicator of whether a restaurant will be successful than whether the #1 chef in charge of the place personally knows how to make creme brulee.

29

Well, that assumes that the trash is just fresh food stuffs, like the “garbage bowl” that Rachel Ray uses. I’ve never worked in a kitchen before, but I would think the garbage could include food that’s fallen on the floor, rotten or raw meat, used band-aids, hair, gum, kitchen floor sweepings - or rancid crab that the previous cook tossed out. (It also reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where George eats the eclair from the “top of the trash!”)

By that same logic, maybe the rancid crab, once cooked, wouldn’t cause food poisoning. (Not defending Joanna; I just see what she did so much worse than what Jen did.) Hey, if Jen wants to fish her own dinner out of the top of the trashcan, that’s her business. I don’t even like to touch my own trashcan lid at home. As Jerry Seinfeld said, “Adjacent to trash is trash.”

30

I spent a good portion of last night giggling over that Seinfeld episode: “And you figured, ‘What the hell, I’ll eat some trash!’”

One of my favorites

31

I’m also more and more impressed with Julia. Sure she may not know all the gourmet dishes, but what she makes, she makes consistantly and as Ramsey has said, that’s the key to running a restraunt. She strikes me as being the type to be in the kitchen during the day trying to make some of the dishes so that she knows the right way.

I think last season it was only when the red side got together and made a seriouse effort to learn and memorize the menu that they made progress. Seems to me that all these people (except Julia) have a serious chip on thier shoulders. “I’ve been making Risotto for 10 years and teaching other people how to make it every day”…yeah, well try making it right. Or more importantly make it the way Ramsey wants it.

32

I couldn’t understand the shock! horror! when some of the Red team learned that Julia didn’t know what a creme brulee is. So you explain it to her, and she is enlightened about 2 minutes later. They made it sound as if she didn’t know how to read, or walk upright. :rolleyes:

As Atrael notes, it’s all about consistency, and it seems that she can consistently cook at a high standard.

33

Yeah, the line from one of the snobs was pretty funny. “It took me TEN YEARS to learn all this stuff.”

I wish Julia had deadpanned, “Well, we all do the best we can.”

34

They appear to have some kind of manuals or handbooks that break down the recipes and dishes (and as anal as Ramsay is, they probably contained detailed, step-by-step, prep-to-garnish instructions for each and every station). It also appears that Julia spends a lot of her free time studying while some of the cooking school snobs have decided they already know it all. I have a feeling a number of them are going to be surprised to find themselves going home before she does – maybe all of them.

The recipes and techniques can be learned, and I’ve never though GR was as concerned about how many recipes a cook has memorized as he is about their ability to run a line, be consistent, listen to what he’s telling them, pay attention to details, etc. If he thinks Julia has those other skills, he knows that learning the specific recipes is just a technicality.

35

I do know what it is, and I make it from time to time…and trust me, I still ain’t no great shakes in the kitchen. I had no idea it was so important.

36

Ooohhh! I can make pudding, dump sugar on top and scorch the whole lot with a propane torch!

Yeah, that’s worth two Michelin stars in its own. :dubious:

However, I stand in complete awe of those that can juggle six pans on the stove and turn out six different breakfasts simultaneously. It was fascinating to watch that one bit of video showing Julia’s muscle memory in action as she was just reflexively flipping, nudging and poking several pans full of eggs.

37

The difference between Julia and the other women is that Julia KNOWS and understands that she is a Waffle House chef, so she studies and pays attention to detail and realizes that she needs to really understand the quality that GR is advocating. The others (the men included), work may work in nice restaurants but they don’t work in a five star restaurant and they don’t understannd the difference, so they lack the self-awareness that Julia has. So they think they know it all and just have to execute what they know. or they try to get away with crap, like scraping the bottom of a burnt Wellington. I like Julia because she gets it and the others don’t.

38

I was reminded of Bluto’s (John Belushi’s) line in Animal House: “Seven years of college down the drain!”

I’m not a cook and I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but it would seem to me that the Waffle House (or similar eatery) would be a good education. High pressure, with orders constantly coming in, and guests who may be in a hurry but also to whom a fast and good meal is important. I imagine the ability of a chef or cook to remain calm and cool and collected in such a stressful environment while making every order going out consistent would be an asset in any kitchen. I’m unsure if it could work the other way though–could a chef who has only ever worked “better” restaurants hack it in the Waffle House?

39

“It was above the rim!”

“But it was inside the cylinder!”

If we didn’t know that there was already rancid crab in the trash, I think we can safely assume that there’s all manner of trimmings of raw meat from food prep, if not used kleenex, etc…

But getting beyond the food safety issue, and assuming the absolutely best case (i.e. that the spaghetti never touched anything bad, she rinsed it really well, and the boiling water, as Jen said, would kill any bacteria – can I assume that she would make the same argument about serving a piece of meat that she had picked up off the floor before cooking it?), she was recooking old food.

Keep in mind that this is supposed to be a 5-star restaurant; while you can’t burn pasta you can easily overcook it, and if we are to assume it was done before Jen waste-binned it, the act of reheating it in boiling water is going to take it well beyond al dente (especially if, as she claims, she boiled it long enough to kill any trash bugs.

Food poisoning is a horrible thing. Joanne was guilty, at least, of inattentiveness. I don’t buy the suggestion that she has no sense of smell (though that would have been a great argument for having her around for next week’s blindfold test). I like to think that, having been embarrassed by the crab incident, she will be more careful with short-shelf-life foodstuffs in the future.

But Jen’s actions showed the sort of laziness and carelessness that, in principle at least, should get a fast-food worker fired. I’m not saying that said McDrone would get fired, just that their two hour training session on the grill and deep fryer includes proscriptions against serving food that’s been on the floor or in the trash. As did Jen’s 10-year coursework, dissertation, and residency on the theory and architecture of a proper creme brulee.

40

Creme Brulee is not that important in all honesty and is just a simple custard. It’s just trendy French crap that the food illuminati and snobs have elevated to some mythical status.

Flan is the same damn thing minus the hard shell… you never hear people making a big fuss about flan, even though it’s tastier! Damn food snobs…where’s the flan love?