We had storms and the DVR only got bits and parts of the episode - only about 15 minutes survived.
We went from some sort of sausage fest on the beach with the blue team holding a narrow lead after adding peppers to their food to some sort of steak cookoff.
The most important part to me was that the snotty kid with way too much attitude was kicked out but I don’t have much idea how we got there.
There’s a write-up on the Onion AV Club website. But regarding your spoiler,
I was really torn about seeing that kid (Max) eliminated. On the one hand, he was really unlikeable so I was glad to see him go. He was almost comically unlikeable, so much that I wondered if he was playing it up for the cameras. On the other hand, it was fun to watch how snotty he would be from week to week. And I thought he said that he was a student at Trinity College. I wondered why he didn’t go to the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson & Wales instead, and study food?
The Blue Team won, which put the Red team on the chopping block.
The judges asked the team captain (Esther) who were the two weakest members. She fingered Christine & Max because they were such failures dealing w/the sausage casings. So the other four members were allowed upstairs.
Then they asked Esther whether she thought she was responsible enough for the team’s loss to take one of their places (Christine/Max). She said No, so she was allowed upstairs.
The steak cook-off was to grill 3 filets–one rare, one medium, one well-done (and make them all taste good, of course). Max got closer on the well-done, but Christine appeared to get closer on the other two, plus she went on sight/feel, while Max used a thermometer.
Remember, Max was also in the bottom 3 for the last elimination round, while she pulled a Hail Mary mousse that the judges liked in the last 5 minutes.
So Adios Max!
I’ve been enjoying disliking Max for awhile now, but I thought Christine seemed pretty unlikeable in this episode, so I wouldn’t have minded if both of them were sent packing. It seemed a bit unfair tho to blame Max for the sausage mess if he was actually just following orders and shoving the ground meat into the machine. Although the smirky way he talked about it almost made it sound like he was sabotaging things somehow.
Why didn’t they take off their wristwatches before shoving their hands in that raw meat? Bleah.
Did anyone else think that the judges gave an unfair advantage in the sausage cookoff?
When the red team got out to an early lead, the bald judge directly intervened and gave the blue team some feedback from the bikers that their relish was too sweet. The blue team then altered their recipe and mounted their comeback.
I thought it was really unfair for the judge to do that. He should have let them live or die by the choices they made at the beginning and let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah, weren’t they even told ahead of time that the onions were going to be too sweet, but the team leader stuck with her decision and only changed it after the voting was going against them and AGAIN a judge pointed out the problem? Having done that, the judges could have also given some advice about the problem with stuffing the sausage casings. It almost seemed like the machine was malfunctioning.
Yeah, but didn’t Ramsay also come over and critique the red team’s sausage as well? Something about it being too fine of a grind and that it had a hot dog-like consistency? I know he tasted one and said it tasted like “dog [BLEEEP].”
Oh, but they did. They told the Red team the sausages were too tight. Normally, you’d give the completed sausage some time to rest and settle out, but if you cook them immediately and they’re too tight, they burst.
Also, Max camera-talked that he knew the sausage was too tight and mentioned it to Christine who ignored him. Instead of working with his team to get the problem solved, he pouted and decided they should lose to “show” Christine and Esther. Smooth move, Einstein!
That does sound like Bastianich influenced them if he came up and said the onions were too sweet or whatever. Hard to say if that was solely his idea or if the producers decided to exert their influence and told him to throw them a bone.
As for the sausage casings - if you can’t make sausages, make patties or meatballs. I did see a glimpse of someone making patties amid the pixelization, so someone had the right idea about how to fix disasters on the fly.
Oh, okay, I’m the first to admit I know nothing about making sausages. My one experience, of watching people put a whole fish in one end of a machine, turn a crank, and have sausage meat come out the other end, was too much for my sad, squeamish self. They were whole fish! Shudder. Anyway, I have now learned that tight sausages need to rest before cooking, so thanks!
The judges have a history (based on the previous season) of providing ongoing feedback to teams so that they can continue to change things (or not) based on the feedback they get, so while in this case it definitely helped turn the tide, it was perfectly in keeping with how those competitions have been run.
I thought it was funny on Monday’s episode when each competitor was given a rack of lamb and one of them decided to debone it and make some sort of hamburger dish out of it.
Yeah both sides got feedback from the judges as they were preparing. I had no problem with that. But when the one just gave the other team help mid-contest struck me as bullshit.
Its like they thought it might turn into a rout and went in and influenced the game.
They’ve done something similar in past episodes. I can’t recall the details, but it was another ‘feed the masses’ challenge and I believe it involved hamburgers, and one team got feedback that caused them to switch up their toppings.
That seems likely. I know on Hell’s Kitchen, when there’s a competition between two teams, it always comes down to the last vote. In real life, it’s not always so dramatic.
Yup, they’ve always struck me as even-handed about it. Inevitably, one team will be doing better than the other, so they’ll be less inclined to fix what ain’t broke. But the feedback mid-dining is not a new thing. Some teams are better situated (or more predisposed) to innovate on-the-fly while others will stick to their guns regardless of what they hear…
I liked how Max went through the whole episode thinking the other contestants didn’t want him around because he was a threat to win it all. Many jerks just don’t realize they’re jerks, but his was a humorous combination of naïvité and arrogance.
Reminds me of a bit last season when they had a similar kind of contest with hamburgers. The judges tried to get the team that was losing to change something about their burgers to help them catch up, but the team captain refused and said something like, “If we’re going to lose, we’re going to lose our way!”
They lost their way.