Looks like a good crew of competitors for season 4. Hopefully they’ll keep the focus on the cooking like they did last season. Didn’t really get to see much of what skills any are bringing to the table tonight. Some exposed as being candidates for early trips home but a sew of them could still settle in and turn things around.
I would have kept Nimma and sent Ryan packing. While her seasoning and flan were off, at least she had the concept of the dish where Ryan was clueless on his.
Was glad to see Bourdain sitting in as a judge but he was a little more reserved with his quips. Maybe due to it being the first episode of the season.
I get what you’re saying about Ryan. No clue what picatta entails? Come on. I’m not a chef and I know better than that.
I thought the two who couldn’t make a souffle were pretty weak. In fact, every single competitor was scared of the idea; makes me wonder about all of them to a certain extent.
But I can’t say I’m shocked Nimma was the first out. Over salting the food is really a pretty major sin for people good enough to even get in this type of competion. And what the eff is a “cauliflower scramble” supposed to be anyway?
I agree it looks like a fun season ahead with some very talented individuals.
Yeah, i would have liked to see Nimma stay too, although i just don’t understand how a good chef can send out oversalted food. I’m far from a great chef, and i’m always very careful when adding salt, because it’s one mistake that’s very difficult to fix after you make it.
I always find the first four or five episodes of Top Chef vaguely unsatisfying, because there are just too many of them, and we never really get a good chance to see them all work. Tonight was really just a blur, with very little sense of what each chef was doing and what their strengths and weaknesses might be.
Did you see the thickness of the crusts on some of those pizzas? Some of them looked like focaccia bread or cakes with toppings.
I thought the fact that two of them are partners was interesting; i would have liked to hear a little more about that. Did the judges know, when they made the selection, that they had chosen partners? I’m sure the whole situation will make for one or two interesting moments down the road.
I’m probably the only person on the board who actively dislikes A. Bourdain, huh. Ah well. I still think the show is inherently flawed (with the whole, how can the viewers at home deliver or really understand an opinion about flavor? thing) but as I’m stuck working at someone’s home every Weds. at 10, I will probably begin to watch it regularly. I caught part of a marathon of the last season and I was surprised at their choice of winner - I did think he should have won, but I thought he would be…not “American-TV-Network” enough to be chosen by the judges. Happy to be wrong, I guess.
I’m dubious about the validity of the judges’ words (all of the judges), and I hate artificial character creation through editing, but I LOVE watching pretty, interesting sounding foods being made and presented.
The chicken picatta made me laugh. It was one of my dad’s usual dishes when he used to make dinner and I was like, “ooh, no!” at both chefs. Judges were totally right there, with both choices they ceased to be making chicken picatta in the slightest. That one guy’s souffle sauce looked like skid marks on the plate. I missed the pizza part, too bad. I’m looking for interesting pizza recipes.
They’re lucky I wasn’t a guest judge for the Quickfire. I’m from Chicago, and you just don’t mess with our pizza. To his credit though, Rocco gave one of the contestants a look of “Oh, isn’t that just precious!” when they put their pizza in front of him.
I’d be hurling pizza pans and screaming “DOUGH! SAUCE! SAUSAGE! TOMATOS! BAKE!” Peaches? ARUGULA? MARMITE!? I’d be willing to give Marmite a shot just once - it might be OK on a pizza in small amounts, but most of what the contestants were using was inappropriate.
Who was the one from Manhattan that grumbled about not knowing about pan pizza and wound up making something that looked like a bialy with so much dough and a little dollop of toppings in the center?
Hopefully we’ll see more cooking in future episodes. Last night’s crammed the challenge cooking into what, five minutes and skipped most of the contestants to dwell on the one guy not knowing what mayonnaise was made of. I’d have chucked him out right then and there for that.
I’m surprised it took this long for Whole Foods to elbow it’s way on to this show. It seems like such an obvious move.
I’ve said this before, but the greatest thing about this show is that they always keep the food as being the most important criterium for voting off contestants. Most reality show producers would say “Hmm, a devout Muslim woman in a house with a lesbian couple and a bunch of foul-mouthed chefs? That’s some good TV - vote out someone else.” But these guys tasted salty food and said “Hit the road.”
I’m no chef either and I might have misjudged the amount of dough needed for pizza, too, but I at least knew it would rise and probably would have allowed a little leeway for that. Some of them didn’t see to realize that the dough would rise.
I’ve never made chicken picatta, rarely eat it, but even I had a good idea that it was chicken, possibly a breast, pounded and flattened and then dredged and sauted with a lemon butter sauce. I couldn’t understand why that one guy kept going on about “all the starch”.
Again, not a chef but even I know mayo is eggs and oil and I think a little lemon juice.
It just seems odd that chefs would not know these basic things.
That’s the one that really got to me. I, too, was surprised by the universal dread of the souffle (I would have loved to see one of the contestants voluntarily select it, and then have us find out that it is his or her specialty), but at least I sort of understood it; it’s a tricky thing to do. But when that guy said he didn’t know how to make mayonnaise?! I make my own mayonnaise, and I don’t even really like the stuff.
As for the deep dish pizza, as much as I would have liked to see a really well executed pizza with marinara, sausage, and mozzarella, they were asked to create a “signature” pizza. To me that implies something unusual.
This is my first season watching this, and at first I was a little taken aback by some of the wilder pizza toppings, but as I thought about it today, I realized that the name of the show is “Top Chef,” not, “Top Cook.” Not to denigrate good cooks at all, but to me the difference is between execution and conception (although, the chef has to execute well, also).
They were asked, specifically, for a new interpretation of the traditional Chicago deep-dish pizza. Anyone who put a basic sausage, sauce and cheese pizza in front of the judges would have been asked, “So what’s new about this?” You might not like the experimental ingredients (some of those pizzas sounded pretty gross to me too), but the fact is that being creative is part of what the show’s about.
Agree totally. It was also suggested that they use their “can’t live without it” ingredients for the pie, which further takes them away from doing a traditional deep dish.
I despise Andrew. Sure, I’d probably be a little cocky if I were a sous chef at LeCirque, but something about him bugs the heck out of me.
I find molecular gastronomy a little twee, but I like Richard. Go figure.
The winning duck l’orange dish looked so good. I also liked the look of the autumn lasagne.
What is the point for these contestants to be on this show? Lots of them seem to have achieved a ton of success already so is it ego? The chance for some cash to open their own place? I don’t remember what the prizes are other than being named “Top Chef.”
Also, how long before someone complains that one of the lesbians is helping out the other one during a challenge?
Wasn’t Nimma, ironically, the one who made the Chicago style pizza that they said din’t have enough salt?
I cannot cook a piece of toast, yet I love this show, I don’t know why. 50% of the time I have no idea what they are talking about, and 50% of the dishes I almost certainly would never eat. Yet I love this show.
I think the goal of most of them is to win the cash prize and use it to open their own restaurant. Plus, it’s a chance to build a national reputation for themselves.
I hate Rocco. He has been trying way to hard to be a celebrity chef. Sure he has the looks of a Sears catalog watch model, but he just has no personality. And everytime I see him he is trying something new to see if it works. And now that he is pathetically trying to be Bourdain, I want to smash his head in with a cutting board.
I read some of the judges’ blogs, and they seemed somewhat sympathetic to them. No one on the show is allowed to use written recipes, and apparently a souffle is easy to screw up if you don’t have the recipe exactly right. (I wouldn’t know personally, having never cooked anything that didn’t come in a box or a can.)
Every chef, no matter how experienced, will always have surprising gaps in their knowledge, especially if they weren’t culinary school trained. I’m not going to put it against the chefs that they didn’t know how to make pizza or mayo or picatta or souffle.
It was clear that Nimma was going home from the first time they even showed her dish. Even ignoring the salting issue, her dish showed no complexity or skill whatsoever. Marinated, grilled shrimp and cauliflower belongs in a cafeteria, not at cooking of this caliber. Even if it were technically perfect, it would have been boring.
Having said that, this is clearly the most talented season so far by a long margin. There should be some serious cooking and some tough judging in the coming weeks.