If I was Bobby, I definitely would’ve sent the other lady home instead. Anyone that doesn’t use spices at all, and is afraid to try, wouldn’t be progressing very far, on my team.
Also, I’m sad to see Bob go. They needed some heavy metal up in there and I’m not sure I could’ve dealt with another batch of vanilla chicken. Shudder.
I haven’t had a chance to watch what I’ve DVR’d yet, but I saw a clip with the comment about “Vanilla does not go with chicken” and I just have to say…one of my daughter’s ex-boyfriends once made a chicken dish for us that was fabulous. When I asked him to tell me how to make it, he said he just threw things in that he found in my pantry. Since he hadn’t cleaned up after himself, I saw all the spices he had used, and there in the middle was my bottle of vanilla. When I asked him if he had actually used that in his sauce, he said yes, just a tiny bit. THAT was the intriguing flavor we couldn’t place that made his dish so good! Never even tried to recreate it, but it really, really was good.
I thought it was dinengenuous to say that on an episode where they were touting “extreme flavor combinations.” Of course, you have to really know what you’re doing, and these poor people were tossed into the fire without know what goes together and why.
Flay also questioned apple on pizza, which a key ingredient in one of my favorites, the award-winning “Watsonville Apple” at Pizza My Heart.
Sarina the smurf needs go ASAP. She seems scared of food and incapable of following instructions. I can hardly blame Burrell for getting rid of Double Hot Pepper Guy. She looked like she really didn’t want to try his food and who can blame her.
After this week I’m agreeing with kittenblue’s sister who says what these people really need is Cooking 101: basic techniques and learning how to follow a recipe without catastrophic kitchen failure. I thought the breakfast challenge worked on that level. So did the noodle dish, kind of, although I thought maybe let them pull their own noodles for fun (so to speak) but use premade ones in the actual dish to avoid chewy dough globs the size of hot dogs.
But with the meatballs and the pizza, they’re expecting these lost souls who really have no clue what the ingredients taste like or how to use them to somehow come up with amazing flavors. A lot of them just seemed completely lost, or if they came up with something good it was totally by accident.
I’m sure someone who knows their stuff can make apple pizza or vanilla chicken taste great, but you have to have a little more know-how than the “throw it in and hope it doesn’t suck” brigade.
I like the pizza challenge simple because it was soooooo cringeworthy what some of them thought worked well together. Then the taste-test was good but what they needed to do was set up like 30 ingredients and catagorize them as sweet, smoky, salty, spicy etc. and then have the contestants experiment with choosing two from different categories like meyer lemon and serrano chile and tasting them until they got a combination they liked and they think would go well with chicken.
Now that Smurfette and Botox are gone they may finally have some people who can learn how to cook. That chicken under a brick of Burrell’s looked really good. I thought Unemployed Dave was going home but he was smart in not serving food that fell on the floor.
i vehemently disagree with the “these people need basic cooking lessons” camp.
Basic technique is largely a matter of practice. If you cook every day, you will eventually figure out how to chop an onion, brown a chicken, grill a steak, etc. Any reasonably intelligent person can sit down with a copy of the Joy of Cooking and figure that stuff out.
But you are not going to cook every day if you are scared of ingredients, and if you don’t learn how they work together. And you are never going to understand that without experimentation. Some of the worst cooks in the world are great at following recipes. But they never get a handle on how to actually think like a cook, so any little deviation they take ends up wrong, wrong, wrong. Or they get so scared of risk that they are more comfortable leaving flavor out than putting it in. Or (more often) they are just so overwhelmed with cooking and recipes and rules that they give up before they even begin.
A good cook develops a good understanding of how flavors work together, and then they can spend all the time in the world perfecting their techniques. I think the last lesson was a good example of how dishes that include two solid flavor notes can be great in a way that one-note dishes are not.
Wife and I have watched a few episodes of this show and neither of us believes that these people are really as stupid as they pretend to be on here. If they were I don’t see how they could drive a car or tie their shoes. It’s pretty over the top like they are trying to out-retard each other or something.
I do like Bobby Flay though in a douchey kind of way.
Aw Squeaky Smurfette is gone just when she finally got her hair looking nice.
After a few sessions in the kitchen with my 23 year old daughter, I do not find that the contestants cluelessness is over the top. In fact, I don’t think most of them are clueless enough. I think that some of them poured on the stupid on that first day and we are seeing tho ones that weren’t exaggerating leaving now. Not knowing how to use utensils? Damn, I started a thread about not knowing how to use a juicer and I’ve been cooking for ages.
Pokerface needs to go on a vegetarian cooking show. Or that next week she’ll have to field dress a deer.