Previously on “Top Chef”: the first Quickfire asked the contestants to cook with hops. I guess you could have seen that coming. Laura made a rice pudding which gave her the win and the money. For the Elimination challenge, everyone had to get into two teams to elevate bar snacks. Specifically, popcorn, pickles, pretzels, mixed nuts, potato chips, olives, and Corn Nuts. Some people were very successful at this and some people just made more snacks which apparently was bad. The point of the bar snacks was so we could have a Miller High Life sponsorship. Rasika made pretzel cake with honey mustard sabayon, which sounds amazing, and was declared the winner. Valentine made corn soup, but it was not great and also tasted of “corn” and not “Corn Nuts” so he was eliminated. (click for more)
Last Chance Kitchen: the mystery contestant was revealed. Soo and Valentine had to use fancy ingredients to make comfort food. Where is David, you ask? For a long time no one would say, but then Tom tweeted “he opted out”. This was very quickly walked back, replaced by a statement about David having his second chance after the first challenge (that “use leftovers to make something” challenge with the bottom three).
We still don't why this story changed. Anyway, certainly people have gotten to LCK and decided they were done competing and quit, so that's not that unusual. Valentine made corn again and it was too thick again so Soo moved on.
Back in the Stew Room, Kevin and Charly talk about how being in the bottom sucks. That's pretty much it. In the morning Rasika and Danny go for a run so they can talk about winning. Dan puts his braces on. They do go under his pants so I can see how you might not notice. He claims he will not be running around the kitchen.
When everyone comes in, there is Kristen and a big table with bowls of cherries. Also a fake wall with a bunch of little doors of different colors. Carla Hall and Clea Duvall are here too. Carla is Carla. For the Quickfire, we discuss Door County cherries and mystery ingredients, which is what is behind the little doors. Rasika gets to go first, since she won the last challenge. She picks a big red door and finds cipollini onions. Danny goes next (Rasika gets to pick) and gets bamboo shoots. Amanda, mustard (ew). Michelle gets ginseng, but she doesn't know what it is so she guesses various stringy root things like ginger and horseradish before Kristen tells her what it is. Charly gets chocolate and complains it's a little too easy. Kenny has marshmallows, which he doesn't like. Supposedly no one likes marshmallows unless you're like, four years old. Dan ends up with kimchi; Kevin, black garlic; Savannah, chicken livers. She doesn't use chicken livers, but judging from the chatter several of the other chefs are jealous. Kaleena, canned salmon; Laura, condensed milk; Alisha, Serrano peppers. Manny is last, probably because he's a very strong competitor, and he ends up with soy sauce. Note that no one got to see what they were picking. The order was simply to see who had the most options, not who could pick their favorite first. $5000 for the winner of this Quickfire, and 30 minutes to cook.
Alisha is very pleased with spicy peppers. Rasika wants to cook her onions in the cherry juice. Kaleena is not thrilled with salmon but she's making sauce. None of these cherries are pitted. But why? I mean, at least everyone has to pit cherries, but this is such a waste of time for no reason. You could have had an intern pit cherries. Michelle tastes her ginseng and finds out that fresh ginseng is bitter. The only thing she knows to do is make tea. Kevin cooks some beef tenderloin. Savannah is going to make pate, which is the classic thing to make with chicken livers, but normally you would put it on toast and she doesn't want to do that since it's what the judges will expect. Then she talks about her background without saying what she's using instead of toast. Kenny hates marshmallows. Charly chars some beets, which is weird because he has chocolate, possibly the easiest ingredient. Alisha puts some big cabbage quarters on the grill, and then mentions in confessional that they might be too big but she didn't want them to fall apart on the grill before she wrapped them up to steam. More than one person is not happy with the dish they end up with.
Amanda: cherry glazed pork tenderloin with cherry and mustard mostarda. Mostarda is basically candied fruit and mustard syrup. Savannah: chicken liver mousse, panzanella salad with shishito peppers, and Bing cherry vinaigrette. Rasika: tart cherry cipollini onions, charred pepper relish, and berbere spice. Laura: Montmorency cherry condensed milk ice cream, tart cherry syrup, and pepper. Manny: soy marinated roasted pork belly with sauteed and pickled cherries. Kaleena: cherry and salmon croquette with tart cherry cream. Charly: charred golden beets with chocolate cherry demi, smashed purple potatoes, and pickled cherries. Kenny: toasted marshmallows with rum and cherry sauce, fried cinnamon and sugar spring roll paper. Michelle: cherry and ginseng broth with charred shrimp and bok choy. Kevin: beef tenderloin with poele of cherries and black garlic. Kristen asks what a poele is, should she know what that is. I think a saute? Danny: grilled skirt steak, bamboo shoot and cherry gremolata with cherry gastrique. Dan: kimchi pancake with kimchi cherries and Bing cherry hoisin. Alisha: charred cabbage with cherry Serrano reduction and lime and anchovy butter.
Overall this was not bad. Charly did not have a good pairing of chocolate and beets. Kenny's dish wasn't cohesive, and Alisha undercooked her cabbage (which you could have guessed would happen based on the foreshadowing). The top three are Savannah (everything came together), Rasika (balanced flavors and good acid), and Kevin (tart cherries brought everything alive). The winner is Rasika. Who has now won $15,000. Clea leaves but Carla stays.
It is time for cheese. I guess we're front-loading the stereotypical challenges this season. Two cheesemakers roll in a big table. For the Elimination challenge, you must make a dish with at least one cheese from the table, for the judges and 100 guests at the “first ever Top Chef Cheese Festival”. Dan claims there is currently no cheese festival in Wisconsin, a fact I doubted so I put “cheese festival Wisconsin” into Google and immediately got like 6 different things. Literally the top hit is the Great Wisconsin Cheese Festival. Cheese is assigned through “random” knife draw. I don't know it's not random, I just never trust any reality show when they claim something is randomly assigned. I mean the one French person got brie. They can come taste their cheese right now to see what they're working with. Kristen tells everyone the crowd favorite will win immunity, so this is a challenge where you do have to think about the random non-judge diners. The judges will pick the bottom three.
Shopping time. Rasika buys chicken thighs, and I feel like she might be the first person to buy the prepackaged ones and not go to the meat counter. Right? It's either the meat counter or like, canned garbage. I don't know if they've ever shown a contestant buying the shrink-wrapped pack of 12 chicken thighs or whatever like a normal person. She's making some rice batter cakes that usually take two days to ferment, and she kind of laughs nervously about it. The editors leave in a long shot of her uncomfortable smiling. Kaleena is making pasta, we assume from scratch. (Spoiler: lol) Manny has cheese curds, which he isn't familiar with because he's never lived in the Midwest. He knows two things with cheese curds: poutine and fried cheese curds. So it's poutine time. Lots of croquettes happening. Michelle says saag paneer with collard greens.
Two hours to cook today. I don't think they said, but probably there is a little time tomorrow at the venue. Someone has set up a big fake cheese counter display with cheese in it. Michelle and Amanda discuss working the crowd, and Amanda reveals people tell her that she sounds like Daria. Then she giggles and says she's not sure why that's so funny. She does have a cute laugh. Kenny reveals that tomorrow it's going to be 100 degrees so instead of making yet another fried thing, he's going to somehow make crab rangoon salad with gorgonzola. I do want to be on this show very badly, but would I stand around outside in 100 degree weather and eat fried cheese for a couple of hours? I mean yes, but that's pushing it. (that's 37.8 degrees Celsius, btw) Kevin wants to form all his croquettes tonight. Michelle tells us everyone is making potato croquettes, but hers is different because it's cheese bound together by potato. What, instead of potato with cheese? I don't see how that's different. Lots of making croquette filling now to cool overnight. Kaleena dumps some store-bought dried pasta into a pot, and tells someone to quit judging her because she can feel it. I mean...I know it's not a pasta challenge but no one uses store-bought pasta. She says this is not the challenge to make pasta, this is the challenge to highlight cheese and get this shit done. Fair, but I'm going to assume they will yell at her anyway. She tells someone it's not really mac and cheese but some type of alfredo situation. Charly drops some cream on the floor.
Tom Time! And Carla. Immediately Alisha is making croquettes with ham and Tom is like, who makes croquettes. Alisha interviews that she makes Spanish food, and so of course the first time she can highlight that, everyone is making croquettes. Then there is a montage of people saying “croquette” and Tom looking mildly unhappy. When they finally get to Kenny, they make faces but I expected more of a reaction to someone NOT making croquettes. Tom and Carla leave so really all we learned in that scene was that everyone is making croquettes, which we already knew.
As prep continues, Dan says he's making gnocchi. OK so another non-fried person. Laura rounds a corner with a full pot and slips on the floor. When Charly dropped the cream or whatever it was on the floor, no one cleaned it up. They show a shot of the floor and it looks like someone did a half-assed job running a towel over it and then leaving the towel on the floor next to the counter. But you can see all the streaks they missed. Dan goes by the same spot, yelling to ask the room some question. I think Laura tries to warn him but he falls completely and drops some of his gnocchi on the floor. Rasika yells at Laura that she needs to clean up after herself. While that's true (because I think when she slipped, she spilled something out of her pot), Charly spilled before her and clearly didn't clean it up well. Dan is pissed off, which makes total sense, but his argument seems to be less “it's basic courtesy to clean up your shit” and more “no one else has to worry about anything physical but I have Kennedy's disease so this is especially unfair to me personally”. There are a lot of shots of Laura cooking at her station and not cleaning anything or apologizing but those could have been cut in from any time today. She does eventually say the floor was already dirty, and Dan does that thing where you say it's fine and we're moving on but no one who is actually moving on says out loud that they're moving on. Manny hopes his filling sets up, which I only mention because they didn't put any clips of anyone else saying so. So I assume this means his food will be messed up tomorrow.
In the morning Kaleena calls her partner. She cant' remember how many years they've been together, which is somehow cute and not sad. She interviews that she moved away from him and his mom for a job, and now she's away for this show.
They have an hour for prep today, and they might spend all of it setting up. Manny admits to his car that he doesn't have a backup plan. Alisha says this is the first chance she's had to do her food, “and I know that's not why we're here--” Her whole car interrupts her to say in unison “that is EXACTLY why you're here”. Heh. The venue is a big red barn, and a lawn area with a handful of picnic tables, some random small tall tables, and one lone table with an umbrella that I'm sure is for the judges only. The chefs' stations have umbrellas. There is no other shade unless you leave the area and stand under the trees behind the cooking stations. It looks beautiful but it cannot be comfortable. Also there is a fence at the back and behind that it looks like a cornfield for maximum Midwesterness.
People whose stations are along the fence do get a little extra shade from some small trees. Kevin says he's cracking eggs in a cornfield, “the American dream”. Heh. Everyone is stressed and it is 95 degrees (35 C). Dough is too soft, or things are getting hot, and of course Manny's filling is too hot to bread. Also the field is full of bees. Someone says they're all doing croquettes, and Charly is like “you know Tom is going to talk a lot of shit about it” which is true. Kevin has to double bread his croquettes because they will melt otherwise. It looks like there might be a breeze? I can't imagine once 100 people get on this lawn you will be able to feel it.
Everyone arrives all at once like they always do. Carla sits on a tractor for some reason. As I predicted, the one table with an umbrella is where the judges are. They also have a big cheese board with samples of various things. Is that so they know what the chefs were working with? We also discover that some of the cheesemakers are here, for the added pressure of serving the person who made the thing you cooked.
When the judges arrive at Danny's table, it looks like he has a dozen blocks of his cheese just sitting on the corner of the table, like a display. Whose idea was it to put cheese out in the sun all day? Danny: 15 year cheddar fritter, cheddar-lime mornay and cheddar foam. It's a little mini eclair with cheddar inside. Mornay is just a flour/egg/butter sauce with cheese in it. Very light but you can taste all the cheese. Kevin does not have a pile of his cheese on display. But he is begging people to vote for him.
Amanda: Mount raclette arancini with mornay and Dijon sauce, fig and olive gremolata. Very good, rice cooked properly, the Dijon makes it feel almost like a Cuban sandwich. Tom tells the other judges that Alisha is “the croquette queen of Chicago” and she is embarrassed. Hee. Alisha: ham and brick cheese croquettes with sherry aioli. Well balanced. Manny: potato croquette with gravy and cheese curds. It's poutine, but with potato croquette instead of fries for some reason. It's salty, and they're mad he didn't do anything to the cheese curds except put them on the plate. No mention of the croquette at all, the thing he has spent all this time talking about.
Charly: yucca croquette with canela cheese and tomato-mango sauce. This dish is underseasoned and Gail thinks the cheese is lost, especially when you put the sauce on. Kaleena: Bellavitano mac and cheese with merlot mushrooms and bread crumbs. This is the cheese with the rind that's washed in merlot, hence the mushrooms. She also says she thought everyone would do mac and cheese and now she's the only one. The judges are glad to not have a croquette. Carla says she clearly thought about that specific cheese and the merlot, and incorporated that flavor. No one cares about store bought pasta. Savannah: Oaxaca cheese quesadilla with whipped avocado, hatch chile and roasted corn salsa. She also made her tortillas from scratch. They seem to like it, although Kristen says it's too much cheese.
Kevin: brie croquettes with mornay, ham, and truffle. Tom asks a pointed question about why a croquette, and when Kevin says something about wanting the cheese to melt Tom makes a face and then they all leave. The breading is very heavy, and Tom thinks it's the worst croquette yet. Some random person says the truffle overpowers the brie. We see a shot of the voting papers, which looks like you are giving everyone a score from 1 to 5. It's not clear if they are adding scores or averaging, but it doesn't seem to be a straight “you have one vote and most votes wins”. Dan: Sancho Cruz manchego potato dumplings, cheese foam, and olive tapenade. So he called these gnocchi during prep yesterday? Why the word change? It's light and the texture is great.
Laura: gouda reserve potato croquette with peach mostarda. The mostarda doesn't taste like mustard and Carla thinks the cheese is getting lost. Kenny says he's running low on relish, so he might be shafting diners to save it for judges. Rasika: Dunbarton blue paniyaram with braised chicken korma. Paniyaram is the fermented batter that gets steamed into little round pancake balls. Gail loved the rice cake and all the spices. Kenny: crab rangoon salad with gorgonzola crème fraiche crema, luxardo cherry relish, and rice paper chip. Somehow there is no cheese flavor. It's too watery and Tom is mad he was spooning wet relish on top of it.
Michelle: coconut curry collard green saag with Pleasant Ridge Reserve potato fritter. Amazing. Kristen curses about it. There's cheese in both the saag and the fritter and you can taste it in both places. The judges act like they're going to count the votes themselves which is hilarious. Kristen gets to use the megaphone to call everyone over. So I guess we're going to announce winners and bottom three in front of all the random people? Huh. Top three are Kaleena, Michelle, and Dan. Two of which did not make croquettes. The winner is Michelle! Now all the random people leave so we can talk about the bottom three.
Judges' Table. Kenny, Manny, and Kevin are the bottom three. They all have to stay outside which sucks. Turns out this bottom three was also the bottom three in terms of scores from diners. Kenny thought of crab rangoon very quickly when he got gorgonzola. It was a good idea to have a cold dish, but there was no cheese flavor. Tom brings up how wet it was, and it turns out once Kenny ran out of relish, he was just spooning the juice on things to get that flavor in. Kevin blames the heat for putting him in the bottom. He admits he double coated his croquette, and everyone nods like that explains everything. Gail says why do a croquette at all, then, and he babbles something about America and cornfields. Tom says they were looking for cheese, not fried stuff. Manny argues that his dish would have worked in a “normal” setting where he could have frozen his filling. This was underseasoned (Kevin's was too) and also Manny didn't do anything to the cheese curds because he didn't have time.
Kenny just had some mush, and Tom is offended that he didn't save relish for the judges. He said he was going to? Did he not save enough? Manny knows where his problems were, and he spent too much time futzing with his potatoes. Kristen thinks that last challenge, they told Kevin his dish was too simple, and it fucked with his head. Tom says it's not that his dish was too complicated, the breading was too thick.
The bottom three did not showcase the cheeses they were given. Kenny is sent home. He has to think about how his flavors go together. He can't wait to go home and be better for himself, but he's excited for Last Chance Kitchen.
Next week: be inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, double elimination. Maybe teams?
Last Chance Kitchen: Kenny is ready to fight. He is very confused to see Soo, someone he doesn't know. Tom reminds Kenny he didn't have any cheese flavor in his dish. Tom says something about how they tried all the best cheese in the state...except limburger. Kenny hasn't even tried it before. He says this is Tom's MO: “Remember that thing that you did bad? Well, here's a worse version of it, do better.” Yeah that's Tom's whole philosophy for LCK. Limburger is very stinky because the bacteria in it is the same one that causes body odor. 20 minute to make something with limburger as the only cheese.
They both try the cheese and it's really strong. Kenny wants to make pizza with grilled rice paper. He calls the time limit cruel and unusual punishment. Soo is making eggplant parm. Well, with limburger and not parm. His restaurant is “modern Italian” so he's going to stick to what he's comfortable with. Kenny is mixing the cheese with rice wine vinegar. I guess? He says it tastes weird and Valentine encourages him.
Tom Time! Soo says his favorite part of eggplant parm is the cheese. Somehow his tomato sauce has gochugaru in it. Tom tells Valentine that stinky cheese smells but it doesn't taste that way. Doesn't it? Kenny is putting melon on his rice paper/egg/cheese and vinegar pizza. It looks like Soo is plating with five minutes still left. His cheese is almost liquid, but he wants more browning so he's got the blowtorch. Kenny is in the fridge with a minute left, and he gives Tom some shit about how he might put fish sauce on it. He is worried his egg isn't set but we don't see it.
Kenny: Vietnamese rice paper pizza with egg base, chili crisp, grilled cantaloupe, and limburger cheese sauce. He cracked an egg on top of the rice paper, then put the melon and cheese and put all that in the oven and hoped the egg would cook. Soo: eggplant parm with ponzu pomodoro sauce and bruleed limburger cheese. Kenny had a good balance with the melon and cheese, but the egg actually didn't set. Soo had a good sauce. Both dishes were cheese forward, but Kenny is out. The egg was cold even! So another wet dish. He's not disappointed, and he hopes everyone is proud. Soo made good decisions.
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