Wednesday, July 29, 2009

SHUCKS! If there's one thing I love on Top Chef, it's the mise-en-place relay race -- and that they've added an oyster shuck-off and Hubert M.F. Keller (and stealth assassin Anita Lo) to the proceedings just makes it that much more awesome.

Anyone who's ever seen the show before could figure out what the elimination challenge was going to be once the interlude was suggested, but no matter: this was the kind of high-level cooking in a collegial environment which has made this season so much fun. The moment which scared me -- and likely you as well -- was when Rick Bayless pledged to not be Baylessy this round. No! Let Bayless Be Bayless!

[This week's spelling bee word: chawanmushi, a Japanese egg custard. I'll use it in a sentence: "I'd like to try Anita Lo's chawanmushi."]

Whatever complaints I've had lately about the show have dissipated -- this episode featured six great chefs put in a position to shine, without unfair or unrealistic constraints, and if there is no Top Chef Masters II I'll be really disappointed.

added: Did you know that Rick Bayless and Jay Rayner are among those blogging this season? Rayner, on Art Smith and the Scottish egg:
Here’s what you need to know about the true Scotch egg: it is a British traditional food, which has no noble antecedents. Or to put it another way, it may once have been a glorious thing, but nobody of my generation in Britain is aware of such a thing. It is a nightmarish food item, the stuff of cheap family weddings, where the irascible scary uncle gets drunk and tries to score with the bridesmaids. The buffet at that sort of wedding would always include a platter of Scotch eggs, which would leave as nasty a taste in the mouth as the party. Think dry, cold, coagulated, cheap quality sausage meat – minced pig eyelids, ground down ears and knee caps; the cheapest of the cheap – with a crust of bright orange breadcrumbs on the outside, and inside an egg boiled to such a degree that if lobbed in a crowded public space it would be regarded as a dangerous weapon. Put said item in deep fat fryer and leave to DIE. Scotch eggs are what you eat at three o’clock in the morning when you pull into a service station off the motorway and are too hungry to make a proper judgment. They are what you eat in British pubs – not the nice oldie worldy, prettified ones; the nasty, sticky floored ones, where the curtains small of nicotine and the air is heavy with the taint of regret and disappointment – when you have drunk ten pints of lager the colour and flavour of something that came out the wrong end of a cat.

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