My Interpretive Dance about Last Night’s Top Chef Results

No, I’m just playing.

However, I do think the video below pretty much captures how I feel about Hosea Rosenberg taking the title last night.

With my well-documented Universal Crush on alpha male chefs, I am sure it’s no surprise that I would have been rooting for Stefan Richter (and here’s my article on our conversation with him; he was exactly as myopically and humorously self-aggrandizing as you would expect/hope).

Or Carla Hall, actually, as I liked her style and approach to the competition. She was just cute as a button and whipped out her skillz when you least expected it.

But no, it was Hosea.

West Coasters: Want to spoil your Top Chef appetite?

On Pacific Time?  Can't stay up late to catch the finale? Click here to read my recap on Buddy. 

I'll also be talking with all three of them for Buddy over the next few days, so head on back there to read their take on Top Chef 5.

Oh yeah, so Top Chef 5...

...is back and I will once again be recapping and talking to the eliminated chefs for BuddyTV.

This season the publicists are only doing conference calls instead of single interviews. 

Sadly this means less one-on-one interactions for me, ergo less chances for me to ask my weirdo chef-obsessed fan girl questions. 

Happily, though, it also means no audio, ergo, no gritting my teeth through sound editing my own giggly doofusness and wondering why I ask such weirdo chef-obsessed fan girl questions and why can't I just be normal for once?

So here's last week's Top Chef Premiere Live Thoughts (unedited, meandering), Recap (less meandering), conference call notes with eliminated chefs and my weekly Gourmet/No Way column.

The schedule will be Prediction columns on Tuesday, recaps on Wednesdays, eliminated chef conference calls Thursdays, and Gourmet/No Way Fridays.  We always have polls where you can pick favorites and you can leave comments here or there if you have questions you want me to ask.

As yet I have no official chef crushes, but I will keep you apprised of any developments.

Most Important Thing I’ve Learned from 'Top Chef' and My Real-Life Chefs

After more than a year working at the cooking school and a couple seasons of writing about Top Chef, I think I have narrowed down the biggest lesson I’ve learned from both activities:

Taste and adjust seasonings, frequently, throughout the cooking process, regardless of how familiar you are with the recipe.  And don’t forget to taste before you send the dish out.

This might seem like a banal realization, but since some Top Chefs have been sent home for forgetting to do it, I don’t feel so simple for feeling like it’s a valuable epiphany.

The chefs whose food I like the best at the shop taste a LOT throughout the cooking process, more than I ever would have expected.  It seems like they have made the recipe so many times, why would they need to check it so often, right?  But they do, and I admire the discipline and humility.  It shows respect for ingredients and the natural variation possible in your raw material.

In addition to the process itself, both the show and the shop have given me the questions to ask when tasting in order to arrive at a balanced dish.  Does it need more acid?  More umami?  More salt?  Something brightly-flavored?  Something sour or tangy?  Taste and adjust, taste and adjust, etc.

And another refinement of the seasoning process I’ve learned is to add some salt throughout the cooking process, too, not just at the end, since it can have a different effect if adding WHEN cooking as opposed to at the end of cooking.

I saw that in the lentils for the Lentil-Orzo Salad I made for the Fourth of July.  I checked them a ton of times as they cooked and added a few more smidges of salt as they slowly became more tender.  By the end, they didn’t taste salty, just more lentil-y and generally flavorful.

I used to be so focusing on the mechanical action of cooking I would forget entirely about tasting , and would often end up disappointed.  While I’m still frequently underwhelmed by my finished product, I’ve found the dishes where I am compulsively tasting all along are usually the ones I am most excited about. 

Top Chef 4 Finale Awkward Interview #3: Winner Stephanie Izard

After several delays, here is my interview with my long-lost twin Stephanie Izard, winner of season 4 of Top Chef.  She explains how to braise a pistachio; I believe I will actually try this at some point.

I have decided to take it as a positive sign that my doppelganger just won $100K and a nationally-televised cooking show.  Surely things must continue to look up for me as well: foul-mouthed curly-haired brunettes, 2008 is our year!

With that one, the interviews are over for a while.  It’s hard to convey the level of relief I feel at the idea of at least a few months during which I do not have to face listening to myself on tape. 

My friends know better than to attempt to take any pictures of me.  However, if they do manage to capture me on film despite my tantrum-throwing, they quickly learn there’s no point in trying to make me look at any pictures of myself. 

Well, apparently I have as much of a phobic response to hear my voice as I do to seeing my own image.  Always so painful, the giggly doofusness.  If science does ever give us the ability to download our brains into a computer, I call dibs on the first spot in line.  I would feel much much more comfortable if I only existed as the text I produce. 

Nevertheless, I will certainly be raising my hand to do the interviews again for season five.  Any excuse to talk to chefs.

And here, too, is the recap of the Reunion show.  While Richard Blais is my sentimental favorite, Andrew D’Ambrosi’s ADHD antics won me over (of course), Spike Mendelsohn turned out to be pretty cool and sweet when I interviewed him, and Tom Colicchio could give me stern lecture any day, I believe grumpy Dale Talde surprisingly emerged from this final episode as the winner of the Top Chef Crush for this season.  I liked his sneakers.

Top Chef 4: It's all over but the awkward interviews!

Top Chef 4 Finale Live Thoughts (i.e., meandering, grammatically-questionable) posted on BuddyTV.   Read it at your own peril!  Not only are the results announced in it, I think I also indulge in some unintentionally illuminating oversharing but seriously: Tom Colicchio, you had me at your frowning disapproval. 

Top Chef 4 Finale Recap (abbreviated, less meandering for the short of attention span) link will be live after 11PM Pacific.

From the Mouth of Bourdain...

Last night I saw Anthony Bourdain at the Moore Theater.  He's on some tour supporting his Travel Channel show No Reservations, which I've seen exactly zero episodes of, but he's a chef and since I have a crush on every chef, so of course I went anyway.

Bourdain kicked the evening off with an explanation of Dale Talde's dismissal from Top Chef, saying that despite what the viewers might think or feel about his overall abilities, he made a terrible dish of butterscotch scallops, which Bourdain likened to "felching Mrs. Butterworth."

Of course the audience fell apart when he said this, as they did every time he said "shit" or "fuck." 

The President of the Debate Club and I were talking about famous actors and singers the other day, and what makes them go from interesting and innovative to...well, let's say, Sting of today. 

I wondered if it's that the majority of people start responding to the blandest or most obvious thing the person does, and - just like a toddler who does something mischevious, gets a laugh, and keeps doing the mischevious thing over and over to get that positive attention - finds themselves unable to stop returning repeatedly to the thing that gets the biggest positive reaction.

While Bourdain has plenty to say about the food world that is rich and thought-out, he clearly knows how to get his audience even deeper into the palm of his hand, and that is with swears and references to genitalia and smoking. 

I'm certainly not looking for him to clean any of that up; I'm not going to be giving up the salty language anytime soon myself..but I sort of want more from him.  He's made it clear he's no fan of Rachael Ray, and one of the reasons is he thinks she and her ilk don't ask their audience to aim higher or take greater care with their food. 

I would say the same to him about writing/speaking; goosing the audience once too often with the excitement of "naughtiness" is sort of the verbal equivalent of deep-frying everything.  Sure, a lot of people will like it, but that doesn't make it your best effort.  He's clearly got the smarts; he shouldn't be so satisfied with those easy laffs. 

Anyway, some of the interesting things he had to say about food were...

He feels that China is the epicenter of all culinary greatness, for a variety of reasons I'm a little too ignorant to spell out as well as he did.  But it was interesting to hear; Chinese cuisine is one that has never held any interest to me, but he was so passionate about it that it made me think I need to learn more despite a lack of natural affinity for it.

I sat up a little taller under my bundle of sticks and straightened my babushka with pride when he noted that a great deal of exotic fine cuisine was actually discovered by hungry peasants.  Who else, he pointed out, would have ever eaten a snail for the first time?

He also had high praise for the true fusion cuisine of Singapore and Malaysia.  I've never had either but I will look for it soon.

He spent a bit of time talking about some of the lasting impact of his book Kitchen Confidential, saying with exasperation that it will be on his gravestone that he's the guy who told us not to eat fish on Monday.  "You live in Seattle for fuck's sake; eat fish on Monday!" he admonished us.

Despite my slightly curmudgeonly wish that he would Hemingway up a bit, I still had a good time, and he said something offhand (to an audience member who asked what he should try when he moves to China) that sums up precisely the attitude of his breed that is why I do, in fact, have a crush on every chef: "Say no to nothing."