Top Chef shook things up for this week’s episode, traveling to Singapore for the season’s penultimate episode. The contestants managed to overcome food labels written in Cantonese, cans that don’t work with can-openers and a confused waitstaff. In the end, they cooked what Tom Colicchio called the best food the judges have had all season. All the chefs got good compliments, but, in the end, someone had to go home…
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– Nee Nee offers up our favorite solution yet for the great how to peel a hard boiled egg mystery:
This is en egg-peeling solution only for cooking solo and not sharing food. If you crack a bit off the hollow end of the egg and put your mouth around it while making a seal and blow hard for a few seconds, it loosens the egg from the membrane and makes it much easier to peel. Gross, I know, but it work really well.
A-mazing. That might have to be the official ES-endorsed way to crack an egg.
– Meanwhile, bcarter3 disagrees with Fuchs Foodie’s Top Chef dismay:
Nonsense. “Top Chef” is a game show, not a cooking lesson. Does anyone watch “Survivor” for tips on how to survive in the wilderness? “The Price Is Right” for shopping hints? “American Idol” for singing lessons?
But rose saunders expects more from the Emmy-winning Padma & Company:
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This week’s episode of Top Chef saw our Chef’testants pack their knives and say goodbye to DC, heading off to Singapore– but they still had one last showdown with the good folks at NASA.
Yes, that is Buzz Aldrin sitting next to Padma. Oh, and Anthony Bourdain.
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Editors’ Note: DC-based blogger Fuchs Foodie just can’t take it anymore. Today, he joins the ES team to point out just what’s been bugging a lot of us about Top Chef this season.
Recent press about Top Chef reads like the notes of a marriage counselor trying to figure out why a once-meaningful relationship has taken a nosedive. In a July poll, the L.A. Times found that 60 percent of people surveyed thought that Top Chef is “losing its heat.” Food writers have offered plenty of opinions to explain the sudden disaffection towards this once exceedingly popular show. The chefs this season aren’t talented enough, says John Horn in the L.A. Times. There aren’t any villains you love to hate, says Josh Ozersky in Time magazine. Yumsugar is tired of the same challenges recycled from previous seasons.
As a long-time watcher of the show, I see some truth to each of these theories, but I can think of a more fundamental problem: Top Chef is a show about food that no longer teaches us much of anything about food. Instead of actually entertaining its foodie audience with inventive dishes, the producers obsess over portraying every personality quirk they can mine from the contestants. In between quirks, the producers share mundane details about the contestants’ lives.
To see if I was imagining things, during last week’s episode, I kept track of the information I learned about cooking in one column, and, in a second column, information about the contestants’ personal issues/dog-walking habits.
Here’s what I learned about food:
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The six chef-testants left were really starting to smell the finale this week. But one got sent packing. We chat with them, after the jump.
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I always knew one day there would be a Top Chef episode starring Leon Panetta. WTF! Seriously though, Padma and Co. have some good D.C. access this season. But one chef-testant had their cover blown…and they tell us what happened, after the jump.
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Top Chef pulled in a political heavyweight this week — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, but that was by far not the only highlight of last night’s episode. Down to eight chef’testants, we were given what many of us consider the best elimination challenge the show has to offer — Restaurant Wars at Bethesda’s Redwood Restaurant & Bar.
But before you see which chef’testant was sent packing (spoiler alert!), lets take a moment to discuss which pant suit was better!
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