MasterChef

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MasterChef

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apskip:
30 CHEFS COMPETE

Ep. 3 began with the 30 remaining cooks inside a grubby industrial building (the kitchen units for the signature dishes had looked start of the art). They watched a dumptruck roll in and unload heavy sacks of onions. Those familiar with mise-en-place (including certainly the 3 judges) would expect a competition to chop an entire 10 pound sack of onions into small, evenly sized, neat piles. Anyone could be evaluated at any time and have an instant pass-fail decision made. It took 90 minutes for the last 2 contestants to reach that point. At the end, about 5 had been eliminated for inadequate knife skills.

The next test was to cook an egg perfectly with any of a huge range of other ingredients so hat the egg flavor was predominant. A very wide range of combinations was tried and about 11 contestants were eliminated. That left 14 to go to the next round.

apskip:
14 CHEFS COMPETE

There was a competition to test creativity. All cooks were given the identical ingredients:

tomatoes
lemon
pork chop
cabbage
cream
parsley
bread
apples
cognac
cinnamon
chocolate

Whitney wins this and her reward is to pick a single ingredient from Chinese mushrooms, mandarin oranges and duck as a mandatory one for all to use. Whitney gets to pick for 5 minutes from the ingredient bins while all the others have only half that time. All dishes are supposed to be Chinese. Almost everyone used chicken and stir-fried, so the range of dishes is quite low.

Mike won this cookoff.

There was a competition to reduce the group from 14 to 12. Sheena and Avis were cut at this point.

Finally, there is a real competition involving food preparation for an entire meal. The remaining group of 12 was assembled to visit a Marine base near San Diego. Mike was asked by Ramsay to pick a team of 6, so he chose Jake, Lee, Tony, Tracy and Sheetal . The other team was defined by who was left but included Whitney, Slim, Sharone, Faruq, and Sharone who assumed leadership of this team. They had to pick a menu to feed about 400 Marines and their families, size out the quantities of ingredients involved, prep theose ingredients, have the finished food ready for serving and in most cases even serve it. Mike's team appeared to be losing to Jenna's teamon better menu and food quality but a critical mistake by Faruq in running out of potatoes and in running out of vegetables due to not prepping enough was made and Sharone's team lost to Mike's. That gave Mike's team exemption from the "guess those ingredients" challenge, a favorite of Ramsay's over the entire run of Hell's Kitchen for good reason. Excellent palate skills are extremely important for master chefs.

The product being tasted was Texas-style chili. The cooks went a bit further than normally happens in Hell's Kitchen, so I believe it is not a super-challenging one. Someone managed to guess the palate skills of the 6 competitors in fairly reverse order, so that the following contestant would win against his following contestant and could be released to the viewing platform where the other team already was.

First up was Whitney and she was phenomenal. She guessed onions, celery, bell peppers, tomatoes, Jalapeno peppers, garlic, cilantro, oil, beans, beef salt and beef stock correctly for a total of 12 before making an error with chili powder.

Faruq got 9 including parsley. That released Whitney.

Jenna got 7. That released Faruq.

Slim got 8.

David got 8 including salt.

Sharone got 8, including cumin which released Slim, David and Sharone and eliminated Jenna.

apskip:
11 CHEFS COMPETE

This episode started with a Box Challenge. In it were the ingredients to make one cupcake plus there was also a huge selection of fruits, sweets and other enhancements. The cooks were given 45 minutes to bake and decorate. Tracy was heartbroken that her cupcakes never rose properly and was nt considered at all due to the "pick only the best 3" rule that Gordon, Joe and Graham have imposed. Those were Whitney, Jake and Sharone.
Sharone had never made a cupcake before in his life, but he won. He was to discover that his reward was extra special, as he would be given the opportunity to cook against a celebrity master chef and if he should unbelivably win he would go straight to the final group of 4. Since that was almost impossible he would still be guaranteed not being eliminated and having an incredible experience.

That celebrity chef was Cat Cora from Iron Chef and he had a choice from 3 of her favorite dishes:
the first dish is truffle halibut with sweet corn zabaglione
the second is beef tenderloin with cous cous
the final dish is marinated lamb with feta salsa verde.

Sharone picked truffled halibut, which everyone had to make.There is no formal recipe for it, as she has made it "thousands of times" and might be able to do it blind-folded. She demonstrated the steps but a lot of the art of this dish is in intricacies of the sauce and that was difficult to pick up from a brief observation.

Sharone cooked against Cat Cora and everyone else remaining cooked to avoid elimination. Sharone did extremely well, but they do not have a place waiting for him at Iron Chef just yet. The winner of the rest was Jake, who will get a reward. The loser was selected from Mike, Slim and Faruq. Faruq had been struggling and this was his demise on Master Chef.

The next morning the cooks went to a truckstop in the California desert where 100 hungry truckers would be descending to eat hamburgers prepared and serve by a Blue team and a Red team. Jake got to pick the Blue team of Tracy, Whitney, Lee and Tony. The Red team by default was Sharone, Slim, Sheetal, David and Mike. This exercise was designed to test teamwork, making good choices and adjusting to mitigate the impact of bad choices.

Jake picked 100% beef for his team's burgers; so did Sharone. Jake picked cheese as a topping but Sharone had blue cheese in the mix of hamburger. As soon as actual production began, Red was in trouble because that cheese melted and gunked up their grills. Sharone successful adjusted very rapidly and then went on to make other adjustments (two burgers in one bun, etc.) to maximize the appeal of his team's offering. Jake almost defiantly refused to admit that there was anything wrong with his offering despite the scorecard continually showing gains by Red after the initial advantage of Blue. It was even at 17 - 17, then Red finished it at 51-35 for the win.

The Red team became exempt from an ingredient visual/touch test( no eating allowed). The lowest consecutive score from the Blue team would be eliminated. Jake went first and has an incredible ability to identify ingredients visually. He correctly picked tomatillo, golden raisins, macadamia nuts, butternut squash, plaintains, okra, rhubarb, blue cheese, filet mignon, rosemary, salmon up to a total of 11 out of 25 there before picking sorrel instead of watercress).

Tony correctly identified 9 and went into the suspense category.

Lee correctly identified 10 and was safe.

Whitney correctly identified 10 and was safe. This eliminated Tony.

apskip:
9 CHEFS COMPETE

This episode started with a Mystery Box challenge. Tomatoes, apple, ginger, avocado, prosciutto, peanuts, asparagus and garlic were all outside the box. The chefs were asked to pull the box away to reveal what was underneath. It was a live Dungeness crab. Nobody had any trouble sticking it into boiling water immediately except Cheetal, who as a Hindu claimed she had never taken the life of a creature. She fretted about this or 30 minutes of 60 minute cooking time, then finally put her crab in the water. She had lost too much time to catch up to the highest level, but maybe she could salvage something. The judges announced they would taste only the top 3 dishes. They chose:

Sharone - Dungeness crab cucumber prosciutto roll with apple ginger reduction.
Lee - Dungeness crab salad w/ fresh avocado and Gazpacho Andaluz
Cheetal (no doubt getting some sympathy points from the judges) - Tomato and Crab Curry

Gordon Ramsay commented that Sharone's dish was vibrant, fresh, delicious and creative. Graham called Lee's dish "you knocked it out of the park". Cheetal's dish according to Joe was simple but excellent. Lee was the winner, having created the single best dish in the brief history of Master Chef, and that gave him the right to choose the main ingredient for the next cooking challenge, creating a Romantic dish.

Lee had the choice of chocolate (which he abhorred), passion fruit and fresh burratta, a mozzarella/cream cheese mix from Italy. He could not think of what he wanted to do with burratta, so passion fruit was his choice. They had 1 hour to cook and all 9 dishes were going to be tasted, with the worst resulting in an elimination of its creator. Sharone tok a huge risk by doing beef sous vide when he was having trouble with the sous vide system, but he did persevere and get excellent results. Lee's shrimp with beef tenderloin sautee w/ cauliflower and a marmalade of passion fruit glaze was the winner. The group of 4 with the worst dishes were the women, Tracy, Cheetal, Whitney and Slim. Tracy and Cheetal were judged to have better dishes and were not going home. A question asked by Joe to Whitney got the wrong answer from her (she said a minor adjustment to less garlic was the way to fix it when the judges believed a total revamp was necessary. However, it was Slim who got the boot.

The next phase of the competition was catering a wedding at an upscale Malibu country club. Lee got to pick his team, which was Mike, Jake and Tracy. He obviously snubbed the best competitor, Sharone, so Sharone became the captain of the opposing team. He by default got Whitney, Cheetal and David. The menu was very simple - Caesar salad with goat cheese tartlet plus surf and turf (filet mignon and Canadian salmon) with mashed potatoes and onion rings and it was 115 portions of each done by each team. It appeared that no special doneness instructions were allowed, so all proteins were cooked at one doneness level. Each team leader assigned roles to specific individuals Tracy started out well, but later went into a funk, having problems with lettuce and burning the tartlet. If this test could have resulted in an elimination, it certainly would have been her. Next worst was Sharone himself, who assigned himself the fileting of the salmon but butchered the first huge fish badly. Sharone's team was making a huge comeback and got the first appetizers out and the feedback indicated they were excellent. Their lead continued throughout and Lee's team could never pull even on even timeliness or quality. The judges felt obligated to jump in for a quality control role; they did no cooking but prevented bad preparations from leaving the kitchen. Joe acted as sommelier and gathered feedback. Although the judges stated they needed a day to decide, it was perfectly clear to home viewers who had won. It was Sharone's team, which was then exempt from a pressure test.

That pressure test was 90 minutes to cook fresh pasta. Early on, the judges observed that Jake had the correct technique for combining the flour and egg with slight temperature increase from his body as transmitted primarily through his hands. The dishes presented were:

Tracy - ravioli bolognese; she had originally planned on lasagna but had to abandon that; the judges said a real bolognese sauce could not be done in less than 3 hours
Jake - fettucine w/ calamari tubes and minimal pasta sauce
Mike - he had trouble getting his pasta to hang before Ramsay told him to flour it; his dish was ravioli w/ tomato-based sauce
Lee - ravioli w/ a simple sauce heavy on garlic

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