Hipster ingredients

Portlandia, bad recipes, and big bowls

Welcome to Top Chef, Not Top Scallop, the world’s greatest Top Chef recap blog. This is a review of Top Chef: Portland, episode 9. My name is Randall Colburn and I am going to make fun of Richard Blais a lot. Read last week’s recap here and my latest LCK recap here. 

Always love when Top Chef begins on a bleeped expletive. Our remaining chefs are rattled by Sara’s departure; both Gabe and Shota say they had pegged her to win the whole thing. This, of course, just reminds me of Tom admonishing Ash in Vegas for getting overly worshipful of Michael Voltaggio. Why are you here if you don’t think you can win?! (Oh, right, the boost in prominence both online and off, as well as the ability to make bank off Top Chef-themed cooking events in perpetuity. But, you know, spirit of competition and all that.) Dawn, especially, is taking Sara’s departure to heart, saying she feels responsible due to her erratic planning, a reaction the show flames by flashing back to Sara throwing one of her dishes under the bus. As I wrote in my LCK recap, I adore Sara but she’s not particularly graceful in the face of failure.

You know who is, though? Chris. I hope this guy goes shooting or one of those places where you hit old computer monitors with a sledgehammer, because he’s buttoned up to the point of strangulation. You see flashes of the irritation he feels at himself when he’s critiqued, but he’s nothing if not even-keeled and endlessly gracious when told for the THIRD TIME that his pasta is chewy and dry. (When Carrie Brownstein puts his Quickfire dish on the bottom, Fred Armisen follows up her critique with an amiable “But you seem so nice!”). It was time for him to go home. He had a short streak there a few episodes back, but he lost his mojo pretty quickly. You could see the cracks in his countenance beginning to show. Genuinely curious what Uncut Colicchio can get out of him in LCK, that magical place where chefs seem to feel more comfortable sharing surprising shades of their style and personality.

Also, when did he shave his mustache?

He hasn’t always looked like this in his confessionals, has he? Is this a Mandela Effect thing? I legit jumped in my chair.

One other thing I’m bringing up prematurely: Tom says he doesn’t write and that “if you see anything written by me, my wife did it.” Does that mean she wrote this?

Tom Colicchio @tomcolicchio

Top Chef time

Down is up, up is down. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

Quickfire

Portlandia’s been off the air for three years, but the discourse around “hipster” and “things that are hipster” in this challenge feels plucked from an era even more distant. That said, listening to Padma characterize wildly popular ingredients like hemp oil, almond flour, and kombucha as “hipster” makes her sound ancient in a way that brings me immeasurable comfort. Because Top Chef is not cool, and it no longer trying to be cool. It is no longer booking Logan Paul. There is no TikTok challenge. There is a 54-year old comedian and a 46-year old riot grrrl icon. Top Chef is speaking the same language as it’s Gen X/geriatric millennial audience, the majority of whom stopped caring about slang and cultural labels around the time people unironically used words like “hipster.” I love it.

(God, can you even imagine if they tried to replace Gail with one of those TikTok nuts who go viral for putting foie gras in a waffle iron? I should stop speaking such terrors aloud, lest I tempt the faceless devils that control TV.)

Anyways, because Portland is a place where “young people go to retire” (thus ensuring “everything old is new”), the chefs must cook a dish using “hipster ingredients” on an old electric stove using vintage kitchen tools. This doesn’t go so well for the majority of the chefs, who’ve forgotten a world without Vitamixes.

Jamie, bless her, says she drinks flaxseed milk not because she’s a hipster, but because she’s lactose intolerant, thus making a good point about “hipster ingredients”: we use them not because they’re cool, but because they’re nicer to our colons than the mass-produced swill we were raised on. We’re not meant to have diarrhea all the time!

Fred and Carrie being genuinely funny people with good chemistry, the judging ends up being the best part. Fred gets a good bit going about Hasselback potatoes. He and Carrie playfully bicker. Padma joins in. It’s cute. When Carrie dings Jamie’s dish, Fred softens the blow with a gentle “But it was great!”

Dawn, who made “cornbread without the corn” by mixing fonio and semolina flour wins for making a “fun” dish that captures the spirit of the challenge by reinterpreting a vintage staple with a modern preparation.

Dawn doesn’t feel like a frontrunner—she’s humble and her food isn’t as flashy as her competitors—but she’s racking up the wins with food that’s well-executed and bold in its flavors. I’ll be shocked if she doesn’t make it to the final.

Elimination Challenge

Enter: Goofus and Gallant:

We’ve seen chefs compete for cookbook spots. We’ve seen them prepare microwave-ready meals for normies. We’ve seen chefs explain how to make a specific recipe to dummies through a partition. I can’t, however, remember a specific challenge where the chefs actually had to write. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)

As someone who is slavish to written recipes when I cook—ask my wife, I can fuck up anything—I loved the wrinkle of these chefs having to actually translate the swirl of madness in their minds to the page. The goal is to write a recipe for home cooks that can be executed in 30 minutes, so Byron, who’s apparently lost all touch with normal humans after a stint at Eleven Madison Park, pens a four-page opus—“the never-ending story of recipes,” declares Kwame—that begins with a seafood stock begging for 15 different ingredients. Dude.

In a neat twist, a sampling of the All-Star judges are tasked with cooking the recipes and serving alongside the chefs. It might’ve been a touch more fun to have bussed-in normies do it, but the COVID necessity of having the All-Stars do it at least ensures that there would be no user error in their cooking. The All-Stars do, however, follow the recipes to a t—Kwame, for example, cooks Shota’s pork without oil, as Shota didn’t clarify in the written recipe that the pan needs oil. Those minor details are so second nature to these chefs that it doesn’t even occur to them to include them. Also, only three hours to cook, test, and write? That’s tight.

A few stories in the kitchen: Shota’s braised pork belly with turnips is inspired by a late-night izakaya he frequented in Japan, a detail that hits a bit harder after learning in this episode that he has an 8-year old son over there. Chris, meanwhile, is again trying to prove he knows how to cook pasta with a sorghum gnocchi. (His first LCK episode is definitely going to involve scratch-made pasta.) Unfortunately, he realizes too late that he wrote the measurements in cups instead of weights, which is going to result in an entirely different dough for whoever ends up with his recipe. (It’s Melissa and it turns out awful.) Kristin ends up with Maria’s soup and is aghast at the 8 pounds of meat it requires for a table of six. Maria not specifying the size of the pot needed to cook all that meat also proves an impediment.

In terms of judging, the quality of the chef’s plate of food still took precedence over how well they translated their recipe. Maria, for example, ends up on top despite her making some serious errors in her recipe and Kristin not quite being able to replicate it. According to Gregory, though, few of the chefs succeeded in writing approachable recipes: “It’s like they were written for Top Chefs!”

Let’s see who lost:

Jamie’s seared foie gras with brioche French toast, blueberry compote, and black sesame

Gregory: “Jamie’s recipe is written pretty nice, but it’s a sweet and savory foie gras dish so I’m curious to see if all these flavors work together.”

Dale: “It’s mushy, it’s not crispy. There’s a lack of texture.”

Blais: “I think it’s too sweet. There’s sugar in three of the components. It’s not a dish I would make out of a cookbook.”

Tom: “The writing of this recipe doesn’t give you time at all. It doesn’t tell you how long to cook it.”

Padma: “The textures of everything piled on top of each other was soft on soft on soggy.”

Byron’s steamed striped bass with seafood broth and beans

Kwame: “I think it would take about three hours to properly make this recipe.”

Tom: “The beans in Byron’s dish are undercooked. Kwame’s are fine. It’s way too complicated for what it delivers.”

Gail: “He made it into 17 steps and 45 ingredients and you really aren’t tasting the fruits of his labor.”

Tom: “How do you take all these ingredients and make it that flavorless?”

Note: Tom gets so mad at Byron’s lack of flavor that he yanks off his glasses in righteous anger:

Chris’ sorghum gnocchi with green romesco, braised dandelion greens, and saucisson sec

Melissa: “Chris’ recipe is not really focusing on how this dough should look…the gnocchi was falling apart.”

Gail: “I think the pecan green romesco is a fantastic idea and really doable.”

Dale: “I love the braised dandelion greens. The best part of the dish.”

Gail: “Melissa is clearly a strong cook, and this recipe failed her.”

Tom: “I think the gnocchi itself is just dense. It’s raw.”

Gail: “I can’t help noticing that this is the third time we’re talking to you about the dough, and it’s the same issue more or less.”

Ouch. No redemption for Chris, pasta-wise. Not many GIFs of him, but here’s one in commemoration of him being so nice.

And the winners:

Maria’s traditional Sonoran pork and bean soup with cilantro, onion, and lime

Gail: That is a very full bowl!

Kristin: “Maria’s recipe is gorgeous but the whole thing seems like too much.”

Tom: “It has tons of flavor. All her meats were nicely cooked, her beans were nicely cooked. Kristin’s not.”

Gail: “This serves 74 people.”

Blais: “A little fine-tuning, people can handle this at home.”

Gail: “Your recipe made the dish seem harder than it was.”

Shota’s soy-braised pork belly with turnip puree and pear salad

Kwame: “I think Shota made a delicious dish. I wish he would’ve put a little less stock, the sauce could’ve been reduced more. When you’re working with the home cook, you need to make sure you’re measuring things out exactly.”

Padma: “It’s delicious and focused.”

Blais: “I love these flavors of bitter turnip, a little bit of sweetness from the pear.”

Gail: “Shota gave us a winning dish. I don’t think Kwame was able to execute it like he needed to.”

Padma: “Your recipe needed a little more clarity.”

Dale: “I thought the star of the dish was the turnip puree.”

Dawn’s salmon with buttermilk sauce, gai lan, and olive puree

Kristin: “I found it very, very, very clear. It was great.”

Tom: “The only difference is the buttermilk is a little sweeter in one of the dishes.”

Gail: “Kristin did a great job clearly because Dawn gave great direction. It’s a restaurant quality dish.”

Padma: “I love the unexpected aroma and flavor in the sauce.”

Blais: “Protein, veg, sauce. Home cook can handle that.”

Tom: “It was a dish I know a home cook could make. Plus, it was really delicious.”

Gabe’s banana leaf steamed smoked cod with crispy skin and salsa veracruzana

Gregory: “I think it’s a beautiful dish. Overall, the [90 minutes] was very difficult. Having a home cook debone black cod is very challenging.”

Tom: “Really good. Crispy skin, the roasted vegetables…”

Dale: “It’s dynamic. There’s a depth of flavor to it.”

Blais: “He’s got these Mediterranean, Mexican, Southeast Asian flavors. I thought that sauce was stellar.”

Gail: “Gabe gave us a great recipe for the home cook.”

Blais: “This is your finest sauce I’ve tasted of the season.”

Gabe wins! Good for him. I don’t have much to say about him. As I’ve mentioned in these recaps before, he gives me weird vibes. A Top Chef, Not Top Scallop reader sent me this article a while back (there’s this, too) about Gabe being booted from Austin’s Comedor last year for “repeated violations of our policies and for behavior in conflict with our values,” and it’s been sticking in my craw. The details of his departure are unclear, but the language used in the Austin Chronicle piece makes it sound like it was a pretty serious situation. (There’s some chatter about it on Reddit, too, but Reddit is Reddit so grain of salt.) The vagueness of it all, though, will probably make it easy for Bravo to sweep under the rug if he wins, but it’s something that’s definitely in the air, even as he preps his own restaurant. These Austin chefs, man…

Scraps

• Fred and Carrie described themselves as the “unofficial Mayor of Portland” and “loves the movie Moonstruck,” respectively.

• What did Shota yell when he got in the car with Gabe? I think it was “Thirsty boys for life!” Maybe?

• Jamie did a “bow chicka” porn sound when Tom entered the kitchen. Is Jamie horny for Tom or did the show edit it to make it look like she was?

• I want to get drunk with Jamie and Tom.

• Next time on Top Chef: Tofu tournament! Tofournament!

• And on LCK: HOLY SHIT.

  

  Is Tom turning into Gordon Ramsey?