"BobbyFlay" news and stories

Last year Slashfood launched the The 10 Hottest Men in the Food Industry and boy, did we hear about it! From commenters all over, everyone had an opinion. This year, we opened up the polls to our readers and let you decide who would make our final top 10 list.

Narrowing down 30 names to 10, after the jump, see who made the list again, and find out who, surprisingly, is our (possibly not-so-hot) hottest man of 2011.

As The Next Food Network Star winds down its sixth season, we here at Slashfood are taking time to chat with the final contestants about their experience on the show.

Click through for our interview.

If ever it seemed like they stack the decks over at the "Iron Chef" kitchen stadium, last night would have been high on the list. With the capable and mostly humorless Bobby Flay as your defending champ, are you really going to throw him a softball like avocado as the secret ingredient? Mr. Mesa Grill himself, denizen of all things spicy and southwestern?

It'd be like giving Morimoto seaweed or Mario Batali basil. Luckily, while the ingredient the producers chose wasn't much of a threat, their opposing chef was something of a curve ball: Floppy haired, unshaven Canuck Michael Smith, seen in the intro hiking around a field in a sun hat, plucking fruits from the vine like some sort of former draft-dodging hippie who decided he liked Prince Edward Island too much to leave.

Smith's casual demeanor belies his Beard-award-winning skills. We knew we liked him from the start, when he cut through the usual overwrought "Iron Chef" choosing-ceremony b.s. by goofily bulging his eyes and gesturing in the direction of Flay like a madman. Finally, we have someone to combat the imported histrionics of The Chairman with a healthy dose of irony!

Mario Batali, sans Doritos. Photo: Bauer-Griffin.

What do chefs eat when they need a palate cleanser after so much fancy restaurant fare? When they take off their aprons, they reach for the same indulgences we do -- perhaps just with an upgrade. Slashfood asked celebrity chefs to share their favorite cravings.

Mario Batali
When orange-clogged chef and television personality Mario Batali isn't reinventing Italian cuisine, he's still got it in the bag -- of Doritos, that is. "I love two things: good gelato and, strangely enough, Doritos and salsa. It has to be Doritos, though. I especially like the lime-flavored ones with chili."

Nigella Lawson
Which foods make domestic goddess Nigella Lawson feel sinful? None! Nigella, who is famous for her intimate, relaxed cooking style says, "I don't have any guilty food pleasures. The only thing one should ever feel guilty about is not taking pleasure."

See what snacks Bobby Flay, Tom Colicchio and other celebrity chefs sneak after the jump.

Photo: Amazon.com

'A Great American Cook:
Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential Cooks'
Jonathan Waxman with Tom Steele
Photographs by John Kernick
Houghton Mifflin -- 2007
Buy it on Amazon

It's rather hilarious when a chef's cookbook matches his real-life persona.

We interviewed Jonathan Waxman -- of recent "Top Chef Masters" fame -- a year or two ago about how to properly cut open an artichoke. He was confident that we'd be able to briskly pick up the trick (which could cause an untrained cook to handily slice off a digit) without much practice.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that the man who trained Bobby Flay in the kitchen some 20 years ago is a pretty darn good teacher, and we were happily producing pretty decent artichoke specimens within minutes.

That same confident, coaxing voice is present throughout Waxman's cookbook, a hodgepodge of his culinary experiences. From the red-pepper pancakes with corn and caviar he introduced at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse to a potato gratin he picked up while training in France, this is a fine compilation from a man who has trained many of the American greats -- and who used to hobnob with the likes of James Beard and Julia Child.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.