"iron chef" news and stories

• There's a hot salsa competition in Trolley Square -- and they don't mean dancing.
• Wilmington's annual St. Hedwig's Polish Festival is all about the pierogi.
• Which restaurant got the highest Zagat rating this year?
• Iron Chef Jose Garces's fame has spread far beyond Philadelphia.

Wait, haven't we been here before? We got to know chef Dominique Crenn up close and personal last year when she tried out to be The Next Iron Chef, a distinction that ultimately went to Jose Garces.

If there's one thing we've learned, however, it's that you always get another chance to prove your Iron Chef-iness on the Food Network, and sure enough, Crenn was back this week to prove her unique Gallic mettle. And if anyone should be able to ace a competition where the secret ingredient is yogurt, it's a European chef, right?

Certainly, if Crenn approached the "coagulated milk protein" -- to use Alton Brown's over-explanation of it -- with a delicate touch, reigning Iron Chef Michael Symon practically bullied it onto the plate, baking, pressure cooking and custarding it until it was front and center.

His flavors and presentation were so bold, a dessert-course tuile threw judge Andrew Knowlton for a loop. "I didn't take you for a tuile kind of guy," he said. Symon's response: "I'm trying to show you my feminine side."

We have to admit: It's more than a little hard to keep all the renowned chefs of America and their various TV appearances straight. It's getting to the point where, if you're lucky enough to be able to dine in a big city, you're liable to be greeted by the same person who you saw whipping up calamari with Kathie Lee & Hoda in the morning, getting eliminated from a rerun of The Next Iron Chef in the afternoon, and cruelly critiquing young upstarts on Top Chef D.C. in the evening.

Such is the case with Maria Hines of Seattle's renowned Tilth. Okay, so we didn't get to dine at Tilth Sunday night, and it's been a while since she graced the airwaves on Top Chef Masters. But we've missed her bold, distinctly northwestern (not to mention organic and local) flavor profiles, unpretentious plating, and utterly cool, laid-back demeanor. In just a couple short episodes, she became our number-one summer chef crush.

So while we were eagerly awaiting her face-off with Chef Morimoto on Iron Chef America this weekend, we did so with a lump in our throats: Really, does anyone other than the reigning Iron Chef win? Sure, there are a few token wins to reassure us that the whole thing isn't rigged, but surely, pairing up Hines with seafood whiz Morimoto was a "better luck next time" kind of move on the part of the producers.

We knew going in that this would be interesting. Venerable New York restaurateur Ed Brown versus Iron Chef Michael Symon: Upper West Side refinement squaring off against brazen Midwestern dude-ness. Even the secret ingredient, wahoo, didn't seem to favor one chef over the other, as they sometimes do. This was anyone's game.

The contrasts were clear from the start. Brown and his white-aproned team were all about precise, almost clinical, technique: Using a smoker gun to infuse the fish with flavor, cooking in duck fat, relying on exotic fish accoutrements like geoduck and shaved bonito.

Symon being Symon, had his team of laid-back, tatted-up sous chefs march out in their traditional, black "mechanic's shirt" uniforms (always the Ohioan, that Symon) and quickly set to work grilling the hell out of everything: lemons, apple chips, grapefruit, tomatoes, bread.

Usually, when they introduce the secret ingredient on Iron Chef America, we can fool ourselves into thinking the contestants really have no idea what they're about to see. The music, the flashing lights, the screaming from The Chairman -- it all overwhelms the fact that the two chefs who are challenged to make five courses out of this stuff look, well, shockingly unshocked.

Never was that more apparent than this week. When the lids came off the trays and the no-longer-new-to-this-Iron-Chef-thing champ Jose Garces and fresh-faced challenger Kelly Liken were presented with mounds and mounds of stinky blue cheese, they didn't so much as blink. Hell, Garces didn't even look up at the chairman. When Liken unnaturally leaned in and started petting some of the cheese wedges (?!), the gig was up. This, clearly, was not an ingredient that was "new" to them.

The recipes reflected as much. Liken's stock-in-trade in Vail, Colo. tends toward local/regional cuisine, and her recipes were for the most part sophisticated and well thought-out -- except for that final fruit crisp that substituted a blue-cheese layer for butter, just under the crumb topping. Kudos for ingenuity, but -- ew!