After a trying
experience last week with microwaved food,
the Top Chef chefs again found themselves preparing food outside of
their element - both literally and figuratively. Instead of working in the kitchen, plating and serving, the chefs were
sent out to San Francisco's Mission District to peddle their wares as street food. In addition to mingling
with the people, the chefs had to focus on
ethnic flavors throughout both tasks in the episode and in doing so, found that they were further from their
comfort zone than they realized.
The quickfire challenge was designed to test the chefs' ability to recognize ingredients without seeing them. I agree with the comments that Tom Colicchio, one of the judges, made on his blog - namely, that the challenge was not really representational of their ability to recognize ingredients because the ingredients chosen were very exotic. Guest chef and judge Mike Yakura, head chef at Le Colonial, a French-Vietnamese restaurant, choose ingredients to taste that some of the chefs had never before worked with. Expecting that all chefs should know all possible ingredients is unrealistic, if not impossible, and the competitors did not do terribly well. Out of the 20 ingredients - which included longan, tamarind, hibiscus extract, chili paste, nopal, konnyaku, durian and nato - the chefs tasted, Tiffani and Miguel only identified 1, LeeAnne, Harold, Lisa and Stephen identified 3, and Andrea identified 4. Andrea, winning the challenge, received immunity.
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