Thursday, July 1, 2010
Food media TOP CHEF D.C. WEEK 3 - I Don’t Really Like Pie, I Prefer Cocaine, And Amphetamines.
Posted by Joel Silverman on Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 8:34 PM
Julia Child wrote “You’ll never regret your decision to learn to make pastry dough, and once the feeling is in your hands, you’ll retain it thankfully forever more.” It’s really not that hard. Years ago, I photographed Aria restaurant’s legendary pastry chef Kathryn King, and after the shoot I asked her to teach me how to make a pie crust. It took her five minutes to show me, and a decade later I can still do it with my eyes closed. King says, “Pie crust is flour, fat, salt, and water, if you keep everything cold, it’s something anybody can learn.”
Episode 3 of Top Chef D.C. opened with a pie challenge. Bravo is launching its sugary spin-off Top Chef: Just Desserts with celebrated pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini as head judge. Iuzzini is the Mad Hatter of the dessert world, known for pranks like a giant penis-shaped cake with a secret reservoir of whipped cream attached to a bicycle pump. When the birthday guest approached to blow out the candle, the cake ejaculated whipped cream. Classy. Iuzzini wanted to test the Top Chef truism that serious cooks can’t handle even a basic dessert. He blogged today about last night’s episode, “By now the contestants should know there will be a pastry [contest] somewhere along the way. You should have a couple desserts in your repertoire just for that reason.” Most of the contestants didn’t seem to have contemplated this obvious strategery. Front-runner Angelo admitted “I’ve never cooked a pie in my whole life.” Middle-of-the-packer Ed admitted that he hates chocolate. Ditzy and dramatic Amanda admitted that she “doesn’t really like pie,” she prefers cocaine and amphetamines. She insists that her drug problem was in her “early twenties”, but she’s just 27 now, and is flaming out extravagantly. Criticized last week for serving alcohol to school kids, she added bourbon to her rosemary-scented apple pie last night, and was shown racing through Whole Foods at breakneck speed, joking “heaven help any women, children, or old people who get in my way.” She performed a psychotic act of petulance in the kitchen, stealthily taking a competitor’s braise out of an oven she had called dibs on, and her defense to criticism of her pie was that she isn’t a pastry chef (she did train at Le Cordon Bleu in London, where pate brisée is surely taught at some point, but that was probably in her “early twenties phase”). Iuzzini sniffed dismissively, “That’s a cop-out: my grandmother’s not a pastry chef either, but she can make a pie.”
Atlanta’s Tracey Bloom took two tries to produce a crumbling crust that was burned on the bottom and raw on top. She admitted that “being in the bottom is embarrassing, like living in a trailer park.” Like Amanda, she is shown flailing exuberantly, aware that her time on this show is destined to be short, and determined not to go out without making an impression.
The Elimination Challenge was to grill a picnic lunch for Capitol Hill interns at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. I was a Capitol Hill intern myself, overlapping with Monica Lewinsky’s period of national service, and I remember that crowd as being more obsessed with getting laid than with culinary trends, but maybe things have changed in D.C. now that the White House has an organic vegetable garden.
Cooking over charcoal seems to fluster most of the contestants. Tracey bellows “HOW DO YOU TURN THIS GRILL DOWN?” which causes Timothy to shake his head in manly disgust (his pride is unwarranted, because he will soon stand with Tracey as one of the four losing dishes). Flamboyantly preppy Arnold, who worried out loud that the smoke might clog his carefully maintained pores, had to learn to start a grill by sneaking a peek at competitor Kenny, who lit his grill the all-American way: with a Deepwater Horizon’s measure of lighter fluid. Once Arnold finally got his grill burning, his appealing lamb kebab with hints of sesame and butane won him the day’s title.
This was not destined to be Atlanta’s year. In one of the funniest and most charming exits in Top Chef history, Tracey killed time in her final stew room by reading the palms of her fellow chefs and claiming “85 percent” clairvoyance. She had run out of time to stuff her fennel sausage into casings (after boasting, “I make sausage all the time, this isn’t going to be hard”), and had served them burger style, but undercooked and overpowered by coarsely-ground spices. In the kitchen earlier, she got manic and wigged everybody out, muttering pep talks to herself and cursing like a sailer at the meat grinder. At the picnic, a party-goer complained that her burger was a little too spicy, and Tracey defensively shot back, “AT LEAST IT HAD SOMETHING GOING ON WITH IT!” But at the end, she was calm, her psychic powers telling her that she was minutes away from the unsparing judgment of Tom Colicchio, who flicked his hand under his chin and told her that she had insulted the honor of all Italians by calling her raw slider “Italian sausage.” At least he didn’t give her the kiss of death and tell her “I know it was you, you broke-a my heart, Tracey.” She went gracefully and with class. Welcome home, Tracey, the rest of the Top Chef season will be a lot more boring without you.
Comments (5)
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Tracey may be a Damn Yankee, but she left with Top Chef with the elegance of a Southern Belle.
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It's disappointing that Atlanta's only contestant this season had such an unpleasant personality mixed with such an incompetence in the kitchen. I'm glad I never tried her restaurant, and I certainly never will.
It's a relief that she's gone from the show.
I find it really weird that last season was essentially a tribute to pork (literally, every episode pork belly or something else porkulous) and this season it's just... back stabbers, gripers, whiners, etc.. and we're only 3 eps in!
This season sucks. It's got some sort of weird housewives vibe with a bunch of rude jerks in it. That really isn't the point of the show.
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