Things get sticky during Top Chef season 20’s rice challenge
On Top Chef this week, the competing chefs tackle a historically temperamental ingredient in "Rice, Rice Baby"
TV Reviews Top Chef
It’s one of the most fearsome sights on Top Chef: The humble rice kernel. “After 19 seasons, no ingredient has caused more chefs to pack their knives than rice,” says Padma Lakshmi at the top of this week’s Top Chef elimination challenge, the finicky starch famously vulnerable to turning into a blackened crunch ora boiled gloop with merely one wrong notch of a burner knob.
But before our global band of Top Chef: World All-Stars competitors could take on rice, they had to take on Ritz—yes, the Ritz cracker, our first blatant display of corporate sponsorship of the season. Guest-judged by Santiago Lastra, the chef-owner of Kol (the only Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant in the UK), this week’s seemingly simple Quickfire Challenge charged the toques with putting together the “perfect amuse-bouche” in 30 minutes using the name-brand cracker and one chosen ingredient that would “transport us across the globe in just one bite,” from caviar cream to tropical jackfruit to guajillo peppers. “But…” Nicole started, having seen Top Chef before.
Yes, there was a curveball: the players would be placed into groups of three and have to utilize all three chosen ingredients in their singular dishes. (“This is too many twists for one Polish girl!” Sylwia exclaimed.) They would be judged head-to-head in each set, and the winner of all five sets would reap the Quickfire’s elimination immunity and a $10,000 cash prize.
Some trios naturally benefitted from the group harmony of their ingredients, like Tom, Amar, and Begoña, who were working with the fresh, oceanic flavors of bottarga and oyster leaves. In contrast, others were perplexed by their competitors’ selections. Dale, lumped together with Luciana and Charbel, had never worked with plantains before, and Victoire wasn’t so excited about Vegemite-like yeast extract (“Ali, why did you pick that?!”).
In real-time, Padma and Santiago judged the heats, pulling off to the side to discuss their front-runners. Nicole’s grilled bavette with goat cheese and horseradish black-garlic jam wowed due to its “umami and balanced intensity.” Tom’s “very yummy” shrimp cocktail with avocado roulade and bottarga persillade took top marks in the second round. In the third heat, Dale overcame his plantain panic with his plantain-fried cod and wasabi-caper aioli. Gabri’s jackfruit a la Mexicana with caviar paste and tamarind butter impressed the judges in the final set. But it was May’s “surprising, unexpected” spicy kumquat jam with hibiscus juice and extract yeast from round four that proved to be the best of the bunch, securing her immunity.
And it was a good week to have it, as the Elimination Challenge was a doozy: The chefs had to cook rice-focused plates across two days for 100 diners plus the judges—including a guest judge, Top Chef South Africa host Lorna Maseko—in outdoor tents at London’s Alexandra Palace. (“Can we have a rice cooker?” joked Luciana.) The application was of their choosing; their plates could be sweet like a pudding, savory like a paella, or risotto if they dared.
Some, such as Gabri’s earthy mole over arroz verde pulled directly from family recipes, while others, like Tom’s lamb biryani, had to look to international influences. (“There’s not a single rich dish in the whole of bloody Germany, man.”) Two contestants, Dale and Dawn, opted for congee due to the porridge’s characteristically forgiving texture, but the latter had trouble with her black Venus rice after the first day of cooking. “My rice let me down. I’m stressed,” she said, tossing the still-crunchy kernels into a pressure cooker overnight, hoping they’d stew down to softness by morning.
Some chefs struggled with proportions with rice cast as the star and not the sidekick this week. “There’s too much rice on the fish,” Tom Colicchio said of Nicole’s crispy furikake rice with negitoro, while Padma found that “the rice didn’t feel like the center’’ of Budda’s Hainanese chicken rice. The three favorites of the week were Gabri’s green rice with mole negro, May’s rice pudding with watermelon puffed rice and sweet potato, and Ali’s charcoal-smoked lamb ouzi with toasted nuts and minted cucumber, the latter eking out the others for the win. “It’s more than an adrenaline rush, it’s a Top Chef rush!” the Jordanian gushed.
Alas, the rice curse did damn three competitors. Luciana’s London-inspired kedgeree with smoked haddock and duck egg was “overcooked and undercooked at the same time,” said Colicchio. (“For me to go home with rice, I don’t think I could enter Brazil again,” she worried.) The vanilla salt that finished Sylwia’s massaman-spiced coconut rice gave the dish a sharp sweetness that Gail Simmons wasn’t loving, but it was Dawn’s crunchy congee that “ate more like a black rice soup” that ultimately sent the Top Chef Portland alum home.
Stray observations:
- Major girl-power props to Sara Bradley, who, in the middle of this high-stress competition, was still pumping and sending breast milk back to the states to feed her nine-month-old baby, Hazel. “I want to show people that you can have a family, be a chef win Top Chef: World All-Stars.” Work, queen.
- It’s a running gag that cooking-show lingo is inherently sexual, and we can already hear Thirst Twitter coming for Ali’s “when I cook rice, I’m always gentle, I’m always sweet and nice” moment.
- The discrepancies between the various Top Chef franchises were evident this week, especially during Gabri’s grocery run for his 54-ingredient mole recipe. “In my season of Top Chef [Mexico], we’re not doing shopping at all…my cart still has half of the ingredients, and already I spent £350. What should I do?!” Eventually, he convinced May to lend him the rest of her unused shopping budget to complete his purchase, but his “Oh my god, this is so expensive!” meltdown at Whole Foods is all of us at Whole Foods.
27 Comments
Ahhh…the Great Depression, when you could sell a cracker on the promise that it was fancier than regular crackers.
Those poor crackers.
Turns out they only outlawed black slavery.
Yeah, you sure can’t do that now.
Padma Lakshmi has somehow figured out how to avoid aging.
She and Paul Rudd exchange butterfly kisses every third full moon of the year. The ritual is really quite beautiful.
Dawn has seemed really checked out both episodes. Her whole vibe has just been down. And it was no surprise that timing and planning got her again (at least she plated everything this time) as those issues are constant with her. I’m sure she’s nice and makes good, flavorful food, but she’s not cut out for competition shows.It’s stressful to watch make the same mistakes over and over and over
No shame in that either. Cooking competitions are a different thing from just being an excellent chef. It’s not for everyone.
Totally agree.
It was always fascinating to me that the Olympic athlete was the one who seemed to suffer from performance based stress the most. I’d love to try her cooking one day just not in a competition setting haha
I really dislike when they have to cook for a large group of people. The best thing about the covid seasons was that they didn’t have to. And I could always do without the Whole Foods shopping, but I’m sure they dump a lot of money into the show for that sponsorship, so it’s probably not going anywhere.I’m sure the edit led me this way, but I love May so far!
Buy shouldn’t Gabri have been disqualified for going over budget? It gave him an advantage that I’m sure other chefs would have loved to have, if they had been able to overspend, as well. Production knew this happened and it should have been addressed. He definitely shouldn’t have been awarded a win for breaking the rules.
I was surprised that didn’t come up later. Maybe it’s always been allowed, but weird that they’d even mention the budget then.
I’ve seen in previous seasons a contestant having another contestant buy a a few items for them when they are over budget, but he seemed to be WAY over. As for the budget being low given the number of guests, my thought was, well if rice is supposed to be the star of the dish, you shouldn’t need that much money. Making a mole with 50 ingredients is going to be an issue, because even if you need a little of something, you still have to buy the whole package, so that shit adds up.
The other contestants didn’t care, to the point that one gave him nearly 200 of her dollars. The producers didn’t care, because May used partof her budget on Gabbri.Also, it’s a cooking competition, not real life.The question is, why the fuck do YOU care?
I believe Ali won the challenge actually but agree with you otherwise.
There has been no talk of any kind of budget for Whole Foods in a while, so I’m not sure why there was such an emphasis on it in this episode.
“There has been no talk of any kind of budget for Whole Foods in a while”
There is a budget every. Single. Time that they shop at Whole Foods. Literally every single time.
When May lent Garbi the money my husband was like “wait, you can do that?” And I was like… I guess? I mean we’ve never seen that done before, doesn’t that sort of change the game?
“I mean we’ve never seen that done before”
That’s unfortunate because it’s absolutely been done before.
As far as sponsored segments go on this show, put some food on a cracker was quite innocuous. They didn’t have to do something dumb and incorporate it in as the star of their dish or anything thankfully.
Couple of stray thoughts:Anyone else try to time their Thursday dinners with the show? Went with a cheeseburger with jalapenos, grilled pineapple, sauteed onions, and BBQ sauce this week.Did they mention what the budget was for the Whole Foods shop? Agree with others that Gabri shouldn’t have been able to borrow money and spend more than the allotted budget but I also kind of wonder why the budget was seemingly only 300-400 pounds when the challenge was to feed 100+ people. Speaking of Gabri, I really thought his attempt to make a 50+ ingredient mole sauce was going to be a disaster and he’d end up on the bottom for trying to do too much. Not a huge fan of chefs having to spare tight kitchen space or applicances in any cooking show – we now have had two straight episodes of kitchen drama. I know it’ll get naturally fixed as more chefs are eliminated though.The American chefs haven’t done anything memorable so far – don’t want to say they’re all outmatched yet but my top-five to win right now (in no order) would be Dale, Begona, Ali, May, and Charbel. I really want to watch some of the international seasons but as far as I can tell only Canada is available on a random streaming service. Bravo should get the US rights to the offshots, add subtitles where needed, and throw it onto Peacock network.
Underestimate Buddha Lo at your own peril.
Buddha would probably be 6th on my list. It’s hard for me to judge how good he is compared to international chefs that I didn’t watch on their original seasons so just going off of what I’ve seen in first two episodes.
“Went with a cheeseburger with jalapenos, grilled pineapple, sauteed onions, and BBQ sauce this week.”
Gross!
“But…” Nicole started, having seen Top Chef before.Or, you know, having been on two seasons of Top Chef Canada before.
“Or, you know, having been on two seasons of Top Chef Canada before.”
Or, in other words, having been on Top Chef before.
It’s a running gag that cooking-show lingo is inherently sexualMy wife and I have been watching the earlier seasons, and we’re finishing up Season 7 now. Angelo has explicitly uttered the phrase “making love to” multiple times, and it’s so gross. Anthony Bordain called him out on it in the NASA episode, saying “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”