Next Iron Chef – Episode 4
“Vienna Sausage — have you ever been to Vienna? This is nothing like that.” — Alton Brown
If you don’t follow the Iron Chef hopefuls on Twitter, you ought to remedy that asap. After last week’s tempest in a tea-cup over whether Marcel Vigneron should have shared his truffle with Nate Appleman, tempers boiled over on the microblogging site with viewers calling foul on Marcel’s selfishness and Marcel fighting back by pointing out that Nate shoved him out of the way to get to the fridge, so he got what he deserved. Last night’s continuing conversation on Twitter was even more degenerate with one chef openly tweeting while drunk about the attitude of a rival. It’s like elementary school with knives and liquor. So almost exactly like my elementary school.
If you want to watch the show, you can watch it here.
This week the chefs were asked to create a dish from one of several canned food items: cooked beef, corned beef, crab meat, spiced ham (spam), and vienna sausage (hot dogs) were all in the mix. Several of the chefs admitted to never having seen or cooked with these ingredients before, which made some of the finished dishes all the more accomplished.
One chef was told that their “inedible,” condemning them to the mystery ingredient showdown, while Simon Majumdar said that another chef’s pesto looks like “Kermit in a blender,” and third nitro-froze tuna and then grated it onto their dish like it was parm – those last two chefs stayed safe by virtue of some awful decisions from the two chefs who went into the elimination challenge.
But the bad decisions didn’t stop there. The secret ingredient for the showdown was lobster. You’d expect that they’d be able to make decent plates from that, and you’d be right. What you didn’t see coming is the twist, which left Geoff Zakarian feeling like the judges had been “played,” and Alton Brown seeking some elimination advice from the Chairman.
I’m not sad to see the back of the chef that packed up their knives this week. Out-cooked, out-thought, and simply out-adulted by the remaining chefs, the competition is going to be stronger for losing one of its least professional chefs.
