I don’t know what’s going on with Lisa Ray’s hair, so we should probably just pretend everything is fine and get the Quickfire started.
It’s a blind taste off of meats. Nobody does particularly well, and we end up with a four way tie for first place with 5 out of 12 correct. Time for a “sudden death” blind taste off with Gabriell, Jonathon, Sergio, and Ryan.
Ryan knocks him self out of the running with this response…
It comes down to Sergio and Jonathon, and Jonathon takes the win identifying avocado oil. No immunity though, just a “significant advantage” in the elimination challenge. (And if you watch enough reality TV, you know that those advantages are very often NOT.)
The challenge is offal. Cooking a randomly selected “acquired taste” delicacy and serving it to a king of nose-to-tail cooking, Chris Cosentino.
Some of the ingredients are better than others. More common items like sweet breads, liver, kidneys…. up against much less popular choices like tripe or intestines. Jonathon’s “significant advantage” is the ability to swap his randomly picked ingredient for someone else’s. He decides to swap his lamb liver for Trevor’s sweet breads.
But wait – here’s the burn! Now he has to swap out two other chef’s ingredients for eachother’s. Bad feelings! Gabriell had duck liver, but Jonathon swaps that out for David’s tripe. Gabriell is NOT pleased.
Shopping at McEwan’s, David also seems stressed and unhappy. He decides to make a risky move and go with a duck liver ice cream. He calls it a risk/reward situation. I guess we’ll see.
Sergio grabs all he needs for his beef tongue dish then grabs some cheese curds as a little snack. Bam! Inspiration struck and he decides to go with….
Gabriell is seriously, seriously bummed about the tripe. He decides to pressure cook it, hoping that will make it less tripe-like and more appealing to him. Hmm.
So, let’s get to the judging.
David’s risk/reward duck liver ice cream is a HUGE success. The judges love everything about it.
They also love Carl’s beef heart steak and eggs. That looks amazingly good.
Elizabeth’s pig’s ears are also in the top four.
And so are Jimmy’s deep fried brains with brain ravioli.
Who do they love most this week? David’s risk brings him his first win!
At this point, I’d like to break for a moment to say how much I am enjoying Chris Cosentino as a judge. He’s smart and knowledgeable, funny and charming, and handsome to boot. Could we maybe have his a full time judge, please?
OK, time to look at the bottom four now.
Gabriell serves his much maligned tripe as a soup garnish. The judges aren’t falling for that. As Shereen says – if somebody ordered tripe, it’s because they want to try tripe. Bad move.
Curtis’ sausage dish is a mess. Seriously – if you’re on Top Chef Canada, you should just not make sausage. It bombs, pretty much every time. The judges hate this one. No flavour, terrible presentation, too many needless ingredients.
Sadly, Sergio took a great idea and blundered it. Elegant, refined poutines are out there – but this isn’t one. They hate the fries, hate the gravy, and hate the way the tongue is just chucked on top. And what’s with the truffles? That’s not enough to suddenly make something refined – it just makes it expensive.
Trista overcooked her meat. That’s really all she did wrong, so we can surmise that she only just made it into the bottom four and isn’t going home this week. They love that she made her own rye bread in a timed challenge, but this wasn’t a bread challenge.
They dislike Sergio’s poutine the most of all. Sorry Sergio!
I feel like there may have been a bit of squeezing Curtis through going on here. Sergio and Gabriell both made bad decisions in this challenge, but Curtis displayed a lot of shortcomings and lack of skills this round that aren’t going to go away. I guess we’ll see.
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