Afterparty: Next Iron Chef
By Crystal Chambers on November 3, 2009
HOLLYWOOD (Herald de Paris) - With Chef Crenn out of the hot pot, there is only one female cook left in the running on The Next Iron Chef on the Food Network. This can be a good thing for the sympathy endeavor and the fact that if the judges – of which two of three are women – the are using the sisterhood to keep a girl in the game.
Besides, they need a girl in order to give hugs as the judging goes on.
Guest Chef Suvir Saran – a master of Indian cuisine – set the first challenge for the chefs to create one bite of food that shows the flavor of India. Chef Metha had the time advantage and the advantage of being Indian and familiar with the tastes of India.
Chef Appleman may be at a disadvantage in that he’s a meat man and this is a strictly vegetarian dish.
Chef Garces used curry powder, which is a misnomer of the world’s thinking that Indian’s relish curry as a staple, and was called to answer for his stereotypically applied curry mistake by Chef Saran.
Appleman, the meat man, managed to impress Saran enough to win the round. Mehta was not a happy cooker. Not that he’s a happy man anyway.
The second challenge was to cook a five course Indian meal in two hours time. Four of the remaining six cooks would be going on a trip, with two taking a trip home. Cleavers flying and the pressure building the cookers hurried – not curried – their lil spatulas away! Per usual chefs coveted their utensils and cookers and were unwilling to share.
The meat mistake was Chef Travino using beef in his dish: cows are sacred in India. Appleman tried hard but over Americanized the dishes and burned his banana – literally – which put off the female judges.
Mehta scored a perfect run across the platter with his five dishes…figures considering he’s Indian. Chef Garces was told the judges could tell that the food was made by a Latin chef because of the extra sweetness and hotness in the dishes and his tapioca was undercooked. It’s funny to see Garces tell the judges he wanted “firmness” in the tapioca when he told the cameras before he went out that he didn’t have enough time for the tapioca to finish cooking.
Oh the lies we tell.
Chef Garces – despite the undercooked tapioca – caused more than one dish to drop when he won the cook-off with his Latin twist on the Indian dishes. Appleman was cored to find out he’d been picked to go home, peeled from the bushel of remaining chefs contending for the title of the Next Iron Chef.
The remaining four are off to Tokyo for their next contest of culinary zen. Come back for another serving of Iron Chef next week in the Afterparty to find out who’s bowing out of the competition.
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