Top Chef spoilers from Tom's blog re: last night's elimination
Posted by
David (aka David)
Aug 26 '10, 12:09
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"Which leaves Amanda. When Eric Ripert goes so far as to use the word �offensive� in connection with fish, what more is there to say? As you�ve no doubt noted in the episodes thus far, he is encouraging of the chefs and seems truly to be rooting for them. Amanda�s permitting her tuna to oxidize was hands down the most egregious of the errors made by the chefs in this challenge. People are frightened of eating fish that has spoiled. Even the appearance of spoilage will engender an aversion to a dish, whether the fish has actually begun to turn or not. Anyone eating Amanda�s tuna tartare first had to overcome our reflexive impulse to turn away from the fish because of its off-putting color. And this is an utterly unacceptable obstacle. To be honest, Eric was a bit afraid to eat the dish. He actually said, �it�s dangerous � it could kill me.� Not only does tuna oxidize quickly once it�s been cut up, it also dries out quickly. When we serve tuna tartare in my restaurants, we cut it up as close to service as possible for both of those reasons, doing so a couple of times per night, and, on a slow night, even to order. Amanda�s instinct that it might be warm in the kitchen so she didn�t want to keep the tuna out was a good one, but there was a better solution than the one she settled on. She could have kept the tuna refrigerated and used smaller pieces as she went along. Had she kept her tuna intact until the day of the challenge, we might have had a tougher job determining our bottom dish. But since she didn�t, once she saw that her tuna was oxidizing she could have switched over to something like a tuna burger, where the oxidation would no longer have been apparent.
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