Top Chef: Wisconsin Recap: Sausage Showdown
Bryan Voltaggio! My brother, my captain, my king! Long have I yearned to hear that bleating staccato laugh again, like Beavis and Butt-Head added a third member to the crew and he was part surfer guy, part goat. With my whole heart, I love Bryan, Top Chef’s Sisyphus pushing plates across tables to judges and begging them to like him, please, like him, and I sincerely believe that he should have won Top Chef Masters. (Have you rewatched it? I cannot, and will not, recommend the series, a cursed television artifact from that sliver of the aughts when people insisted on talking about food in purely sexual terms. You’re not George Costanza; give it a rest.) When Bryan showed up this week for both challenges — when he joined the chefs during the Quickfire and just hung out with them like a dad chaperoning a field trip! — I felt a deep, soothing calm. Top Chef still did a goofy thing this week by not ranking the lowest Quickfire dishes and again denying the chefs a chance for useful feedback. But I like to think the production mostly kept its shit tight because Bryan was there, and you’re not going to waste Bryan’s time, you know?
“Sausage Race” begins with everyone still reeling from Rasika’s exit last week, especially Michelle, who was convinced that she was going home. (Okay, maybe not Dan and Soo, who are playing mini golf together in their hotel.) But there’s mostly an anxious vibe when everyone shows up for the Quickfire to see Bryan alongside Kristen (in a black and red tracksuit that looks like something Acid Burn would have broken up and worn as separates in Hackers), and to learn that their Quickfire challenge will focus on the flambé technique. They’ll have only 20 minutes to make a dish with alcohol that they then cook off, making for some fun and fiery moments in the kitchen. Everyone jumps into action, trying to figure out what they can do in such absurdly limited time for the $10,000 prize. Amanda decides on a meringue with fruit; Michelle settles on mushrooms, bacon, toast, and liquor, “some of my favorite things” (same!); Kévin turns to a dish he often makes for dinner parties, shrimp with anise-flavored Ricard liquor. Mini-blow torches are everywhere as time ticks down and the chefs make one last stab to cook off the booze in their dishes, and then it’s time to present.
Most of the dishes are either seafood-focused or desserts, and none of them seem like total failures after the first round … but we don’t actually know if any are bad because Kristen and Bryan don’t share their least favorites. They only single out the top three: Kévin’s grilled shrimp flambéed with anise-flavored Pastis and served with fennel potato puree (a dish he says he makes a version of for dinner parties); Amanda’s play on a baked Hawaii, with brioche French toast flavored with coconut and lime, alongside a meringue and caramelized mango flambéed with Cachaça (a Brazilian sugarcane liquor that I personally think is delicious); and Danny’s version of aguachile with grilled prawns, flambéed with mezcal. Kristen then tells the three that they’re going to cook again, with an emphasis now on charring, and the person who wins that round will get $20,000 from Finish dishwashing products. That’s huge money for a Quickfire — excuse me, for the Ultimate Quickfire Challenge, nonsense words that Kristen says because everything on this show now must be the first and the biggest and the best! — and it sets a fire (sorry) under Kévin, Amanda, and Danny. Kévin decides to go fairly subtle, charring only one element of his dish, while Danny and Amanda are charring everything they can. That approach seems to be the better one because when they present their dishes, Kristen and Bryan seem a little disappointed by Kévin’s. The dishes: Kévin’s green curry charred squab with a Panko-fried squab leg and almonds; Amanda’s grilled and glazed veal chop with grilled and charred corn relish and grilled peach pickles; Danny’s grilled and charred branzino with charred poblano puree and charred avocado. Kristen and Bryan praise Kévin’s squab leg and Amanda’s salad, but the win goes to Danny, a win that I think Top Chef again tipped — as they did with The Bear-like montage last week — by presenting Danny as the only contestant with a little backstory about why he wants to win this challenge (so he and his wife can buy a house).
Danny gets the cash, and he also has immunity for this week, which comes in handy when Kristen announces the Elimination challenge. The chefs will randomly divide into two teams of five, and the teams will compete with dishes featuring bratwurst, Polish sausage, Italian sausage, hot dog, and chorizo, which they’ll serve at American Family Field in Milwaukee, home of the Milwaukee Brewers. It’s a fairly standard head-to-head team challenge based around the host city’s sports team (Top Chef has done these a lot in the past), but Wisconsin adds a wrinkle to the formula by leaving the order in which the teams will present their dishes to how the Milwaukee Brewers Racing Sausages place in a race the morning of the challenge. It feels a little unnecessarily complicated? But there isn’t any actual drama in how the teams, which unexpectedly divide almost entirely by gender lines, work together (blue team: Savannah, Soo, Kévin, Manny, Dan; yellow team: Kaleena, Danny, Michelle, Laura, Amanda). Danny firmly tells his team that each member should stick to their $200 budget (“I’m making very meaningful eye contact with Laura,” he says, since last time they worked together, she used $325 of the team’s $1,000 budget for her dish and left him with $75 instead of $200), while over on the blue team, they trust Kévin when he decides that he’ll do a risotto that he’s done before and is confident he can get done in two hours. And there isn’t any arguing over who gets each sausage, so the head-to-head matchups are: Savannah and Michelle, Polish sausage; Soo and Danny, hot dog; Kévin and Kaleena, Italian sausage; Manny and Laura, Chorizo; and Dan and Amanda, bratwurst.
The next day at the stadium, the Milwaukee Brewers Racing Sausages face off to determine how the teams will serve: hot dog is fastest, followed by Polish sausage, Italian sausage, chorizo, and bratwurst. (Amanda cheering for the chorizo as “the only sausage of color” made me laugh; I do enjoy how much the chefs stuck to the bit and treated the Racing Sausages as if they were real entities, not people in suits.) So Danny and Soo are up first, and Soo’s corn dog with wasabi and jalapeno mayo wins over Danny’s bacon-wrapped hot dog with braised cabbage and beet relish. Point one for the blue team. Then Michelle’s Polish sausage étouffée with creamy grits wins over Savannah’s pierogi with fennel and apple salad because there was more sausage in her dish, and Kaleena gets another win for the yellow team with her potato gnocchi with Italian sausage and Calabrian chili, which the judges far prefer to Kévin’s Italian sausage risotto with roasted Parmesan and fennel. Manny evens up the count for the blue team with his chorizo and cheese tetelas with roasted tomato salsa and avocado crema, which gets the edge over Laura’s chorizo kabob taco with yogurt sauce. And with the teams tied 2-2, former Damanda teammates Dan and Amanda face off on bratwurst. Dan goes very traditional German with a potato pancake served with charred cabbage, caraway sauerkraut, mustard butter, and dill, while Amanda gets a little more modern with a rye and caraway spätzle, caramelized onion, and crispy sauerkraut. Amanda takes the win for integrating bratwurst more into her dish while Dan’s sausage was primarily sliced and placed on top of his pancake, and that means the blue team and its three losing dishes are heading to Judges’ Table.
None of the losing dishes from Savannah, Kévin, and Dan is that bad (“Someone will be going home for making a good dish tonight,” Tom says), but they all suffered from not using their chosen sausage enough. Still, the judges think that Savannah’s pierogi and Dan’s potato pancake at least focused on the sausage and made good use of their dishes’ other ingredients, while Kévin’s risotto was primarily about Parmesan cheese — even more so than the rice, which had some broken granules, Bryan mentions, and which Tom says he could have cooked on the field for maximum freshness. (I don’t really buy Tom claiming that they wouldn’t have criticized Kévin if the risotto was cooked last minute, but fine, let the man have his hypothetical.) So although Kévin’s was one of the better risottos served on Top Chef, he ends up getting the boot. And Michelle, in a huge comeback after almost getting eliminated the previous week, gets the win, meaning she has immunity for next week. It’s her second Elimination challenge win, and I love that for her! Anyone to give Danny some competition.
Assorted amuse-bouche
• Tom hat watch: Avenge me for this bullet point. Avenge me!! He could have so easily worn a baseball hat for this baseball-themed challenge and he just DIDN’T.
• Let me give credit where it’s due: Laura making her own chorizo was a bold move, and the idea of a chorizo kabob taco is blowing my mind. Those little skewers were adorable; I would like to purchase some. And were those flash-fried onion strings or potato crisps on the taco? Give me that crunch!
• Is Aguachile having a particularly hot moment right now in the larger culinary world? It feels like it’s taking the place of ceviche, the quick-seafood dish that was formerly every cheftestants’ go-to.
• The dishes I most wanted to eat this episode: Kaleena’s kimchi and scallion donut with peaches and jalapeno flambéed with bourbon from the Quickfire, and Soo’s corn dog from the Elimination. He used french fries to coat the hot dog! That’s deranged and impressive.
• Manny telling Kévin he’s a “hot Italian” — the Power Bottoms’ flirtation is getting out of control!
• Brittany Snow is a guest judge this episode for her role in Pitch Perfect, which yes, “pitch” is a baseball term, but the movie isn’t a baseball movie, Snow isn’t from the Midwest, she said she rarely eats sausage, and the whole thing felt incongruous? I wonder if Top Chef tried to get Anna Kendrick first and she declined, although she’s done foodie stuff in the past.
• The yellow team seemingly came in $100 under budget at Whole Foods, and I simply think each team member should have gotten $20 to buy whatever they wanted for themselves. Twenty dollars won’t get you far at Whole Foods, but still! Maybe a case of “sparkling rainwater” for the inane novelty of it?
• Kaleena refusing to run across the baseball diamond: Good for her.
• Restaurant Week incoming! And um, did I hear correctly that it takes one of the teams 30 minutes to get the judges their first course?
• LAST CHANCE KITCHEN SPOILERS AHEAD: Rasika, what happened? This was a great episode of LCK, with the best challenge I’ve ever seen on the show; I can’t recall if this format was used before, but if not, LCK should absolutely repeat it in the future. Top Chef rarely feels truly strategy-based, but “Let’s Play Ball” was clever in how it made Rasika and Kévin gameplan and compete, and it was also extremely entertaining to watch. Tom’s challenge for Rasika and Kévin continues the “Sausage Race” theme in that it’s baseball-inspired: The chefs will have 45 minutes to make up to nine dishes (like nine innings), for which Tom will award them zero through four points (like how many runs you can score at once). It’s up to the chefs to decide what the best strategy is to gain the most points; should they go for a few great dishes or more mid ones? At first, it seems like Kévin is taking the former approach by saying he’s planning only three dishes, while Rasika is doing the latter and serving Tom a traditional five-course Indian dinner. But when 15 minutes have passed, and Tom doesn’t have any food yet, the tide seems to turn, with Kévin adapting his strategy to give Tom more dishes, even if they’re not amazing, while Rasika feels locked into her routine. Rasika serves the first dish, a milk-based rice payasam, or Indian rice pudding with milk, sugar, saffron, and cardamom; she knows the rice isn’t fully cooked but serves it anyway, and of course Tom dings her for that. Kévin’s first dish is a little cube of lamb with bread crumbs, panko, garlic, and demi-glace that Tom calls beautifully cooked, and once Tom gives Rasika one point for her pudding and Kévin three points for his lamb, he sets up a point spread that Rasika is never able to surpass. Her Berbere eggplant with corn and pepper salad isn’t seasoned well enough, her bisi bele bath (rice with lentils) and potato curry is fine but not mind-blowing, and her Chilean sea bass with green chutney is well-cooked, but the sauce is too salty. She gets six total points for her four dishes, which feels brutal, but Rasika really fails herself by not changing her tactics and sticking with carb-heavy dishes that took a while to cook. In contrast, after his lamb, Kévin keeps focus on proteins that can be quickly cooked and dishes that can be easily assembled: a scallop with butternut puree and herb salad; poureax (leak) vinaigrette with chive and parsley salad; a charred butter lettuce salad with sliced salmon and yogurt sauce; and smoked salmon with dill cream. Some of Kévin’s dishes also get one point, too, but he serves five dishes to Rasika’s four, and ends up with eight points total. He’s back in the running, and Rasika’s out.