Cruel Intentions?

Full transcript after the jump!

Hello, I’m Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin and I am commenting on Episode 6.

In this episode Michelle Bernstein was the judge, and Andrea seems to be uncomfortable about seeing Michelle on the other side since they both have a restaurant in Miami. And I think Michelle gave her a little bit of a scratch ... during the Quickfire. It was kind of expected, I guess, and it was fun to watch, but I don’t know how nice it was for Michelle to do that. The ingredients were very exotic. Foie gras I don’t think is very difficult to work with, so that was lucky. Wild boar is like using pork, or cooking pork. An egg is an egg – I know the size is different in between an ostrich, an emu, or a chicken, but it's still an egg, so it’s not too difficult. The duck balls don’t have too much flavor, and they have the texture of basically a sausage, so it’s not too difficult to cook with them. And they are as sweet as a sweetbread, actually. Maybe the crocodile would be challenging because it becomes dry very fast. The ostrich doesn’t have too much of a flavor; if you don’t overcook it, it's fine, and you can have a good result with it. So I think the most difficult out of all of them was the crocodile, and maybe the rattlesnake – I have never seen something like that. It was actually a big surprise to see them starting and thinking and organizing themselves to cook their ingredients, and suddenly, in the middle of the process, Padma came in and decided to change completely what they were doing, and they had to give their protein to the next participant. I thought it was a very surprising, fun, and hard thing to do.

Well, I think to make the perfect omelet is a real challenge, and [Andrea] was very smart about thinking "I have some eggs, what am I going to do in, now, 15 minutes, that’s going to be so incredible?" And she stuck to the classic, and she showed that she mastered the technique and mastered the seasonings, and made a perfect omelet. And that was a very good choice and decision that she made.

So in the challenge on the boat, Angelo started to give some advice and help others, and with Angelo we have learned in the past that you need to be a little bit careful because you never know what his intentions are. And Kevin and Kenny seemed to be understanding that pretty well, and they removed themselves from the scene, I would say, and kind of just listened but didn’t really participate and give any advice. They certainly didn’t believe Angelo, and it's hard to know if Angelo had pure intentions or not, that day. So then, Kenny ended up in the bottom, and I think he was wondering (and probably a lot of us were wondering) is it a conspiracy to eliminate some of the best contestants, and that was a great opportunity to do so. It looks like the team wouldn’t do something like that, it looked like they had good values, but at the end of the day, it’s a game, and it could be a fair game to just let go the strong cooks. And Angelo and Kenny are strong, and why not let them go? Then, it would be definitely simpler and easier to potentially go to the final. So everyone was unanimous about Tamesha’s dish. It looks like it was poorly executed. She cooked the scallop only on one side, part of the scallop seems to be raw, part of it seemed to be cooked, I don’t know. The sauce was on the verge of being slimy, from what I understood, which didn’t help the scallops. The comments were not good, and it looked like she may have done the worst job, and at the end, we saw it: she went home. So definitely, she made big mistakes on that challenge.

After a few weeks together, sharing the house, it looks like some relationships are developing. And as a viewer, actually, I’m kind of amused and borderline uncomfortable with the way things are going with some of the contestants. They’re getting very, very close, I don’t know, the body language is very to watch. So I can’t wait to see next episode and comment on it.

Those are my comments for Episode 6, and I will see you next week when I comment on Episode 7.