Top Chef: Doppelgängers

March 26, 2022 12:24 PM - Season 19, Episode 4

The chefs are joined by local chef Chris Williams in the Quickfire Challenge. He tasks the chefs to put their own twist on a biscuit dish in honor of his great grandmother, Lucille B. Smith. Then in the Elimination Challenge, the chefs find themselves pushed out of their comfort zones by chef Wylie Dufresne when they’re tasked to work in teams of two to create two dishes that look exactly the same, but taste completely different. The pressure is on because this is a double elimination.
posted by ShooBoo (5 comments total)

What a great challenge! I often think back to “green perplexed tofu”, which somehow reminded me of this. I was a little surprised by the elimination but when you have two chefs taking a big leap instead of both (or at least one) staying in a comfortable region there’s definitely danger ahead. The double savory courses seemed really interesting.

I don’t know how you mess up the biscuit part of a biscuit. Anyone unfamiliar with the magic of a cream biscuit, rectify that.
posted by supercres at 3:32 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

This elimination challenge was so cool. It looked amazing, how creative and interesting. I'm sorta shocked they haven't done anything like this before. I'm really curious how no taste dude is gonna do, he's won now and seems to get a lot of things right without it, but I gotta imagine it's not gonna be able to take him all the way to the end? Will be interesting to see.
posted by Carillon at 10:56 PM on March 28, 2022

I really enjoyed this episode and was amazed at the creativity of the chefs. The right pair were sent home though. Pannacotta and mousse have completely different textures and they were different colours on the plates. I was glad to see Buddha redeem himself after last week's samosa disaster. It was lucky for him Sam was worse, or he'd have been gone by now.
posted by essexjan at 4:28 AM on March 29, 2022

I was worried that this challenge would be too difficult for the chefs to pull off, but they (in general) did an amazing job, so good on them (and on the production team for giving them enough cook time). I was also worried that Jackson's lack of sense of smell would doom him and Buddha, and was preemptively furious -- the previous challenges were 'team' only in a vague sense; if you cooked a good dish individually, you'd still be fine. This one was such a core team challenge that the stupid double elimination made sense, and I'm glad they seemed to find the team where both chefs messed up a little to send home.

But Jackson is such a weird case to me -- he's been heavily focused, and a lot of it around his inability to smell. And he said he didn't tell anyone at the start, and presumably they would have then showed him telling people later. But they haven't, so has he done multiple team challenges without anyone knowing? That's the baffling thing to me -- why wouldn't you tell everybody? It's not that they can do anything to you since it's the judges who pick who goes -- the worst is you wind up getting picked last for teams. And once you haven't revealed something so core, if you do reveal it later, it's not 'poor dude, competing at half strength', it's 'what a psycho'.
posted by Superilla at 10:44 PM on April 3, 2022

I was worried that this challenge would be too difficult for the chefs to pull off

Yeah, this seemed like a post-Restaurant Wars challenge to me, but people rose to the occasion.
posted by praemunire at 7:41 AM on April 4, 2022