These Guys are Chefs?

I mentioned yesterday that Lakeview Coffee and I caught the first round of Top Chef. It was amazing - not in terms of what food the contestants made but in terms of the basic knowledge of cooking that they lacked.

The elimination competition featured the contestants being paired off against one another with each pair having to make their interpretation of a classic dish such as crab cakes, souffle, chicken picatta, steak au poivre, shrimp scampi, etc. To say the least, the results were in many cases appalling. Examples:

• Neither of the two people who ended up with souffle succeeded in getting anything close to the appropriate rise and were terrified of making it.

• One of the chefs who did crab cakes (a real whiner), didn't buy mayonnaise thinking the pantry would have it. Then being forced to make it himself didn't know how to make a mayonnaise. This is suppose to be a top notch chef and he doesn't even know how to assemble one of the most basic sauces in the cooking repertoire? Hell I know how to make a mayonnaise.

• Another in discussing his failures with the chicken picatta could only talk about the amount of pasta in the dish and missed entirely the issue of the breading and acid in the dish.

It seemed that the judges were equally appalled by this lack of rudimentary knowledge. Pretty sad.