Top Chef Masters pits 24 chefs against each other in a charity competition. Semifinal Episode 1 features Hubert Keller, Christopher Lee, Michael Schlow and Tim Love. The chefs will be rated on the basis of stars. Whichever chef has accumulated the most stars by the end of the episode will win and advance to the next round.
Quickfire Challenge: Making Dessert for Girl Scouts
Every season of Top Chef seems to frustrate contestants when they are required to prepare a dessert. So for this Quickfire Challenge, each chef must create a dessert for a panel of Junior Girl Scouts. The chefs are given 90 minutes and access to everything in the Top Chef pantry.
Chef Lee knows that kids like French toast, so he creates small bites of French toast and serves them on a skewer with carmelized banana and marshmallow fluff. Chef Schlow tries to create a chocolate cake, but when it does not bake in time he is left with peanut butter chocolate candies. Chef Love creates strawberries three ways, while Chef Keller makes a chocolate meringue.
The four Girl Scouts tasting the desserts are difficult critics. During the Quickfire Challenge, each chef will receive a score from one to five stars. Chef Schlow received 2.5 stars. Chef Lee and Chef Love tied with 3.5 stars each. Chef Keller wins the challenge, earning all five possible stars from the girls.
Elimination Challenge: Dorm Room Cooking
For the elimination challenge, the chefs will be limited to the appliances found in a typical dorm room. They will each have a microwave, toaster oven and hot plate. Each chef is responsible for creating a 3 course meal, as well as shopping with a $150 budget. What the chefs don’t know is that they will actually be preparing their meals in dorm rooms of students at Pomona College.
Chef Keller makes Scottish salmon, carrot soup, and macaroni & cheese with prawns. Draining, cooling and reheating the macaroni created a problem until he decided to use the dorm showers for all three of these tasks. Chef Love began with a scallop carpaccio, created because he accidentally placed his groceries in the freezer after shopping. For his second course, he improvised and created a vegetable “pozole” and his third course consisted of skirt steak and braised kale.
Chef Lee served a snapper ceviche, risotto and a pork chop. Chef Schlow began with salmon, followed with a cabbage soup, and ended with pork a la apicius. The judges will each award up to five stars during the Elimination Challenge, as will the college students that were invited to the dinner.
The Judges Choose a Winner
Judges’ Table is different from traditional Top Chef judging because they do not need to come to a consensus. Each judge gives their star rating separately. The judges have pleasant things to say about most of the dishes created, especially considering the circumstances that they were cooking under. During deliberations, they were still fairly complimentary of the final dishes.
When the final scores were tallied, Michael Schlow came in fourth place with a total of 13.5 stars out of 25. Just beating him out was Tim Love, with 14.5 stars. Christopher Lee came in second place with a total of 19 stars, just under Chef Keller’s 20.5 stars. Hubert Keller is declared the winner and earns $10,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Stay tuned for next week's episode of Top Chef Masters, airing on Bravo, Wednesday nights at 10 PM. Visit the Top Chef Masters Page for more episode summaries and gossip about the show.
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