Being 'top chef' means never having to do dishes

What they don't show you on Top Chef or Iron Chef but that we're learning at the California Culinary Academy:

* Cooking is messy, and someone has to clean. At culinary school, we clean in orderly fashion and in accordance with accepted safety and sanitation practices. As Chef John Meidinger told us in Safety & Sanitation class: "This isn't romantic, is it? You're not going to see this on the Food Network. But you will spend 3% of your revenue cleaning everything in your restaurant."

* All those rich, flavorful sauces take time, lots of time, to make. When a chef opens a container of stock on television, he/she is bypassing the long, hard work it takes to make the stock. Additionally, using off-the-shelf stocks probably introduces a lot more sodium to cooking than should be there.

* Back to sanitation: Saying scant attention is paid to it on the cooking shows would be unfair. But it does tend to get nudged aside regularly. A couple of examples: Double-dipping by chefs when they are tasting something; on Top Chef, head judge Tom Colicchio likes to drop in on the competitors at the height of food preparation. He often ends those brief visits with a handshake, and the chef goes right back to the food, not washing his/her hands.

* Good cooking doesn't always take a lot of time, but some of it does. The condensed amount of time on the shows -- a one-hour time limit for Iron Chef and generally no more than two hours to prep and cook a meal on Top Chef -- makes a number of cooking techniques unrealistic, or it telescopes the work involved so that the viewer isn't getting the true picture.

* There's a good bit of humility and modesty among chefs. At least that's so with the chefs at the Academy. The arrogance, bravado and strutting one sees among contestants on Top Chef and Iron Chef must be for entertainment value; they add nothing to the sauce.

(Photo credit: www.tenhundfeld.org)

'Cat food' puts SF chef in jeopardy on Top Chef

San Francisco catering chef Laurine Wickett was in the bottom three again this week on Bravo TV's Top Chef.

One judge, Food & Wine magazine Editor-in-Chief Dana Cowin, called Wickett's pork dish "cat food."

Wickett survived, as another chef was eliminated. But her reputation and ego were bruised in the judging, shown Wednesday evening. What head judge Tom Colicchio said in his blog:

Laurine opted to make a pork butt rillette, but the problem was that she didn’t know how to make it. She thought it was a braised meat. No, no, no – you confit it in pork fat first, so that the water is forced out and is replaced with fat. After you’ve completely cooked the meat over several hours on a low temperature submerged in fat, you take it out, whip it up with a fork (or a mixer with a paddle), slowly incorporating more of the fat with which you cooked it, and you end up with very lush, rich, unctuous meat. By just braising it, Laurine wound up with a stringy, watery dish. She really screwed up. ... At least her chutney and salad were quite good. … Dana did say that she thought the texture of Laurine’s dish was like cat food … it wasn’t.

Wickett owns Left Coast Catering in San Francisco. She is the last of three Bay Area competitors still on the program.

(As an aside: One is led to wonder how the editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine knows what cat food tastes like.)

(Photo credit: www.bravotv.com)

SF's lone remaining 'Top Chef' makes cut, barely

Laurine Wickett, owner of San Francisco's Left Coast Catering, was in the bottom three in Bravo TV's Top Chef competition Wednesday evening. But she survived for another week, at the least.

Wickett (left) got off on the wrong foot by pushing back on the challenge to "deconstruct" a dish and reinterpret it to show individual cooking style.

What head judge Tom Colicchio said in his blog:

"For Laurine and others to say 'that’s not what I do' makes no sense to me. The point is to stretch yourself as a chef. You may not be a chef who does this often, but this doesn’t mean you can’t give the matter some thought, apply your knowledge of your craft, and come up with a thousand different ways to rework something so that the flavors are there along with the imagination."

For the Eliminaton Challenge, Wickett's dish was a deconstructed fish and chips,  malt sabyon, tartar sauce and tomato confit with ginger and garlic.

Colicchio said she was in the bottom three for " ... technical reasons: it was so poorly executed."

San Franciscans eliminated in past episodes are Preeti Mistry, executive chef for Bon Appetit Management Co. at Google headquarters in Mountain View, and Mattin Noblia, chef/owner of Iluna Basque in North Beach.

(Photo credit: www.bravotv.com)