Just
like Christmas, birthdays and taxes, Hell’s Kitchen steak night comes but once
a year (technically once a season but you know what I mean). This episode, we were treated to just that occasion;
a night where the chefs’ primary focus is on steak of all cuts and
varieties. There are other dishes as
well, but not nearly to the degree of the regular nights. This reinforces the importance of cooking
steak properly. Because underdone steak
won’t kill you like underdone chicken will, it is not as huge of a deal if the
meat is not cooked all the way, but the fact of the matter is that if you can’t
temp meat properly, you probably shouldn’t be a chef. It is one of those basic skills that is
taught from the very beginning of one’s career, and is absolutely essential to
be a good chef. As a point of reference,
when I was sixteen, I had a job as a chef at a restaurant in my home town. It wasn’t as fancy and “swanky” as the Hell’s
Kitchen restaurant, but it fit the town.
Steak was definitely on the menu, and even at sixteen, with very little
in the way of formal training, I was able to accurately temp steaks. Even now, many, many years out of the game, I
can still fairly accurately predict the temperature of a steak without cutting
into it. Here, we are looking at adults,
individuals that have years of experience, that cannot properly determine the
temperature of a piece of meat. This may
be the single worst crop of Hell’s Kitchen contestants I have ever seen.
The
show opens with douchey hair grand champion taking drastic measures to get
himself back to his old self. By “old
self” I mean the chef that he was when he started. It is obvious that at this point, his
confidence and ability to adequately cook to Ramsay’s standard are gone. An alteration to one’s self such as this (in
this case the shaving of one’s hair), while quite shocking to outsiders, is
actually not a bad move. By shedding the
image of the unconfident individual staring back at him in the mirror, douchey
hair grand champion was trying to remake and rededicate himself to cooking, and
ultimately winning Hell’s Kitchen. I
applaud him for the effort, but it will only be worth it if this act snaps him
out of his funk.
Ramsay
provides the big reveal to everyone that it is Hell’s Kitchen steak night, and
with that he gears the reward challenge to taking a cut of steak (everyone gets
a different cut) and creating a stunning steak dish using either a rub, a
sauce, or both for the meat. As a
kicker, Ramsay has requested that all of the steaks be cooked to a temp of
medium rare. All of the steak dishes
look very good in terms of how they were prepared, and Ramsay acknowledges this
as he wrestles with the decision on who to award points to on many an
occasion. The main knock against many of
the dishes, and what is ultimately the undoing of the blue team, is that the
steaks are not cooked to the desired temperature. It feels like amateur hour here, and the guys
that did cook their steaks correctly feel it too. While loud guy may have been a bit out of
line in terms of calling out his teammates with as much vigor as he did, he
wasn’t that far off in characterizing their sub-par effort. It should be noted that one of the chefs that
overcooked their steaks is douchey hair grand champion, so obviously the
haircut is not having the desired effect as of yet.
So the
girls win again and are pampered at a spa, where we as the viewers are tortured
by seeing these women in swimsuits. The
men lose again (naturally) and have to prep the kitchen for dinner service that
evening, while also butchering half a cow.
I don’t mean that they got a bunch of meat and had to cut it up, they
literally had to haul a cow carcass (minus the skin and hair, and sliced in
half) off of a truck and hack it up into the necessary portions. This is not the worst challenge by a long
shot, and the guys do a decent job of coming together and acting like grownups
(finally). One thing I do find funny is
that as the girls leave for their reward, they pass by the guys hauling the cow
carcass off the truck. Fat black girl mentions something about that being a big
cow, or a big piece of meat, or something like that. I’ll just leave it at that, you fill in the
punchline. It should also be noted that
fat black girl again mentioned her “hoo-ha”.
Good lord. That’s at least twice
that we have witnessed, God knows how many times she has said it off camera. Maybe the chefs this year are so bad because
of the distraction of her hoo-ha (or at least her talking about it).
The
ladies come back from their spa day and everyone gets ready to start the dinner
service. Appetizers are pretty easy,
with sliders and crabcakes being two of the new ones flying out of the
kitchen. There is no risotto or scallops
to be found (the usual stumbling blocks) so you would expect a fairly smooth
start to the dinner service, right?
Oh, so you haven’t been watching
this show for the last seven weeks? That’s what I thought.
The blue team stumbles a bit when
douchey hair grand champion (there he goes again) starts firing off crabcakes
for absolutely no reason, and then when he does get an order, he forgets to
provide the salad garnish with them. Not
a great start by any means, but it is miles above the red team’s appetizers as
squeaky voice actually loses a hair in one of the sliders (after failing to
hear another order of sliders even being called). There were other dishes being cooked in the
kitchen at this dinner service, but the majority of the focus of the cameras
was on the ineptitude of the chefs when it came to cooking the steaks. Both the red and the blue teams kept sending
up raw (not even rare, completely raw) meat.
It was so bad that on one of the steaks in the blue kitchen, the fat was
not even close to rendered, as if no heat touched it at all. The blue team did a piss poor job, but the
red team did so bad that chefs were actually kicked out, having to finish the
dinner service with just squeaky voiced girl and not fat black girl at the
helm.
The red
team lost which meant that they had to come up with two people to put up for
elimination. After some deliberation,
and the possibility that squeaky voiced girl should go up based on her hairy
burger (which isn’t a euphemism, I swear) it is decided that the two women on
the meat station should be put up. This
is a fairly obvious decision, especially since one of them is raw chicken
(remember her; she has that name for a reason).
This is ultimately who gets shipped off as her brand of cooking (bad)
had no place in Hell’s Kitchen. It
should be noted that there is still no handshake or acknowledgement of the
dismissed individual by Ramsay, and this time raw chicken just whipped off her
jacket and quickly exited, surprised that she was the one being sent home. I love how everyone that gets booted is so shocked. Really?
Your half-hearted attempt at explaining why you should stay in Hell’s
Kitchen is going to save you even though you can’t cook a piece of steak? Come on, don’t delay the inevitable. I’d like to say that we learned from this
episode that cooking steak is not as easy as it looks, but I think all we
learned is that these dumbasses can’t even cook steak.
Tonight, Ramsay yells, tempers
flare and bad chefs make bad food, just another night on Hell’s Kitchen!
See you next week!
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