Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: D+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Incompetence! It Burns!
By Monty Ashley | Season 5 | Episode 10 | Aired on 04.09.2009
There is whooping and hollering as the chefs put on their new jackets.
The chefs line up in front of Chef Ramsay again. He tells them it's time for the first Individual Challenge. Robert: "It's on, baby. I'm ready to handle my business individually right now." Aww, yeah. Wait, what? What are you talking about? Anyway, the prize will be going with Gordon to San Francisco. Danny interviews that he wants to hang out with Chef Ramsay and get insight into how he got where he is. Well, judging from his books, he's insanely competitive and driven. So you might try that.
The challenge is this: each chef has the same fourteen ingredients with which to create a phenomenal dish. And they have to use all the ingredients. Andrea thinks this is a lot of ingredients to cram onto one plate. The ingredients include red wine, antipasta, mushrooms, rosemary, and chicken. As the chefs rush around, Chef Ramsay walks through the kitchen exhorting them to use inspiration. Andrea's using the rosemary as a skewer for sort of a shishkebab thing. Chef Ramsay suggests that Danny consider his presentation. Ben fumes about Danny ranking him last. 54321 and serve!
First up: Andrea with a rosemary-skewered chicken kebab served with a rosemary au jus and caper-tomato sauce. Chef Ramsay: "That's it?" Ben sneers that he's classically trained and that rosemary skewers are "Culinary School 101". Andrea interviews that she knew that putting the skewers on the plate was risky since it was just one episodes ago that she got yelled at for having crab shells on the plate. Chef Ramsay deems the dish "a lot better than it looks" and says that he just wanted more chicken.
Giovanni has made a pasta pomodoro, and Chef Ramsay likes it. Paula has made a "melange", which I think is chef talk for "I mixed all the ingredients together", and it is also nice. Robert made a chicken cacciatore, which Chef Ramsay thinks is a tiny bit dry but delicious. Danny roasted the chicken and it's fine.
Ben spends about an hour describing what he did with the chicken. It's complicated, and if he can't boil it down to one or two words, I don't see how I can be expected to. Chef Ramsay says it's delicious (which he said about most of the dishes) and praises Ben for cooking the drumstick unlike everyone else.
Chef Ramsay praises everybody's dishes and claims that it's hard to choose a winner among six such wonderful chefs. Does he think we've just forgotten the nine episodes of him calling these people incompetent idiots? The previouslies clearly showed him telling Ben he was awful. Anyway, he calls Ben and Danny forward. He likes Ben's chicken and Danny's sauce. Finally he congratulates Ben. "Finally, Ben gets to taste a little success!" enthuses Ben, who I hope will not be referring to Ben in the third person too often. We don't want a recurrence of J.