Episode Report Card Mr. Sobell: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Eat Where the Truckers Eat
By Mr. Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 08.25.2010
The Blue team decides to grind up short rib and short loin for a 100-percent beef burger. It'll have your standard lettuce, tomato, onion accoutrements, and apparently coleslaw will be involved. Jake calls it a "Route 66 burger," which, hopefully, is evocative of the burger's style and not a handy way to identify the roadside where they found all the meat. The Red Team is also going for an all-beef burger, but taking a different tack with the accompaniments. There will be a chipotle barbecue sauce, and blue cheese is being worked into the beef, along with a host of spices. Oh, and Sharone is using bacon. I hate to prejudge these things long before the competition begins, but bacon wins. Always. Joe is unconvinced: "I think the Red Team is definitely falling prey to the Celebrity Chef Burger Syndrome." Joe, up until now we have had a very cordial relationship, but if you are speaking ill of both blue cheese and bacon, please accept my cordial invitation to go to hell.
Either we're in a remake of Maximum Overdrive or the truckers are approaching. Team Blue seems well organized under Jake's benevolent dictatorship. Meanwhile, the Goofus to Blue's Gallant is Team Red. Their burgers are leaking fat and causing smoke and flare-ups on the grill; more to the point, the burgers look like they've been charred beyond salvation. Ixnay on the Blue Heesechay, please. Sadly, the Red Team has just two minutes to prep a whole new batch of burgers. Hopefully, there's an In 'n Out within sprinting distance.
With the truckers now lining up for their grub, the Blue Team serves up their traditional burger. Their ruthless organization and efficiency is marred only by the fact that they are using Swiss cheese on the burger. Friends, unless you've got some mushrooms you're putting on the burger to go with that Swiss, you'd best go with cheddar instead. Then again, I'm the fellow who thought blue cheese sounded like a hell of an idea, and where has that left the Red Team? Spiraling into chaos, is where. No one seems to know what anyone else is doing, and the simplest tasks -- someone calls for butter lettuce, and poor, out-of-her depth Slim screams "Butter? What the hell are you asking for?" -- are requiring a Broadway production number to carry out. Good Lord, they're burning the buns. I hear Mayor McCheese wants to bring them up before a tribunal at The Hague for crimes against burger humanity.
Time for the votes to start rolling in from the first trucker who, for lack of a better phrase, was lucky enough to taste burgers from both teams. Trucker No. 1 pulls the Red Team's lever. Either that chipotle barbecue sauce is tastier than anything we can possibly imagine, or we're seeing the first instances of voter fraud so massive that it would make a banana republic dictator blush. One of the truckers calls the Red Team's burger "electric chair food." As in, they should be given the chair for what they've done to your food? Nah, man -- it's the kind of food you'd want to eat as your last meal before getting the electric chair. Presumably for all those drifters you killed during those many, many miles of trucking. But perhaps I've said too much.