Top Chef Review: Deep Fried Paula Deen

Top Chef All Stars brought in one of television’s biggest chef personalities as a judge this week, Paula Deen. I am pretty convinced she wants to kill us all with her Southern style cooking; she deep fries balls of butter for heaven’s sake. In her defense, she says Southern cooking is how you “show love to each other.” Ok fine, just keep that donut hamburger away from me, Paula.

For the Quickfire challenge, Paula Deen judged the chefs’ deep frying skills. The winner would get $5,000. Paula recommended they be creative and not make “fried calamari over a salad.”

Antonia proceeds to make fried shrimp over a salad, because that’s totally different.  Blais makes fried mayonnaise, which I think is a brilliant thing to do when serving Paula Deen. Of course Blais had to dip it in liquid nitrogen first because, you know, he’s Richard Blais. Mike makes a fried chicken “oysters”  dish and serves it in an actual oyster half shell. The sketchy thing about that is Mike totally stole the idea from Blais’ notebook, which Mike snuck a peek at earlier that day. It doesn’t end there! After all is said and done, Antonia would have won the challenge with her rather unoriginal dish, but she didn’t follow the rules and forgot to prepare two plates, one for Paula and one for Padma.  She was disqualified, which left Mike’s stolen chicken oyster dish as the winner. Blais was not happy about that at all. If you didn’t hate Mike before you sure do now.

Chef John Besh is introduced and he presents the contestants with the Elimination Challenge! The challenge is to cater a gala in the GNOF’s honor. The protein must be Gulf seafood, cooked Southern-style. Here’s the other kicker: The chefs have to choose a type of protein held by one of the six returning All-Stars – who would also be their sous chef. Mike picks first because he’s evil, and evil always picks first I guess.

Mike chooses Tiffani F. and gives Blais second choice, which totally makes up for the five grand he stole from him. Blais picks Fabio because they have a bromance going on. Antonia selects Spike, Carla goes with Tre, Dale with Angelo and Tiffany picks the white shrimp, aka Marcel.  With the teams set they devise a plan, go shopping for ingredients and prepare for the next day.

At the fundraiser the judges patrol each of the contestants stations. They liked Antonia’s crab cakes, Blais’ pulled pork and snapper, and Mike’s grits-battered shrimp. They did not like Dale’s amberjack soup, with its undercooked potatoes, or Tiffany’s “why-is-this-sweet?” honey-glazed shrimp. Carla folded under the stress of her own Southern cooking expectations and dished up a grouper that’s all hot sauce and no grouper. It doesn’t help that the queen of Southern cooking, Paula Deen, didn’t like Carla’s collard greens either. The top three and bottom three were well defined before they were called in front of the judges’ table.

The judges, Padma, Tom, Paula Deen, and Chef John Besh, called in Richard, Antonia, and Mike first and they’re told they did an excellent job. Richard wins a trip to Barbados and he said he’s taking Fabio, along with his family, which is pretty adorable. I picture that ending up like the movie Captain Ron with Fabio as the title character. Winning definitely lessens the sting of losing the Quickfire challenge for Blais, and helps support the theory of karma for me.

The bottom three were Dale, Tiffany and Carla. The judges talked about how much their dishes sucked. Paula Deen said Carla’s dish didn’t make sense, which is really harsh coming from Paula, whose creations never make sense. Then Paula said something about sucking on shrimp heads that has already become a viral video. They booted Dale off the show, a total surprise since he owned last week’s challenges.  The only real reason for getting rid of Dale at this point was to shock the remaining chefs and the audience. Carla is having a mental breakdown on TV right now, Tiffany’s dishes have been lackluster for a while, and they still decided to kick off Dale. He says he’s proud of how he did this season and he should be. Richard Blais’ lead is growing larger each week and he’s starting to look a lot like Secretariat.

For another take on this week’s episode, read “The Drama Heats Up” by Zarna Patel.

Season 8, Episode 11 “For the Gulf” (original air date Feb 23, 2011)

Top Chef: All-Stars airs Wednesday 10/9c on Bravo.

Photos courtesy of David Giesbrecht and Bravo.