Top Chef ™
Baker:
Season:
Week:
Challenge Type:
Beef Tartare with Whipped Foie Gras
Vinny, talking to specialist butcher: "Doing a tartare what do you think, strip loin or tenderloin?"
Butcher: "Tenderloin. Nice and tender and very lean."
Vinny (during cooking):: "This is to resemble laser beams, if you will. I dyed it green with herbs. There's always laser beams and people have to dodge them. For my stunt, these stick lasers are gonna sit on top of the bowl. Then the judges are going to have to reach through the laser beams to get the golden key. After they get the key, then they can break the lasers over the tartare and enjoy. I don't know where the this idea came from."
Presenting to Judges
Vinny: "All right, judges, for your mission today, you need to try and extract the key out of the lasers. Once you acquire the key and get through the lasers, it is a beef tartare with marinated beets on top, the flavors of harissa and preserved Meyer lemon with a little bit of foie gras mousse inside."
Judges
"If the mission was to make an ice popsicle out of raw beef. Awesome. Nailed it."
"The only thing I got is foie gras. My initial bite was a little bit of mousse, and that was it."
"I ate it before it got frozen. There was some acidity in the pickled vegetables on the top. Tartare was fine. The foie gras mousse was fine."
"But in terms of the story, I was blown away. The key, the lasers. If he levitated away from the dry ice, it could be a very interesting dish that we were looking for."
