Top Chef ™
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Flat Iron with Kohlrabi and Gooseberries
Tristen: "I am cooking with flat iron steak and gooseberries. Gooseberries are similar in texture and taste to grapes."
Tristen: "I'm really happy with the cut of beef. I got flat iron, but gooseberries have the most amount of acidity. I don't know if those two necessarily go together."
Tristen (shopping): "I have a really tart berry, so I'm going to use it as the acid for my steak with my version of pemmican. Chef Danya mentioned this dish called pemmican. It's animal fat mixed with berries and dried meat, kind of like beef jerky. So I grabbed some beef fat, some local beef jerky, some raisins, to kind of help counteract the tartness of the gooseberry. I've never made a pemmican before, but I just want to show them that I respect the culture."
Tristen: " Just trimming the boof up. Just want them to cook nice and even. My gooseberry is closer to white wine than it is to the red wine. With beef, you want tannin. Red berries help cut the fat of the meat, but gooseberries are really acidic. They Kind of taste like sour grapes. Luckily, my cut isn't so fatty, and I can lean into the acidity of the gooseberries. I just want to bring out a little bit of the flavor and blister the skin before I pickle them."
Trsiten: " I'm making pemmican and this will be my first pemmican ever. I feel a little nervous, but I'm just trying to pay respect, and anytime I'm trying to pay respect to something, I feel a little bit more comfortable doing it. I nitroed some raisins, beef jerky, and gooseberries so I could get all the same texture. This (shows a bowl) was just liquid fat before I whisked it. Now it's bright white and fluffy.
Shuai: "That's delicious."
Lana: "As usual, Tristan's making something delicious."
Tristen: "I love a good bone marrow. It's just how fatty it is. Beef fat is very good."
Tristen: "Flatiron isn't like, a very expensive cut. These are really thin, so I want to char them really nicely. There's not a lot of room for error when it comes comes to cooking flatiron. Getting the temp on this is really, really pivotal."
Presenting to Judges
Tristen: "This is flat iron with kohlrabi and gooseberries. Chef, you mentioned something about pemmican. So on the top is a mixture of tallow, golden raisins, gooseberries, and beef jerky."
Judge: "Tristan, why did you choose flat iron? I saw you grab it immediately."
Tristen: "I always try to promote, like, Afro Caribbean cuisine, so I really like secondary cuts."
Judges
"I think there's a ton of flavor in this dish."
"You know, it's a tart berry, and he used it to his advantage because. he tried to emulate the pemmican. With the fat, it was very rich. But with the gooseberries being so acidic, he really nailed that. The gooseberries gave me sour candy."
"That's a good thing."
"I love that it was nature's candy. It was beautiful, and I think that all really worked."
"My beef just wasn't cooked perfectly."
"Mine was cooked perfectly."
"I'm, like, eyeing the gooseberries that you have left on your plate. I want to eat them."
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