Top Chef ™
Baker:
Season:
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Challenge Type:
Grilled Trout with Mustard
Massimo: "I foraged some really nice juniper. I would love to get the trout grilled on the barbie and then smoke them on juniper. The way that the smoke dispenses all of the flavor. You cannot get that any other way. I'm making bannock, and I'm going to garnish it with the flowers that I got today."
Massimo: "I'm poking holes just to help get a bit of that smoked flavor inside of the potatoes."
Massimo: "I have time to do a bannock cooked on a rock, and I'm really excited. Yesterday I saw a patch of mustard. Mustard root, mustard flower. So what I'm going to do is a sauce of mustard. I'm going to make an espuma with the potatoes and the trout."
Massimo: "I'm rolling out my version of a bannock cracker. I want to get that stone nice and hot. A nice bannock cracker that's crispy, that you could dip in. Maybe those other wild herbs that I forged, chop up, make into a condiment. This sounds delicious to me. I got some really nice flowers yesterday, so I think it's cool."
Massimo: "Right now I'm butterflying a trout. I really want to get the flesh as fondant as possible. I could get a nice little rose on it. Trout is very, very thin. It's going to be extremely difficult to get the crispy skin, the perfect cook, and the smoke all at the same time. But this isn't my first barbecue."
Presenting to Judges
Massimo: "Yesterday, when I was foraging, I saw mustard. So this dish was actually conceptualized by the mustard itself. Today I make grilled trout that's lightly smoked in juniper with a sauce of mustard root and mustard leaf with a smoked potato puree. And I made a bannock crisp with all the wild flowers and wild herbs."
Judges
"Thank you. I like what Massimo did here because he took one ingredient, mustard, and really focused on that, and I think he did it really well."
"The fish was perfectly cooked. Trout is one of my favorite fish ever to eat, so I appreciate that he showed it the love it needed."
"Everything in the bowl I thought was well balanced. But the bannock, that really intense herb condiment, had, like, such a bitter note, and it just felt disconnected from the trout."
"He kind of left it up to the user to figure out how to eat it. But once I found my balance, the bannock plus the fish and the potato and the sauce, then it worked for me."
"It was very elegant for such a big personality, like, very, like, dainty."
Judge: "Massimo, walk us through how it all came to be."
Massimo: "I knew I wanted to cook trout on open flame. I had a half an hour extra, and so I wanted to cook the bannock, to have a little bread, to have something to dip in. The fish was just beautifully cooked. I loved the mustard relish made with the stems.".
Judge: "The sauce, I mean, absolutely outstanding. Thank you so much. I loved that you put a lot of bitterness and herbaceousness onto that bannock, but the way you plated it, because there was so much garnish on the bannock, I didn't think to dip it. And the flavors on the cracker were incredibly powerful."
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