America's Culinary Cup
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Kombu-Cured Hamachi, Caviar
Kombu-Cured Hamachi with Cauliflower Cream, White Soy Butter Champagne Sauce, Caviar and Pickled Turnips (Salty + Umami)
Buddha: "My taste profiles are going to be salty and umami. I'm going to do a kombu-cured hamachi with cauliflower cream and champagne sauce with caviar. Kombu is the king of umami. It's literally what MSG comes from."
Buddha: "Now that my fish is in the fridge, I'm gonna work the base of my sauce. It's possibly my last challenge. I'm definitely going to be going out with a bang."
Buddha: "I want to pull out the prosecco, the caviar, gold leaf to make this beautiful sauce. Last time I competed, I didn't have two beautiful daughters, but now I do, and all I can do is think about them. I've been missing them a lot, and I'm doing this for my family just so we can live more comfortably and I could spend more time with them."
Buddha: "Time is winding down. I'm gonna zhuzh it up with a little bit of gold leaf. Why not? If it's my last time here, let's go out with a bang. The sauce tastes great, but I do feel like it is reading a little bit too salty-umami. So I'm going to turn it down just a little bit. So I'm adding a couple more cubes of cold butter, trying to get all the balancing right. I'm still adjusting the flavors. This is going to be really down to the wire."
Buddha (presenting): "So I did hamachi with caviar, cauliflower cream, and a white soy butter sauce. Some pickled turnips on there. It is salty and umami."
Padma: "Very pretty."
Michael: "This dish shows some of your best work. The kombu jime technique that you used to bring more umami to the fish definitely paid off. The addition of the caviar kind of helped drive home both the umami and the salt. If I had one negative thing to say about it, this sauce is just pure umami. It's a real umami bomb. It comes off tasting almost a little cheesy because of the dairy that you put in there."
Wiley: "I actually liked the cheesiness, but I think of cheese as being very rich umami. The cauliflower was delicious. I think you could have given us a little bit more of that, but this is just fantastic stuff. Really good."
Padma: "Buddha, I really loved your sauce. It was an umami bomb in the best way, but a couple of drops of lemon or something in the sauce would have given you a more uniform counterpoint to that umami."
Wiley (post-elimination): "I almost wish you had just given me this, because this was fantastic."
Padma (post-elimination): "This is the best dish I've seen from you in this competition. Buddha, you were one point away from a perfect score."
[Result: Buddha eliminated despite a near-perfect score on this dish — Chris's plate was judged unanimously stronger.]
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