Top Chef ™
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Pan-fried Walleye with Smoked Sour Cherries
Pan-fried Walleye, Wild Rice with Tomatoes and Smoked Sour Cherries
Kat: "I'm going to lightly pan fry my walleye fish. That's how I grew up eating it. This is what my dad and I used to go fishing for. I grew up in Door County, Wisconsin. This fish seems to have very fine bones, so maybe a little challenging, just getting organized, trying to figure out where everything is."
Later, Kat: "Trying to get my cream to smoke. I want to have a smoked element to play against the sweetness of the sour cherries. I tried to set up a little smoker in a hotel pan, trap some smoke in it. That's not working all that well. I'm really improvising here right now. I resort to lighting the chips on fire, turning to embers, and then just dumping the whole thing into the cream. I have spent 10 minutes trying to troubleshoot the smoke."
Presenting to Judges: "This is a pan fried walleye. A bit of lentil flour, wild rice and tomatoes, and sour cherries on some of your plates. I suffered a little bit of a time crunch. It was like a series of things that put me behind."
Judges: "Let's start with Kat's dish. Did you have everything on your plate? I did. I was one of the lucky ones, but I actually did think there was quite a bit of flavor in the rice. I was happy that she did use it because it is a big Saskatchewan product. Sheila, obviously your plate, it was missing fish. I gave you half of mine. I also was missing the cherry. I actually thought the cherries were the best part of Kat's dish. Dish has a lot of flavor. I have a hard time evaluating this since I don't have cherries and I don't have tomatoes. And so it's kind of a big 'I' for incomplete."
