Top Chef ™
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Pepper Crab with Southern Grits
Pepper Crab with Southern Grits and Seafood Gravy.
Jennifer made a Dungeness crab and grits dish inspired by she-crab soup - a preparation nostalgic from growing up on the coast of South Carolina. She incorporated Fresno chili mash into the brown butter and into the crab salad dressing. The grits were seasoned with seafood-based gravy. Jennifer described the emotional connection: growing up, we would go to the coast of South Carolina and always order she-crab soup. The combination of spiced crab salad over cooling grits - the crab carrying the heat, the grits providing relief - was praised as a standout dish of the whole challenge.
Tom Colicchio singled it out as the dish he would most want to eat again from either team.
{Judge}: One dish that I really loved, and I thought it had that roller coaster in one dish, and that was Jennifer's dish. Kudos for the depth of flavor that you brought to the she-crab soup. That's really hard to do. When I ate some of the crab was where all the spice was, and the grits was a nice little foil. I thought that was a great mashup dish and really flavorful.
{Judge}: Jennifer's sauce, I think, is spectacular. When you get to the center of that dish, and you take a bite of that crab, you really feel the heat. It packs up the punch. I love the different textures throughout that crab salad. The celery, the pickle, the fennel. It almost becomes like little treasures where you're finding them, and it's fun.
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