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And there we have it.

Yep. Both Callebaut (which calls them “chocolate crispearls”) and Valrhona (“chocolate crispy pearls”) make them, and they’re virtually identical in size, appearance, and consistency. As the descriptions imply, they’re some kind of crispy substance coated in chocolate. They’re also available in milk chocolate.

Thanks, and yes, it’s very tangy and lemony and moist and frankly, everything I want in a lemon cake. It’s definitely a bit of a faff, with all the egg yolks (my freezer is full of egg whites now), but worth it for a party.

My brother and I threw a party for our mother’s milestone birthday last weekend, and I baked the cakes. One was a ridiculously tall, three-layer chocolate stout cake with brown butter cream cheese icing between the layers and covered with coffee-brown sugar ermine icing. (I am decidedly not a decorator, especially when pressed for time!) It was a challenge to cut thin slices (which were then halved horizontally) to serve, but luckily, my dad is good at that kind of thing. The second (and third) cakes were Rose Levy Beranbaum’s triple lemon velvet bundt cake, made with Meyer lemons from my folks’ backyard tree. I baked and syruped these two days ahead and glazed them the day before serving, and they were moist and thoroughly imbued with lemon flavor. Both cakes were big hits.

I’m fairly sure it has been used since the first season, when Katy Lee was host.

In Salon: How Padma Lakshmi grew from"Top Chef" host into the show's guiding core

It certainly didn’t help that production treated her not just as glamorous in the way she was presented, but as eye candy. I distinctly recall the season they had her emerging from the surf in a bikini in slo-mo, and some of the male contestants prompted to react in talking heads. I think things changed when she became (along with Tom) an executive producer. I imagine that as she’s developed more influence and cred, she has also affected how much attention they’ve paid to varied (i.e. non-European) food cultures, something that has really improved in recent seasons.

He’s certainly been a fine as a guest judge the multiple times he’s been on (based on the previews for the Season 20 finale, he’s reprising that role), and he is engaging. As an aside, I enjoyed his memoir, Yes Chef.

The season was filmed last autumn, though, so not when it’s light quite that late. Note how relatively bundled up they were in the outdoor scenes. They have said that judges' table can go for hours, especially when they’ve got a tough decision to make. I really hope the judges told Gabri about his comment at some point! However, Gabri was the only one of the four proficient enough in French to be able to effectively communicate his needs to the employees, as the editing contrasting this with the others failing to be understood in English pointedly showed.

Indeed, there were a litany of issues with the ill-fated Top Chef: Just Desserts, but Gail as host wasn’t one of them. She’s warm and personable, and obviously has a track record as judge. Whoever takes it on has to be willing to eat as much as Padma has noted she must, tasting every dish of every QF and EC, however.

LOL, edited!

Based on fat percentage, at first glance this seems similar to European or American “European-style” butters, which are 82 percent and upwards butterfat (vs. the 80 percent USDA standard for American butter). But the statement, “Its high melting point makes it is extremely heat resistant” leads me to suspect that it is lower in milk solids (which readily burn) as well as water, but it’s impossible to know how that varies proportionately from other high-fat butters.

I’ve used parchment liners when baking upside-down cakes, and it does the job.

Buddha is from Australia, but he both makes his home in the US and was one of four (out of sixteen) who came to the season from the American Top Chef, which is what I was referring to. And no, I did not mix up Amar and Ali, nor was I commenting on the ultimate final four, just the late-season weight of the America-based presence. As others have speculated, they may have had some inherent advantages thanks to greater familiarity with specifics of the format, language skills, and so on. Still, it has made a novel season less interesting than it could have been, to me.

Perhaps. As much as I don’t mind Buddha (and can appreciate his talent) and like Sara and Amar, I wish the competition weren’t so heavily weighted toward Americans. Not so global, after all.

And I’ve read in past interviews that hence, a bunch of her filming downtime is devoted to exercise.

Even weight-gain Padma is still ridiculously svelte.

I had the same thought re Padma and not knowing she was the one they wanted in the first place. I didn’t know Jamie Lauren was working behind the scenes either, but Lee Ann Wong had that same role for a number of years following her appearances as a contestant.

Ali’s sauce issue was mainly that he just didn’t have enough because his sauce over-reduced on the stove. The judges wanted more of it, but he couldn’t plate with more or he wouldn’t have enough to put that dab on every plate. (Tom walked into the kitchen to see if Ali was putting more jus on later plates.) So he may have plated it in the wrong order, but he didn’t have enough jus to work with in the first place.

Which looks to actually be a crab dish with lobster jus, so …eh. I can appreciate elevated comfort food as a thing, but their concept sounds like elevated for elevated's sake, and not half as witty as they pretend. If I’m going to Las Vegas and spending on a meal with a certain level of refined technique, I’m not attracted to their concept. But LV is a place thick on gimmicky attractions, so I can see tourists leaning into theirs, along with the Voltaggio name.

In the Restaurant Wars thread, dleighg said: Indeed, in the most recent LCK, where the challenge was cooking with root vegetables, Tom looked askance at Nicole saying she was including leeks in her dish because they are roots. And actually, I don’t believe I’ve heard anyone refer to onions or garlic that way, even if what we eat are technically the roots, vs. just referring to them (along with leeks, shallots, etc.) as alliums.

Taking my reply to the Last Chance Kitchen thread, where it applies.

Right, from the very last scene of the series finale, where we see Don meditating at Esalen and we close on his dreaming this up:

I believe some of us thought the office was the strongest part of the show.

We saw Sr Veronica exasperatedly say that the cake was wrongly delivered to Nonnatus House, as well as the flowers, so the cake was already in Poplar. (The chances of this actually happening — wedding accoutrements delivered to a random address across town rather than to a posh hotel in Chelsea — seem rather slim, but that wouldn’t serve the story.)