How Would You Handle The Challenge

[FormerMod-a1]

Have ideas for what you'd cook for a challenge?  Or having difficulty figuring out what you'd cook?  Discuss what your approach would be here.

[FormerMod-a1]

21 minutes ago, susannot said:

Same here. Generic white Midwesterner with generic N. European roots.  Mother cooked from the Betty Crocker cookbook.  Most ethnic thing she ever made was stuffed cabbage and stuffed peppers, which is why I taught myself to cook beginning at age 14.  I craved flavor in my food.  On the other hand, thinking about my "heritage," we were always blessed with an abundance of local fresh produce and my parents always planted vegetable gardens, so a Midwestern fresh produce dish would have been my choice.

See, I think stuffed cabbage or stuffed peppers are exactly the kind of thing you could do for here.  You don't have to make it just like mom/dad/grandma/grandpa/whomever, you can make it better, but it's still about your "roots".

My thoughts for this challenge were that since I am both Polish and French, I might go with Polish since French cooking is so well known, so ubiquitous.  Stuffed cabbage, my great grandma's chicken soup, chruschiki, pierogi, something along those lines.  Then my other though was maybe a dish tied to my northern Michigan roots like a pastie (but done like my grandma as a full pie rather than handheld).  Use the best ingredients and the best techniques and really make it work.  Kind of like the fried chicken, collard greens, and biscuits - very common sounding* things but done to perfection.

* but not common in execution

[susannot]

True!  I have elevated Mom's stuffed peppers and made them really delicious.  It starts with locally grown peppers, often from my garden.

I have decreed that we are having fried chicken, biscuits, and collard greens for New Year's Eve.  In past years I have tried making a fancy dish involving shrimp or lobster, but why bother?  Nothing can be more perfect than Chris's American classic.

Edited December 30, 2017 by susannot
more food

[Grandma Saracen]

I would have made matzo ball soup, or garlicky chicken with a charosets side (apples, walnuts, wine, cinnamon). Maybe an elevated kugel of some sort (yum). I love latkes, but they don't sit as well.  

[biakbiak]

I am Norweigian and German and raised in Seattle since there wouldn't be enough time to adequately male smoked salmon, I would make a salmon sausage that uses both fresh and smoked salmon and dill, serve it with a pea spaetzle I make and a mustard dill cream sauce.

[cooksdelight]

Southerner, with Cherokee on both sides of my family... which really didn’t have a whole lot of influence on the meals we had. I’m still amazed that my grandmother would have 12-15 hot dishes on the table at once as soon as we were home from church.

Meatloaf is one of the things my grandmother made that no one else has ever come close to touching. I won a couple of national contests with her recipe, which I have fiddled with a bit. I could do little meatloaf one-serving sizes with a baked pouf of mashed potatoes.

[Wings]

They have to name the challenges something to offer some direction.  Best dish wins, worst goes home.  Given that,  just make a good dish, something you know you can create well.  THEN tie it into the challenge title.  Make it up if you have to.  

55 minutes ago, cooksdelight said:

Meatloaf is one of the things my grandmother made that no one else has ever come close to touching. I won a couple of national contests with her recipe, which I have fiddled with a bit. I could do little meatloaf one-serving sizes with a baked pouf of mashed potatoes.

Whoa!  Will you share the recipe, please.  Pretty please.  :^)  

[Christina]

This was a great idea for a thread!

[FormerMod-a1]

FYI - Moved some posts to the Recipes thread.  

[buttercupia]

Pasta e fagiole, or as we call it, pasta fazool. Recipe originally from my great aunt and very slightly tweaked by me over the years. It's deceptively simple and relies on perfectly matching quality ingredients into a hearty soup that feels like a hug. it's never failed me and if I had to make a "heritage" dish, it would be that.

[Lura]

For me, that would have been the scariest challenge imaginable.  I would have stood there the entire time, trying to think of something I could make, and surely I would have been sent home!

Both of my parents are Irish by heritage, but I have no experience with Irish food.  I grew up in Ohio, New England for a while, and now California.  I feel like a mutt!  My mother's cooking was very bland, so that wouldn't please the judges.  I guess that I would go Midwestern and prepare a stuffed, smoked pork chop with a fresh spinach, pear, bleu cheese and pecan salad with a balsamic vinaigrette.  Or turn the chops into a stuffed pork tenderloin with the same ingredients.  There is little more that I enjoy as much as cooking and baking, but coming up with the right recipe seems to be the difficult part of the challenge.

Questions: Wouldn't the grocery shoppers have to know ahead of time what specialty ingredients to shop for?  Therefore, wouldn't the contestants have to make out shopping lists of all of their ingredients?  Doesn't that mean that the contestants have a good idea ahead of time what the challenge will entail?  Therefore, are the contestants told to act surprised and perplexed when the challenge is announced?

Edited January 2, 2018 by Lura

[HunterHunted]

1 hour ago, Lura said:

Questions: Wouldn't the grocery shoppers have to know ahead of time what specialty ingredients to shop for?  Therefore, wouldn't the contestants have to make out shopping lists of all of their ingredients?  Doesn't that mean that the contestants have a good idea ahead of time what the challenge will entail?  Therefore, are the contestants told to act surprised and perplexed when the challenge is announced?

No. I think you're confused about the challenge timeline. They announce the challenge and send them shopping. We've seen the chefs scribbling in their notebooks on the drive to the grocery store. That's the chefs working through what they want to make and the ingredients that they'll need. We've also seen chefs having to adjust their dishes when the grocery store didn't have the necessary ingredients. I would guess that it's probably less than 2 hours between when they announce the challenge and when they get to the grocery store.

[hjmugillecuty]

I live in Utah and am LDS. We have a dish called funeral potatoes, so named because it is served at funerals. It's potatoes, cheese, and corn flakes. That would be the dish I'd try to elevate for a "heritage" challenge.

[Jesse]

I have one "ethnic heritage" dish, tourtiere, French Canadian pork pie. You could easily make it into little tartlets which would cook faster and seem more elegant. I'd have to know how to make my own ketchup, because I'm guessing bottled stuff doesn't fly on Top Chef!

[RockShrimp]

We're Jewish, and pot roast takes too long so I would have just had to order Peking Duck from a nearby take out place.

Edited January 5, 2018 by RockShrimp

[Wings]

I know I would come armed with dishes I know are a success from my restaurant.  It is pretty easy to fit a dish into the challenge is some way with a tweak or two.  A couple of good desert recipes is a must.  

Fried food is always a hit and they win a lot.  Same with noodle dishes.  

I hope my boyfriend, Huge is going to be on this season.  

Edited January 5, 2018 by Wings

[Lamb18]

I've been thinking about what I would cook and it's a tough one. Half Norwegian, half German and cuisine from neither really being fixed for supper when I was a kid. The dish I remember most is a hot dish consisting of ground beef, macaroni noodles, canned beans and canned tomato sauce. The closest to ethnic cuisine was the egg pancakes my mom would make now and then. However, when I was in Munich last year I ordered some kind of roast beef dish with a brown sauce or gravy over it and when I took my first bite, my first thought was "I've eaten this before." I think my grandmother used to fix it when I was little before her arthritis got too bad for her to cook a dinner for multiple people.

[akr]

I would have been baffled, too.  Most of my ancestors got to the US a long time ago - British in the  1600s, and as it turns out (23andme turned up 25% German/French ancestry), Germans in the 1750s.  I have one Norwegian great grandfather.  Anything else is mysterious but seems to be from the same areas.  Neither of my grandmothers was a particularly good cook, and there are no handed down recipes from them except one for baked beans, which I never liked because I didn't like beans (a texture thing when I was a child).  My Mom's inspirations weren't from family recipes but from whatever was percolating through the culture at the time (so, Fannie Farmer, Julia Child, etc), or things that she'd eaten that she'd liked.  Dad was stationed in Germany  at one point so in childhood some of our Christmas cookies were German, but that's the extent of the German food we ate, I think, and it didn't come from family heritage but from my mother's travels.  I used to like to have rhubarb pie on my birthday (it was my favorite and the two-week season where I was growing up coincided with my birthday), so - rhubarb pie?? The British use a lot of rhubarb.  That's not why we ate it, though.  

Heritage?  Hmm.  Maybe also Bisquick and Campbell's soup, and peanut butter sandwiches.  And my mother remembers when they had to add yellow food coloring to margarine because the purveyors of butter had had a law passed outlawing the makers of margarine from selling yellow margarine.  

@Lamb18, that sounds like sauerbraten. I think we had that very occasionally, too, but again that would have been from being stationed in Germany, not from growing up with it.  And I think it may have been a recipe derived from a Lipton soup packet.

[PamelaMaeSnap]

On January 4, 2018 at 7:35 PM, RockShrimp said:

We're Jewish, and pot roast takes too long so I would have just had to order Peking Duck from a nearby take out place.

Hubby and I were joking about this as well. Since I can't cook to save my ass, I could make my grandmother's famous "roast chicken that is so dry she apparently roasted it for eleventy million hours" and hubby would serve up his grandmother's mile-high plate of flanken. Or else we'd just present a platter of turkey sandwiches from the (long-gone) Madison Avenue Deli (me) or pastrami from Wolfie's (him). 

That said? Hubby is the world's best cook (well, maybe not WORLD's best but definitely the best one I know) and grew up in the kitchens of several top NY restaurants (his stepdad owned several) and he makes amaaaaaazing chicken matzoh ball soup from scratch. But, yeah, it would take too long to fit the bill. 

I love playing "what would YOU cook for this challenge?" with him when we watch. Me, unless the challenge is "which can of Progresso soup would you heat up on the stove," I am ineligible.

ETA: Personally I think hubby would be a great contestant on something like Master Chef ... obvs not Top Chef since he's not professional ... because he aces both risotto and perfectly seared scallops, which seem to be the downfall of many a contestant. But he has no interest in going that route. I might qualify for World's Worst Cook but that's about it. 

Edited January 15, 2018 by PamelaMaeSnap

[FormerMod-a1]

For the Campbell's soup challenge, I don't know what I would have done.  I do have a really good scalloped potato recipe that uses their condensed soup (on usually no one suspects), but don't think I could make it in that timeframe.  Otherwise, anything else is really Midwestern, heh.

 

[CrazyInAlabama]

My mother was not a good cook.     Her go to meal was Campbell's tomato, over thinned with water, and not stirred enough, and grilled cheese on white bread, with one piece of cheese, and not even browned.

In this challenge, they could have made an elevated grilled cheese, and added a lot to improve the flavor of the Tomato soup.   

[BlackberryJam]

Not enough time, but use the tomato soup to make tomato pasta and stuff it with a mushroomed up cream of mushroom soup, with a very light cream sauce.

[seltzer3]

African/Carribean challenge.
-Create a peanut stew.  Would probably not make fufu but use rice.  Maybe make some vitimbua or sambusas.

Fruit challenge.
-Really surprised no one tried to make a chutney of some kind.
 

Movie Theater
-Horror.  Probably some that oozes "blood" like a jelly donut or a donut with beet puree.  Or some spaghetti that looks like worms.  Or like a Spider crab roll.  
-Drama.  Something really spicy.
-Comedy. This one is hard.  Probably some movie reference.  Like spring rolls (for those of you who watched rush hour 2).
-Action.  I feel like I would go Gabriel's route and make something where they have to interact to eat.  Like a soup where the pour things (although that would not go well eating in a car).  
-Sci-fi.  Something that is frothy?  I realized half of these would be a lot easier if they were in a sit down restaurant.
-Romance.  Something shareable.  You could go Lady and the Tramp route and make spaghetti (but again annoying to eat in the car).   Maybe like homemade oreos so you and a friend could twist the oreo.  
 

Edited May 4, 2021 by seltzer3

[seltzer3]

This challenge.

Probably would go vegetarian like Sara make a lentil curry or a lentil stew.  Make roti or some of flatbread to go with it.

Or maybe a stir fry noodle with beef and peppers

[seltzer3]

Asian Challenge

Filipino.  Chicken Adobo.  Maybe something on a stick like what Jo did.  Like a turon.
Indian-Maybe a veggie Pakora (since samosas would be the obvious choice).  Eggplant, or Aloo Gobi curry.
Chinese- Would try to make hand stretched noodles, but it might be difficult.  Maybe dumplings, or baos?
Japanese-Karaage would be the easy choice.  If something different, maybe a japanese curry?
Vietnamese-Maybe egg crepes?  I feel like for some reason, this one is really difficult.

Football challenge.
-Uh, this one is hard to do a carb forward dish.  Maybe a lentil curry?

 

Episode 1.
I think a beef pie would have been a nice touch.

[FormerMod-a1]

I'm not sure how I would have handled the Ritz challenge - Ritz have a flavor on their own.  I did want to try all of them, though!

Now, for the elimination challenge - making rice the start of the dish seems like the harder part.  I love rice, but it's hardly the star of most dishes.  I probably would have gone with a fried rice or a congee.  (And I probably would have lost, lol).  And the fried rice wouldn't be done in a traditional style - more of an "American" fried rice like a Wisconsin or Midwest fried rice with brats, mustard, kraut, etc.

[caitmcg]

It’s kind of surprising that no one went for fried rice. That seems like a no-brainer, given that it’s best made with cold, day-old rice. Cook the rice and prep all the inclusions/seasonings on the prep day, then turn it into fried rice on serving day.