The Competition

The most common question I’ve been asked since my appearance was “How could you think of something to make with ________ ingredient?” Honestly, that wasn’t the biggest problem. I develop recipes for a living— some with “crazy” ingredients— so it’s somewhat easy for me to come up with ideas for recipes, good recipes one that incorporate the four secret basket ingredients. What prevents the dishes from being successful, and. in my case, keeps them from coming remotely close to what I envisioned is:

1. The Pantry

2. Time

First, the pantry. We were allowed to tour the kitchen facilities, pantry included, for about five minutes before shooting started. Most of that time was devoted to a producer, who gave us instructions on how to operate the most expensive equipment — the anti-griddle or sous vide, for example — without breaking them. (Of course, nobody uses these things.) We spent a few minutes trying to memorize everything that’s in stock. Contents range from staples, like flour, to more exotic ingredients, none of which I could remember, which is precisely why my three rounds on Chopped were a fucking shitshow. As the first round kicked off, I was doing fine. I’d designed a great dish in my head; it hinged on a gastrique made from plum jam. Sounds like a solid plan, right? It would have been, if there had been a jar of plum jam anywhere on set. There wasn’t. As panic set in, lost every shred of professional competency; my inner monologue quickly changed from quickly changed from “I am a great chef, and by golly, I can do this!” to “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!”

Next, the biggest issue, and the thing the judges admitted to us is the single greatest reason Chopped contestants fall— time. You are given twenty minutes for the appetizer round; thirty for the entree and dessert face-offs. I didn’t see what the big deal was, as I was expecting each of these minutes to pass by the same way they do when I’m microwaving some leftover lo mein (by time it’s finally hot, I always feel like I probably could have walked to Chinatown and scored a bowl of freshly made noodles instead — maybe even taken in a movie, too).

You know how fast twenty minutes flies when you’re holding a rack of wild boar, having a panic attack, and listening to Marcus Samuelsson loudly question every single one of your choices while you have a half dozen television cameras in your face?

I very quickly got to a point where my goal was not to make the most outstanding dish in the competition, but merely to finish. The kitchen is gigantic, there’s tons of running around, and the process is both physically and mentally exhausting. While the judging and interviews all happen in TV time and something as simple as grabbing a fork can take all of twenty minutes before directors get “just the right shot,” the actual cooking takes place in real time — three rounds in eighty minutes. I arrived in the studio at 5 a.m. and didn’t leave until around 11 p.m. That’s exactly one thousand minutes of “standing around waiting” between full-fledged sprints.

And trust me, those thousand minutes were most definitely “lo mein minutes.”