Episode Title: “Line Cook for a Day”

Synopsis: An eliminated chef from “Last Chance Kitchen” joins the contest, which surprises the participants; during a double-elimination challenge, the remaining chefs must rely on their collaboration skills.

Discuss.

The pickle craze continues! A five-course progressive menu featuring pickles is a lot, but it inspired all kinds of creativity from the chefs that seemed to bring out the best in (most) of them. Tristen and César really did that with their respective dishes. It’s too bad they were both on the losing green team. It made the winning purple team’s victory seem slight and undeserving. Can’t stand Massimo, but he won this challenge and has immunity next week. The chefs really should have been judged individually by whoever lost the heats. Katianna might have been in the wrong for unnecessarily adding tofu to her dish, but was she really worse than Vinny (on the winning team) who didn’t get a single vote for his dish? He really skated through by the skin of his teeth here. Shuai accidentally sabotaged teammate Henry’s dish, so if that hadn’t happened, the green team might have won instead. If Henry had been eliminated, Shuai should have stepped in to say that the fault lies with him and he should be the one going home. Moving on to “LCK,” SPOLIERS it was a battle of the LA neighbors: Kat and Katianna. They had to use three pickled ingredients (chosen by the other chef) to make a cohesive dish of their choosing. Katianna made a salmon dish using the brine from pickled beets to cure the salmon. Kat opted for a shrimp dish, but then she overcooked her shrimp and mistakenly used them anyway by dicing them up into a relish salad thingie and not as the entrée. Tom C. saw right through that bullshit and sent her packin’ lol. Rule No. 1: Never plate ingredients that don’t taste good and are improperly cooked!

It speaks to the great strength of this season that frontrunner after frontrunner is getting eliminated. Henry was another one I thought would go far in the competition. The quickfires haven’t been giving me much of anything, but I’m glad Henry at least won something with the dirty dishes thing for $10K. Crazy that the show’s never done a pizza elimination challenge before, but here we are. Tristen really might be our next Buddha, the undeniable chef that just steamrolls to the end. He won the final immunity, and he has this uncanny knack for crafting winning dishes out of ingredients that he hates. Pickles, anchovy ranch, and I think figgy duff? Good for him, I guess. He won over the two pompous Italians (Massimo and Vincenzo), so that’s fun. Too bad I knew the final outcome with Henry the minute they showed he left a bag of flour in his cart at Whole Foods. He never recovered after that with his dough, and the judges couldn’t get over him serving a rice bowl instead of a pizza. César overreached with his cocoa mole pizza, and Paula continues to be an underwhelming mess. Sadly, SPOILERS Henry faltered in “LCK” making a dough-forward dish in 30 minutes. He opted to make pork wontons, and Katianna went for some kind of New England chowder crumble. Henry would have probably won if he hadn’t added sour broth to his finished dish, which Tom C. thought was weak and unnecessary. Oh wells.