Watching the Top Chef finale last week, it became painfully obvious that none of the contestants had the slightest idea how to make dessert. Richard, a molecular gastronomist from Atlanta, managed to cut bananas into pseudo-"scallops" for about the fourth time, and serve them with bacon (actually, pork belly) ice cream. The winner, Stephanie, made what was obviously a mediocre ricotta pound cake. And Lisa who shouldn't have been anywhere near the last round, made a sort of rice pudding that had the virtue of (apparently) being tasty.
I am surprised about the apparent chasm between sweet and savory cooking. I understand that someone who has been cooking meat on the line since they were 15 is likely to be much better at savory dishes. But why the utter incapacity at baking on display during the show? No one made bread, nor even a barely acceptable cake. Even for the ultimate episode, when the contestants had two months to prepare, knowing that they might be asked to make a dessert, the results were still underwhelming. Although, compared to other seasons, they still did well - Hung, the winner of Season Three, served a molten chocolate cake for his dessert. Un-ironically, I mean.
I know, fundamentally, that if I was given two months to prepare, I would have a dessert that would knock people's socks off ready. Frankly, with some tweaking, even my almond semi-freddo of the weekend is flatly better than anything the contestants made. With a week of thought, I would have a restaurant style dessert that would take me all of 45 minutes of prep time and would look perfectly creditable. Yet, three different professional chefs, and countless others throughout the show, seem utterly incapable of making anything sweet.
I can only assume that as one advances in cooking, the temptation to jettison anything that isn't one's speciality becomes overwhelmingly strong. Even so, it strikes me that a chef who is completely incapable of making a cake is missing something fairly significant. But then, perhaps that's why I'm not a professional cook.
6/17/2008
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I think sweets are increasingly seen as not very important, and as sort of a lowbrow part of a meal. Perhaps these chefs figure any idiot can bake cookies and call it dessert because of the ease with which sugar can mask whatever else is happening in a dessert. Sweets don't seem to be a high-wire act the way savories are. I suspect people who go on a reality TV show about cooking also might have been negatively affected by something like Ace of Cakes, where dessert is measured by appearance rather than flavor.
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