Monday, July 25, 2011
How did Ashley Christensen fare on Iron Chef America?
When challenger Ashley Christensen, the culinary wunderkind behind Poole's Diner in Raleigh, selected Iron Chef Bobby Flay as her foil in Iron Chef America Sunday night, the Twittersphere immediately responded with the hashtag #slayflay.
When the secret ingredient, chum salmon, was unveiled lying in state among ice sculptures of—dancing? leaping? swimming?—fish, #filetflay never caught on, but Christensen and her sous chefs set to work with a zen-like focus to concoct five courses made from a less fatty—and thus trickier to cook—variety of the popular fish. No drama, just methodical cooking.
Meanwhile, the swaggering Flay, who I've disliked since he exuberantly stomped on his cutting board in an early episode of Iron Chef (very un-chef-like), barked orders at his team, which, among other made-for-TV crises, lost a bottle of Pinot. No worries, they always carry a spare.
As expected, Christensen deftly melded French and Southern cooking in her adventurous dishes: salmon tartare with Carolina shrimp, chum salmon chile relleno (you could almost smell the poblanos roasting), chum salmon carpaccio, brown butter-roasted chum salmon topped with a frog leg that resembled a recently unearthed pterodactyl fossil, and an elegant salmon skin beignet.
Flay's dishes felt less adventurous: slow-roasted chum salmon (how slow can it roast in less than 45 minutes?), fried green tomato with smoked chum salmon, grilled black bean sauce with chum salmon, Cuban-style whole-roasted chum salmon, and a chum salmon chowder with dungeness crab. (Tweet of the evening was posted by Fullsteam Brewery: "Well done...for Red Lobster, Chef Flay!!!") Ho-hum chum.
As the hour ended—notably interrupted by a commercial featuring a Lays potato chip chef, as if such a person really exists—I thought Christensen's artistic plating and originality would supersede any chumminess between the judges and Flay.
Judges Ben Sargent, host of Catch It, Cook It and Eat It, actress Cady Huffman and Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten praised the carpaccio—Sargent noted the salmon had benefited from a good pounding—and the beignet. Yet they criticized the other three dishes as not being salmony enough.
Except for the whole-roasted salmon, whose Cuban spicing, including plantains, were better suited for pork, Flay's dishes were met with sycophantic praise (not that I'm bitter).
Score: Flay, 45; Christensen, 35.
As Laura Leslie posted, "@poolesdiner got robbed."
Comments (4)
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Let's not forget that Walter Royal scored a 51 on Iron Chef, and Ed Mitchell whipped Bobby like a rented mule in the Throw-down. Raleigh has plenty of winning food.
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I loved it when Ashely cut out Ben Sargent's heart and stomped on it as he complained that the salmon flavor could be more dominant in the beignet. The salmon in the beignet was a big risk and she pulled it off well. Her response with the restraint of a southerner Ben Sargent was, "we really wanted it to be something you would want to eat." I don't think Mr. Sargent even knew he was carved up an fed to the fishes.
I frequent Poole's often, and her dishes on the show looked exceptional. As you stated, Flay's seemed plain and unimaginative. The judges complained, albeit there was plenty* of salmon on each dish, that the flavor wasn't salmony enough, when she was only doing a better job then Flay with meshing the key ingredient with the other flavors on the dish.
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