View full size“Top Chef: Texas” judges Gail Simmons, Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio.
Table Talk: ‘Top Chef’ is bad for gastronomy; vegetarian Thanksgiving ideas
At the digital kitchen table, today’s hot topics include a rant on why TV’s “Top Chef” is damaging the state of American restaurants, plus a month’s worth of ideas for a turkey-free Thanksgiving, beginning with roasted Brussels sprouts and shallots.
Why “Top Chef” is bad for gastronomy: Maybe I’m suffering from “Top Chef” fatigue, now that the Bravo reality cooking competition and its spinoff shows have become a year-round venture. Maybe it’s the lingering bad taste over the ho-hum winner of “Top Chef Masters” in June, and last week’s disappointing finale of “Top Chef Just Desserts.” But I couldn’t muster up any excitement for last night’s start of the latest season of “Top Chef,” which is taking on the cuisine of the Lone Star State. Time’s Josh Ozersky says the show isn’t just overexposed. He contends that it’s bad for the state of American cooking. His beef: Because many of the show’s chefs are so young, they haven’t honed their skills in the culinary trenches as line cooks. So they cook dishes on the show that are based on their personal points of view, rather than experience. If it were limited to chefs on the show, it wouldn’t matter much. But Ozersky contends many chefs exit cooking school and instantly want to be known and loved, their “unique” dishes fetishized by their generational counterparts among the dining public and the blogging corps. “The result has been hundreds of small, Brooklyn-style hipster restaurants opened on a shoestring by young cooks who are not ready for prime time, and which succeed just long enough to inspire equally wretched emulations,” he writes.
A turkey-free Thanksgiving: We’re just three weeks away from Thanksgiving, and home cooks will soon be spending time figuring out what they want to serve on the big feasting day. But there’s a growing movement away from making turkey’s the centerpiece of the big meal as people become more aware of the conditions of the factory farms that produce most of the birds that Americans consume. To raise awareness, Farm Sanctuary and Ellen Degeneres are continuing their successful Adopt-A-Turkey Project, which has rescued more than 1,000 turkeys over the years.
View full sizeCharred Bruss from Ned Ludd, one of chef Jason French’s signatures that would be perfect for the Thanksgiving table.If you’ve been considering a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner, you’ve got plenty of help from the New York Time’s Tara Parker-Pope, who every November turns her Well blog into a feast of vegetarian and vegan recipes that are perfect for the holiday table. To start out, she’s got recipes for Coconut Butternut Squash Soup, a side dish of Black Rice, Corn and Cranberries, plus Massaged Kale Salad With Cranberries and Cashews, and Seven Vegetable Couscous.
Over at Serious Eats, they have a simple Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Shallots with Balsamic Vinegar recipe that looks totally delicious. The secret: Cook them fast and cook them hard. That’s the same approach that Ned Ludd chef Jason French uses in his Charred Bruss, which has become my go-to way for cooking sprouts since he shared his recipe last winter. His secret: A super-hot cast-iron skillet, high heat, and a zing of citrus to finish the dish.
– Grant Butler
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