What’s the key to making a winning dish on Chopped?
You have to figure out the ingredients. The ingredients are chosen very carefully — the producers sit around and if they can’t think of something that could feasibly be made from them, they empty out the basket and start over. The thing is they set a trap. So let’s say they give you three Asian ingredients — bok choy, soy sauce and sesame seeds — and then they throw something in like blue cheese. Some chefs are gonna plow ahead and make an Asian dish and then crumble a little bit of blue cheese on top, hoping the judges won’t notice it. But the person who wins will be the one who figures out how to make a blue cheese souffle that works — I don’t know what that would be like, but if they can do it, they will win. Do you watch other shows on Food Network? Yes, I love the Barefoot Contessa. She definitely knows what she’s doing, and she has all these friends who are fancy gay guys in the Hamptons, so she always does something like “Hank and Bob are coming back from 10 days in Paris, so I’
