Let's get started. So the Quickfire this week was all about the slots and one of the elements was umami, which a lot of people have questions about. A lot of the chefs used mushrooms for that. I did an umami cook-off for the umami board at Craftsteak. For that you would use something like truffle products or soy products that kind of set off that 5th sense, so to speak. That’s what you go with for something like that. I think I did a miso-glazed Japanese eggplant. It was a soybean product and an ingredient I’m pretty obsessed with right now, a fermented, tiny, yellow bean paste. I use that in an eggplant dish, so that’s probably how I would have gone about it.

Michael’s seaweed cracker looked good, it’s a great bar snack recipe. Padma called out Robin’s curry for not being very Middle Eastern and she was right. I thought Kevin’s winning dish looked nice and I think he was using a chop, not a shoulder that was super-thin. It looked like it had a little thinkness so I would have liked to see it cooked a little less. That’s how I saw it, but who knows what happened and how long it sat there. Food is time-sensitive. It looked he nailed the flavors, and the mixture of mint and cilantro seemed very Vietnamese. It looked like he also had some fish sauce action with lime juice. If you get it right, you can’t go wrong with that. I could eat that every day honestly! I don’t get sick of that stuff.