Rick Bayless wins “Top Chef Masters”
Earlier tonight Bravo aired the championship of “Top Chef Masters.” Native Oklahoman Rick Bayless competed against Hubert Keller and Michael Chiarello in a four-dish challenge and emerged the winner.
The judges included former winners of the “Top Chef” title, the regular “Top Chef” judges, and the restaurant critics that have been judging “Top Chef Masters.”
The chefs were instructed to tell their life story through these courses. This made for a fascinating episode as each chef told about the events that inspired each of their dishes. Bravo also included pictures (including some of the chefs with some very interesting haircuts!) to illustrate the chef’s stories.
The first course was to be a dish associated with their first food memory. Since Rick grew up in a barbecue restaurant here in Oklahoma, he went with a barbecued quail dish using his parents Hickory House barbecue sauce. It was very well received. Editor-in-chief of “Saveur” magazine, James Oseland, even asked, “Who would have thought that barbecue sauce could be so refined?”
The second dish was to be the one that inspired them to become a chef. For Rick, this was an Oaxacan black mole that he tasted in Mexico when he was 14. According to Rick, it took him 20 years to perfect it. All the tasters were extremely impressed with the depth of flavor that the dish contained. Regular “Top Chef” judge Gail Simmons claimed she’d “never eaten a mole so good.” At the final judges table, restaurant critic Jay Rayner said he was unable to describe the sauce with words, but needed guttural noises.
The third dish was to be associated with the opening of the chef’s first restaurant. Rick felt that the meal that set his first restaurant apart was their use of suckling pig, so he prepared a fabulous dish of suckling pig with a surprisingly sophisticated sunchoke puree. Speaking about this dish, “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi said, “A lot of times we don’t give Mexican food enough street cred as being as serious as maybe French or Italian, and here … there’s nothing not sophisticated about this.”
The last dish was to demonstrate the future of each chef. Unfortunately, Rick’s rice, seafood, and chorizo dish was not as well received by the judges as his other dishes. Apparently, the seafood became a little overdone, and Rick’s dish suffered because of it.
Despite this small misstep, Rick pulled out a one-point victory over Chiarello. He not only won the grand prize of $100,000 for his Frontera Farmers Foundation (Chiarello and Keller both received $20,000 for their charities), but by gaining the title he also proved that he could compete against people with much more training than he had. More importantly, he accomplished his goal of showing that Mexican food belongs with such haute cuisine as French and Italian food.
We here at BAM’s Blog would like to congratulate him on his win. He is truly deserving of the title of “Top Chef Master,” not just for his cooking, but for his grace and passion for his cuisine. Upon learning that he had won Rick referred back to his childhood days at the Hickory House: “My dad was a pit master and now I’m a Top Chef Master. I think he would be really, really, really proud of that.”
—3D
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[...] Bayless wins