Week of June 20th 2011: Top Chef Tour

My love for Top Chef has been pretty well documented on this blog so you can only imagine how excited I was when I saw that they were doing a tour and San Francisco was a stop.

Fabio

The tour was basically two former Top Chef contestants doing a head to head cooking competition. The rules were simple - both chefs had the same main ingredient and then could choose from 10 other ingredients. They also were each allowed to bring 1 ingredient of their choosing. Basically, it was a mini episode of the show.

Ryan Scott

Me and my friends arrived and were excited that Fabio would be one of our contestants. Fabio was well known for being very Italian and very funny. He was constantly making jokes about other competitors and also about how self aware he was about his Italian charm. The other contestant was Ryan Scott and despite my love of the show, I just couldn't remember him. It turns out he went home relatively early in his season but now is budding on the San Francisco food scene. He's best known for his food truck and the brunch he used to do at Bruno's in the Mission (which apparently just ended last month...). 

The main ingredient that the chefs had to work with was salmon. This made me so happy as salmon is probably my favorite fish. I honestly cannot remember the 10 other ingredient. I think pine nuts may have been one of them and it looks like corn from the picture... Fabio chose Red Bull as his personal ingredient (after explaining it was because he got no sleep on his very early flight) and Ryan chose tequila (because "who doesn't love tequila?" his words, not mine). 

Both of the chefs decided to marinade the salmon in their personal ingredient in order to give it a tangier flavor and then garnished it with whichever of the other 10 ingredients they used. Although they had similar preparations, I think Ryan had a much better salmon. The audience agreed and Ryan won that round. Ironically, this was the second show of the day and Fabio had won the other.

Either way, it was very fun to finally get to experience a Top Chef competition live. It's one step closer to my dream of actually getting to be a taster for one of the episodes...