Chopped Challenge
There is pleasure in panic
With only a few days left in our first block, Chef gave us a surprise “Chopped Challenge” today. For those unfamiliar with the American game show, contestants are given a set of (usually wacky and weird) ingredients that they then must incorporate into a dish under severe time pressure. The idea is to elicit creativity, test your culinary talents, and generally make good reality television.
Chef organized us into pairs (I would be working with Jamar today), and gave us our mystery ingredients (all of which must feature in our final dessert):
Goat cheese
Raw beets
Tapioca pearls
We were also allowed to create a “shopping list” of other ingredients we needed, which Chef would fetch for us from the supply room. However, if we forgot anything, we’d have to improvise; Chef would only make the supply trek once. Within these parameters we would have 3 hours to create three identical dessert plates featuring our chosen dish.
With the rules explained, Chef clapped his hands and said “Go!”
My stomach clenched. My mind became a useless blank slate. My hands dripped their clammy, sweaty protest.
This was not good.
I frantically scanned through my past production sheets for any recipe that I could modify to include beets. Frustrated, I switched to reading the instructions on the back of the tapioca pearl bag. They were entirely in Vietnamese. I hastily grabbed a crumb of goat cheese, tasted it, and concluded it did indeed taste exactly like goat cheese.
For his part, Jamar was calmly browsing the internet and gently suggesting possible recipes from his online research. My panic continuing to grow, I flagged down Chef and asked if we were allowed to choose a recipe that we hadn’t covered yet in class. He chuckled and said, “I don’t recall any of our recipes featuring beets, so yes!!”
Eventually, Jamar reeled in my panic and suggested we make a beet red velvet cake with goat cream cheese frosting. My brain screamed at me that we didn’t know how to make cakes yet, and I calmly muttered to myself that we could figure it out. Jamar eyed me worriedly.
I volunteered to make the cake and set to work scaling the online recipe we found and making high altitude adjustments. Jamar got to work on the cream cheese frosting and started simmering a raspberry coulis. Halfway through mixing my cake batter, I realized I would need shredded roasted beets for my cake, and our beets were still raw. I dropped everything and started peeling.
After about an hour of being a panicked mess, I started to calm down a little. Our cake was finally in the oven and our frosting was made up. We had a little room to think through the rest of our dish, including how we would incorporate the tapioca balls.
We googled cooking instructions and decided to try simmering some tapioca balls in a 4:1 ratio of water to see how long it would take and assess how much sugar we would need to add for taste. Since I’m a big fan of boba tea, I figured I had a pretty good idea of what the finished product would look like. I was deeply mistaken. Instead of the marble-sized black boba balls I was familiar with, these tapioca balls were tiny – the size of sesame seeds – and pure white. The water boiled out of the pan after a mere 2 minutes as the balls started to absorb liquid, so we decided to add more (we would add water at least 6 more times). We decided to taste the tapioca after 20 minutes, which was how long the online instructions we found said they would take. They tasted like eating a mouthful of hard, raw rice.
Frustrated, I suggested we just dump the entire batch of raspberry coulis on top of the tapioca and let it simmer for however long it took. Jamar agreed. We did so, and I tried to put the pot of boiling mess out of my mind.
I checked our cake for the fourth time, decided it was probably, maybe, almost possibly done, and pulled it out to cool.
Finally, it was time to assemble our creation. I gingerly (and with a visceral, plunging feeling in my stomach) sliced our cake in half for frosting, all the while praying to the pastry gods that our bake would be ok. It was good! The crumb was consistent and moist, the red color from the beets incredible, and there were no streaks of white flour marring our pristine dark chocolaty color.
Chef suggested we try mixing the (now bright magenta) tapioca pearls into our frosting for texture and flavor. We raised our eyebrows, saw that we had less than 10 minutes remaining, and decided to go for it.
We whipped some goat cheese and heavy cream together to form a whipped cream and scooped quenelles onto the plate. Jamar topped these with some tapioca “caviar” and beet crisps he had baked with sugar. We smeared raspberry coulis on the plate, tried in vain to figure out a way to elegantly present a very small piece of cake, gave up and just plopped it on its side.
The results
Our final dish was a complete mess. The cake was too small, the icing a melted mess, the “caviar” dripping off the side of the quenelle. BUT! It actually tasted pretty darn good! The goat cheese was present but not overpowering, the chocolate cake rich, moist, and a red velvet red from the beets, the tapioca bizarre but flavorsome and sharp. We could even see the change in Chef – his hesitant, skeptical approach towards our table transformed as his brows unfurrowed upon tasting our creation.
It’s a strange feeling to be both utterly embarrassed and defiantly proud of something you’ve created. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced this precise combination of emotions before. I’m also deeply grateful for the reality check: despite having spent nearly 6 weeks in culinary school, even the simple challenge of coming up with a novel dessert is enough to completely trip me up. It’s a good reminder that there is still a very long way to go and lots to learn. And that the reality of cooking in an unstructured environment is far different from the carefully crafted syllabus of school.
After today, my confidence is lower but my enthusiasm remains stubbornly high.
I want to be good at this — really good. Doing so will take a lot of work.
I’m ready for it.