The Next Food Network Star: Shane Shows Off!

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The Next Food Network Star: Shane Shows Off!

June 29, 2008 09:35:46 by Lisa Stauber

Last week on The Next Food Network Star, Nipa the overconfidant drama queen has been eliminated. The field is narrowing, and the contestants are feeling the pressure. “I need to redeem myself,” Adam says as he works out. He’s tired of being seen as a slapstick clown in the kitchen.

The First Challenge
The chefs file into the Food Network kitchen, and Iron Chef Cat Cora greets them. They’re each given a basket, containing six ingredients. They’ve got 30 minutes to create a dish. “To become a Food Network star, you have to be able to vividly describe your food,” Chef Cora tells them. They’ll have to describe their food on camera, and the winner will get a surprise advantage during the main challenge.

This is the challenge Lisa was looking for. She needs to show the judges she does have what it takes to perform on camera, and in the other camera challenges she didn’t fare so well. She’s got beets, ginger, udon, and chicken, and she plans a noodle dish.

Jennifer’s basket holds swiss chard, pork tenderloin, and mangoes, and she’s not sure how to describe them on camera. Kelsey has blood oranges, saffron, fennel, and polenta and seems excited to be cooking up a storm with the strange mix. Then again, she’s always excited about everything.

Shane lucked out with a basket full of Mexican food. He’s got flank steak, cumin, avocado, habanero peppers, garlic and anchovies and plans to show off his culinary expertise. Adam has a ton of fresh ingredients, including apples and cabbage, and plans on making a salad. He can’t figure out how he’s going to describe cilantro, and I’m guessing he’ll probably try to make a joke out of it.

Aaron’s platform is bold flavors, but he got a basket full of dessert. Strawberries, coconut, white rum, dark chocolate and pound cake fill out his recipe, but can he make the dish sound as delicious as it tastes?

Chef Cora decides they need a real challenge, and makes them describe someone else’s dish. “We are describing a dish we haven’t even seen or tasted before,” Lisa says. She seems a little miffed that the camera challenge will be even harder, now.

Kelsey’s up first, and misses Shane’s habanero completely, calling it citrus. Shane comes up next and nails the saffron. “I liked your energy,” Cat tells him.

Adam’s got 90 seconds to taste and describe Aaron’s dish, but his words fail him. There’s a lot of mmm’s but not a lot of substance. “You’ve got to anticipate the wrap up,” Chef Cora tells him. “That means not taking a big honkin’ bite of food right before.”

Aaron’s totally tongue tied, and finally comes tells the camera that apples are crunchy. “You’ve got to own the dish,” Cat tells him, “and you didn’t do that.”

Lisa is assigned Jennifer’s dish to describe. She does a nice job picking out the individual ingredients, but her on camera presence lacks genuineness.

Jennifer must describe Lisa’s dish, and she thinks the noodles are linguine. She can’t place the ingredients and therefore can’t describe them. “The one thing I noticed was, you don’t really know your foods,” Cat tells her. “I’m very disappointed,” Jennifer says.

Shane wins because he can actually describe the foods, but there’s a tougher challenge coming up. “It’s about put up or shut up,” Aaron says, ready to win the fight to be the next star.

The Main Challenge
The chefs have to work together in teams of two, and they’ll be presenting their dishes to a panel of food experts including the editor of Bon Appetit magazine. Iron Chef Cat Cora and the selection committee are on hand as well. They’re required to reinvent a classic, yet complicated dish and make it accessible for the home cook. Two people will have their recipes published in Bon Appetit magazine.

Aaron and Adam are teammates, serving up noodles, chicken, and polenta. The plates are sloppy, with noodles all over the place, and Cat asks if that was on purpose. “No,” Aaron admits. The dish was supposed to be a modern take on coq au vin, but Bobby thinks the chefs missed the point completely, and one of the judges thinks the polenta looks like scrambled eggs.. That’s not good eats! “I’ve been having problems with my presentation,” Aaron says. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Lisa and Jennifer are partners, and they’re making a verson of turducken - turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken. They’ve making a turkey medallion with duck sausage stuffing underneath. Jennifer’s grilling some squash, but Lisa’s only go one leg of duck confit and throws it on the the grill as well to get some great duck fat flavor. Jennifer can’t get a jar of apricot juice open, though, and ends up smashing it all over the food. There goes the duck! Lisa takes it in a stride, though. “I need to be a less dominating perfectionist, so I’m not going to fight with her.”

Lisa thinks the turkey is bland, and whips up a strong sauce. Jen thinks the sauce is too flavorful, and tries to fix it. She takes too long, and the sauce never even makes it onto the plate. Jennifer’s side doesn’t make it either, and she hopes the presentation will save her. Susie thinks they missed the point of turducken, which is a bird inside of a bird inside of a bird.

Kelsey and Shane have to make a quick version of Beef Wellington, a dish that takes hours to make. They’re putting beef in pastry cups with pearled onions. The time is passing too quickly, and Kelsey starts praying for a miracle. “This is a train quickly going to crash,” Shane says. They manage to plate everything up, on ugly plates. Shane spins the dish as No Nightmare Beef Wellington and Kelsey points out how easy it would be for the home cook. He shares a personal, funny story about his mother, but the photographer isn’t impressed. He says it wouldn’t make a nice photo. The editors love the flavors, though. The team may be the youngest, but they finished strong!

The Elimination
“We’re really nervous going into the eliminations,” Jennifer admits. Adam’s not very confident, and only hopes someone comes off worse than he did.

Kelsey’s up first. “I think you have to work harder to get authority,” Bob Tuschman says. He thinks she comes across very young. “You’re a culinary authority, or you’re not on this network.” Now it’s time to talk about the Beef Wellington dish. “The flavor was really nice,” Cora says.

Jennifer is called on the carpet for seeming like an amateur describing the dish in the first challenge. “This was hard to watch,” Bob tells her. Moving on to the Turducken, Bobby missed the confit. Jennifer takes the blame, and Lisa tries not to cry. “Presentation wise, Jen came out gangbusters,” Susie notes. She loves Jen’s new confidence.

Aaron spent too long tasting the dish for the first challenge, and ran out of time to describe it. Onto the main challenge. “The flavors were very good,” Bob says, but it had problems. “It was completely off the charts from where coq au vin should be,” Cat says. Adam’s polenta was awful, and Aaron is told to be more authentic.

One of the teams is a winner, and Shane and Kelsey will be published in Bon Appetit. That’s two in one day for Shane, the baby of the group. The pair are safe for the week as well.

“Lisa, your skills and your expertise saved you again this week,” Bob says, releasing her to go upstairs. Aaron’s also safe, leaving Adam and Jennifer.

“So far we’ve had one - one- dish that showed you can cook,” the judges say. “You weren’t very successful in exhibiting a high level of expertise,” Susie tells Jennifer. It’s decided that Jennifer will be going home to her little girl, and Adam gets another week. “I’m not going to go down without a fight,” Adam says, promising to step up his game.

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Photos courtesy Food Network.

Topics: The Next Food Network Star |

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One Response to “The Next Food Network Star: Shane Shows Off!”

lakehouse Says:
July 4th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Jennifer, nice person, but way out of her depth–it was actually a relief to see her eliminated. The perpetual apologizing was very annoying and her lack of knowledge about basics was glaring in the last episode. Having said that, it must be a huge hurdle to have these challenges thrown at you and have to complete them under the time and personality constraints and knowing you must do it while facing the critiques of the special guests, Bobby Flay and the Food Network execs. But if you can’t stand the heat, you SHOULD get voted out of the kitchen–they aren’t going to give someone a nationally broadcast TV cooking show just because they can make a wisecrack or be over-the-top cutesy. So let’s hope Adam shelves the standup and gimmicks and starts cooking food people would want to eat, that Lisa takes a freaking breath (and a Xanax), that Kelsey controls the saccharine and Aaron steps it up some more in front of the camera–Aaron, we love your dishes.

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