Top Chef Season Six Episode Five "Camping" Recap

Perhaps the first hint that this week's challenge was going to be a doozy for the chef contestants was Tim Love's appearance as a guest judge in the quickfire challege. Love is a chef known for his urbanized southwestern cooking and goes on an annual trail drive, complete with horses and cowboy crew, from Fort Worth, Texas, to New York City, stopping at local farmer's markets for new ideas. In other words, the James Beard-award-winning chef is pretty intense and so were the two challenges this week.

Going along with the southwestern theme, the TV audience was asked to choose between three ingredients: kangaroo, cactus, and rattlesnake for the key ingredient in the quickfire challenge. And the winner was cactus, which nevertheless rattled the Top Chef hopefuls.

In what is becoming a recurrent theme of season six, only Mike I. seemed versed in how to work with the specialized ingredient. His cactus and tuna ceviche with pipián won him $15,000, but he didn't receive immunity from the elimination challenge.

On the losing end were Ash, with a sad looking cactus grilled cheese, Michael, and Ron who made a dish with what Love thought was rancid crab (as we will learn later in the episode, bad seafood is the no.1 cardinal sin). Michael created a dish was "like two trains coming together", according to Love, and suffered a blow to his over-inflated, Michelin-star-ego by being in the bottom three.

But things were about to get heavier as Padma announced that the elimination challenge was to take place in a ranch in the desert. The guests: two dozen local cowboys. Time: one hour and 15 minutes to cook everything.

When the contestants arrived at the campsite which was to serve as their cooking space, they found four fire pits, some banged-up cast iron pans and a mess station with some crude-looking cooking tools.

"This is my idea of a living hell," said Eli on viewing the site. Meanwhile, other contestants seemed more enthusiastic. "The outhouse is familiar to me" said Ashley wistfully, reminiscing about her childhood growing up in the woods. A comment which only leads one to ask: where do the producers find these people?

On the scorching hot afternoon of the challenge, most of the chefs seemed to go a little crazy. It all culminated in Ron asking if anyone had a sword he could use to bust open a coconut.

Brian, however, remained cool as ever, staring at the open-pit grill an hour before the start of the challenge to map out his cooking space. This move paid off for him with a win for his "restaurant quality" pork loin over polenta and dandelion greens.

Brian's brother Michael joined him, Laurine, and Ashley in the top four. The sibling rivalry seemed to be heating up as Brian commented that every time he and his Michael have been in the top group, he has always one-upped his younger brother.

On the bottom were Robin, Ron, and Mattin. This time around the judges seemed truly disgusted by all three of their dishes. While Robin struck out with her drunken shrimp that apparently tasted like chlorine, Ron's Haitian cocktail, in what seems like a bit of a stretch, was denounced as the worst drink the judges had ever tasted.

The real loser, though, was Mattin who inadvertently gave Love indigestion with his undercooked black cod ceviche. Earlier in the episode, Tom Colicchio—who is always one for drama—spit out his raw cod onto the dusty desert floor in disgust.

So it appears that the Top Chef wisdom from episode six is as such: do not serve undercooked seafood in a subconscious attempt to give the judges a mild case of food poisoning, learn how to de-slime cactus, and catch up on how to cook with rudimentary tools.