Shalmanese

Ironically, the all stars cast might have been their downfall in this challenge. Every one of the chefs comes from a fine dining restaurant and didn't have the experience to work in a turn & burn kitchen. Some of the weaker contestants for earlier seasons might have excelled at this one.

All that proves is that J&W is pumping out students capable of doing math.

We're going to see completely automated restaurants before we see fantastical tubes connected to our homes. Given that food preparation seems to stubbornly refuse automation and that it's one of the largest employers of low wage workers (fruit picking, butchery, food manufacturing, fast food kitchens etc.), food is going to be one of the last places where machines take over.

Nut it up. At these things, it's more important who you're eating with than what you're eating and often your colleagues will care more about convenience than gastronomy. 2 or 3 days of bad food won't kill you. If you really must, bring enough that you can snack during the day and only go for something light during lunch.

It can be slow roasted with great success. You can cook it at a 350 or so until it hits 130 internally, then drop the oven down to as low as it will go and let it coast from 130 - 140 over the course of an hour.

You don't even have to look at parmesan and tomato, it's conclusive that MSG sensitivities are overblown because MSG doesn't only appear in Chinese restaurants anymore. Take Minor's Chicken Base for example. Walk into any average mid priced western style restaurant in the country and there's a 50/50 chance that there's a bucket of Minor's Chicken Base hiding somewhere. Look at the ingredient list, the 4th ingredient listed is MSG, ahead of even sugar. Anything made with Minor's Chicken Base is going to have even more MSG in it than the average mid priced Chinese restaurant and yet, because it's hidden away in the kitchen, people mysteriously don't complain about headaches. If you're complaining about getting headaches only from Chinese food, then you definitively don't have a MSG sensitivity simply because MSG appears equally as often outside of Chinese food as in.

Most restaurants will let you do half glass pairings with degustation. That leaves you tolerably soused at the end of it.

Yeah, just raid a goodwill. There's always a ton of assorted ovenware.

Apple, white chocolate & cranberry/raspberry is a pretty classic pairing. Think cookies, muffins, bars etc.

I sear only on the skin side while spooning hot fat over the meat side, no oven. This way maximizes the amount of time spent rendering the skin while applying gentle heat to the meat. Comes out perfect every time.

Not tasty enough? Add Bacon.

Wagyu Ribeye, Potatoes & Green Beans dressed with Chimichurri.

It's simple. Lairds should be in the class of Applejack, not Calvados and more expensive reccomendations should only be made if they are strictly better than the cheaper alternatives. This takes care of both of your objections (punting the discussion of what "strictly better" means).

You can extract Pomegranate juice from seeds by quickly pulsing in the blender and then straining through a sieve. Very high yield and low bitterness.

Only do this if there are reasons you can't cook the truffle straight away. Don't deliberately store truffles in rice to infuse the flavor. Truffles should be used as soon as humanely possible.

If your oven is capable of it, cook it at 200 until it hits 118, then drop the oven to 120 and you can keep the roast in there indefinitely. As long as you start early enough, you don't need to care about timing.

It should have turned into dulce de leche by now...

Didn't Iron Chef Japan do this about 10 years ago?

Possibly. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever had a tenderloin before. I never buy it and I never order it if I'm out. I might have had one at a wedding at some point.

Do you have any acid in there. Too high a concentration of acid will denature proteins.

To empirically test, twist a garnish over the sink, then drop it into one sample of pure vodka. Wait 20 minutes, fish it out then compare it against pure vodka. If you have another person, double blind it so you don't know which is which. See if you can tell the difference.

Relax, this is totally doable. Your biggest problem will be dealing with the lack of evaporation when scaling the ragu. Ragu depends on a certain amount of evaporation to concentrate the flavors. Scaling it up 12x, you need to get rid of 12x the amount of water and evaporation along is not going to do that. Utilize a food processor to dice your mirepoix if you're slow at prep. It will cause excessive cell damage but that's actually ok. Sautee your mirepoix until they sweat out. Then, drain them through a sieve and add just the solids back into the pan. If you're using ground meat, do the same. In a separate pan, reduce the wine/stock/veggie juices/meat juices by at least 1/2, replace half the tomato puree with tomato paste and replace the milk with 1/3rd the amount of heavy cream. As for the pasta, freezing fresh sheets will get you what you desire. You can make the pasta the day ahead, put a sheet pan in the freezer, lined with plastic wrap. Roll out a sheet of pasta and cut it to 90% * 90% the size of the lasagna pan. Put it on the sheet pan, cover with another layer of plastic wrap and then repeat. Preferably wait ~5 minutes between laying down each sheet to let the one below it freeze. When it comes time to serve, reheat the sauces to a simmer & layer with the frozen sheets. The heat from the sauce will defrost the sheets and they'll behave exactly like fresh.

Why not roast the marrow, then make a stock from the roasted bones? Best of both worlds.

6 hours? You're completely fine. The USDA reccomendations are paranoid to a fault. If you got some agar culture, smeared it with a rich colony of every kitchen nasty, left it for the requisite 4 hours at the optimum temperature and then fed the mess to an unsuspecting diner, there is a slight chance they might get food poisoning. If you're talking about turkey bones that are largely sterile, sitting in the open air, the chances of anything happening are less than being hit by lightening.

Did you leave it in the fridge covered or uncovered? It could be that the top has dehydrated which gives it the appearance of being set.