While Elgin Community College-trained chef Zach Laidlaw did well on Thursday’s episode of “Next Level Chef,” it wasn’t enough to prevent his team from heading back to the basement.
This week’s challenge required contestants to prepare steaks taken from large cuts of beef.
Because Laidlaw’s empanada creation won the prior week’s challenge, members of his team — mentored by celebrity chef Richard Blais — worked from the top floor kitchen and had the first choice of cuts. They went with filet.
The middle level group, coached by Gordon Ramsay, picked strip loin. The basement level chefs, overseen by Nyesha Arrington, were left with sirloin.
Laidlaw prepared a pan roasted filet coated with horseradish bread crumbs served with smoked potato mousseline.
Arrington called it a beautiful, classic dish, while Ramsay said it had flair.
Laidlaw’s filet was pitted for best dish against a strip steak served with a sauce cup made from an onion created by Gabi Chappel, a social media chef from Brooklyn on Team Ramsay.
Chappel’s dish was lauded for its out-of-the box creativity, and she was named the competition’s winner. Not only did that move her team to the top level, it protected her teammates from elimination.
The two players competing to remain on the show were Team Arrington’s Mada Abdelhamid, a home cook from Los Angeles, and Team Blais’s Lauren Smith, a home cook from Santa Monica, California. In the first round, the celebrity chefs deemed Abdelhamid’s sirloin too rare and Smith’s mustard-crusted filet with vegetables underwhelming and underprepared.
For their cookoff, Abdelhamid and Smith faced a “shellfish showdown.”
Smith’s poached lobster tail served in a coconut broth lost to the tiger prawn stir fry prepared by Abdelhamid.
Smith’s loss put the three remaining members of Team Blais back in the basement. Team Arrington will work from the middle kitchen in next show, which airs Thursday nights on ABC and streams on Hulu.
The next challenge will have the 10 remaining chefs making pizzas.
Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
