Elgin Community College-trained chef Zach Laidlaw heads back to the top-floor kitchen on the next episode of “Next Level Chef” thanks to teammate Nicole Renard winning the “You Wanna Pizza Me” challenge.
Renard, a social media chef from Washington state, created a pizza with lamb’s tongue, olives and cream cheese on a crust made from spinach-based dough. Because she, Laidlaw and Angela Pagan, a professional chef from Atlanta, were the team sent back to the basement kitchen last week, they were forced to make their pizza with inferior equipment and ingredients passed over by the other two teams.
Of Renard’s unusual pizza, team mentor Blais and fellow celebrity chef/mentors Gordon Ramsay and Nyesha Arrington found it to be a surprisingly lovely creation. Ramsay called Renard’s pizza courageous and the out-of-the-box approach the judges were seeking.
Laidlaw, a 34-year-old Burlington native, was mostly in the background on this week’s show, which airs Thursdays on ABC and streams on Zulu the following day. He made a salmon pizza with a white sauce served on a cauliflower dough crust. The celebrity chefs enjoyed it, with Blais calling salmon a smart grab and Ramsay comparing it favorably to well-known chef Wolfgang Puck’s famous salmon pizza.
Christina Miros, a home cook from New Jersey, produced one of the pizzas deemed the worst — a Greek-influenced pork pizza on focaccia that was found to be sloppy in presentation and having an underbaked crust. However, she was able to escape going into the elimination round by using an immunity pin she’d won in an earlier competition.
The other mediocre pizza was produced by Mada Abdelhamid, a home cook from Los Angeles who topped his creation with chicken nuggets and sun-dried tomatoes, a combination the judges found to be very dry and generally unpleasant.
He faced off against Chris Tzorin, a pro chef from Orange County, California, in coming up with Italian-American-style Parmesan dishes. Abdelhamid prepared a bone-in veal chop dish with a spicy red sauce while Tzorin went with a more traditional chicken dish.
Ramsay voted to eliminate the chicken parm chef while Arrington chose the veal parm as the lesser dish. With the vote tied, Blais cast the deciding vote and sent Tzorin home.
On the next episode, Ramsay’s team will be working from the basement and Arrington’s from the middle as they tackle Greek dishes.
Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.