Iron Chef America – Morimoto Versus Cantu
01 23 2007
Oh my god – This guy is an insult to geeks everywhere. Homaro Cantu, with his Scrolling LED name badge from thinkGeek, Laptop, Digital Cameras and headsets, this guy makes my brain hurt. And that’s generally a hard thing to do. I’m a huge geek, but this guy is just wayyy too much. It makes me think he’s probably a schwazz. I hope he gets his ass kicked by Morimoto. :-p The secret ingredient? Beets.
Alegedly, this guy is trained in “postmodern cuisine”, but you wouldn’t know it so far, 9 minutes into battle. Iron Chef is still trying to explain all of this guy’s gadgets.
Oh, now onto the judges – Melissa Clark, Naomi Moriyama and Jeffery Steingarten (The man who ate everything).
Oh man, this is an insult – he’s using edible packing peanuts, and edible rice paper that he’s printed stuff onto. How does this have anything to do with beets, the secret ingredient? I can’t imagine how that stuff can taste good, at all. Yuck :-\
Cantu just started using his class 4 laser to carmelize sugar on something fried. Oooh, now he’s using it to poke holes in that edible packing material. That’s so lame :-\
Uh, they just stopped to take a picture with their digital camera. They’re not taking Iron Chef seriously. Oh, he imported the photo into MICROSOFT WORD – Sacrelidge!
Cantu’s inspiration for his dishes are… USB cables and personal computers? That just makes me cringe :-\ He’s onto judging now. His dishes are: Beet Maki roll with synthetic champagne, hot and cold beet soup, surf and turf (prepared tableside with a “hyper-insulated box”), frozen sphere of beet, mascarpone with beets and “liquid delivery system”. His final dish is chocolate pudding with julienned beet and horchata paper.
Morimoto is now onto judging, wearing traditional Japanese clothing – he’s changed out of his normal outfit. His dishes are: 3 kinds of beet sushi, where Morimoto made faux salmon eggs out of beets. They look neat, and apparently taste really good. The second dish Morimoto presented was toro tartare with pureed beets. His third dish is gold beet soup with beet foam. Beet foam? Fourth: beets cooked in Miso. Fifth dish: Tempura, udon and rice. His final dish was beet souffleith yellow beet ice cream. The judges loved the yellow beet ice cream.
Oh no! Chef Cantu won!? 
Morimoto actually got the jump on him with Originality of dishes, too! How is this even possible?! :-\ Okay, in taste Morimoto lost out by one point, 25 to 26. In plating, he also lost by one point, 13 to 14. In originality, he won, 13 to 12. So in total, Cantu won by one point.
