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Meanwhile, his teammates Adrienne and Claudette are struggling with their fish course. Claudette had proposed they cold smoke the fish, which Adrienne was fine with . . . until she realized that Claudette had never cold smoked anything before.

Too bad they’re up first. They serve a “smoked” trout with cacio pecora and trout skin chips. On the green team, Fatima and Laura offer a play on cheese and crackers, with a Shepherd’s milk cheese halo and a cracker made from cheese rinds. The judges adore the cheese and cracker dish, which had great flavor and made smart use of the rinds. Adrienne and Claudette’s dish isn’t bad, but it’s underseasoned and lacks smoke.

Both teams hit the next courses out of the park. Non-moustache Joe and Bruce on the blue team serve a sheep’s milk feta with beet agnolotti and scallions. On the green team, Carrie and moustache-Joe have a potato and ricotta dumpling with a butter sauce and hazelnut relish. Tom really likes that Carrie only grilled one side of the dumpling and finds that the dish had good balance between pasta and filling. For Joe and Bruce, the pasta was fantastic and had nice, bright flavors.

The same is not true of both teams’ third courses, which are disappointments. The blue team has a lamb loin with spring vegetables from Tyler and Rogelio, but the lamb is unevenly cooked—Padma and Tom’s were raw, while Graham’s was cooked perfectly. The green team has seared lamb with corn grits from Tu and moustache-Joe, but the corn is far too sweet and the butchery on Tu’s lamb is quite bad.

Both team finish strong, though. Brother on the blue team has a blueberry tart with whipped ricotta that has great flavor. For the green team, Tanya and Chris serve fried dough with sheep’s milk feta ice cream and a chocolate ganoche, which Padma adores and declares to be one of her favorite dishes ever on Top Chef.

So a lot of highs and a couple of lows, leading to a difficult decision regarding the winning team. The green team’s first two dishes did the best overall at highlighting and featuring the cheese, but the lamb dish from Tu and moustache-Joe was the worst dish of the evening. In fact, Tom describes it as “really bad, just in technique, flavor . . . across the board, there were no redeeming qualities.”

Thus, the question, as Padma puts it, is whether that one dish is enough to drag their entire team down.

The answer is no. The green team ends up on top and is heaped with praise by the judges. Laura’s cracker was amazing, and the dish showed great attention to detail. Carrie’s dumpling was a play on something she’d done before, but was simple, humble, and perfectly executed. And Tanya’s feta ice cream was brilliant and delicious.

As a side note, I gotta say, after last week’s female shellacking, it’s great to see that the top chefs on the winning team were all female. The contrast was even more stark given Tu’s disaster of a lamb dish . . . Padma notes as an aside, he was very lucky to have been on the winning team.

And from the winning team, one chef is the overall winner, and that’s Carrie. Quite the turnaround from being on the chopping block last week. Just goes to show that when the playing field is even, nobody is safe.

And certainly, one chef from the blue team will learn that today. With the judges being fans of Brother’s dessert and Joe/Bruce’s lamb (plus the fact that Joe won immunity), there are only two dishes up for consideration on the losing end of things. Claudette didn’t do a very good job adding any smokey flavor to the fish, and she owns up to the fact that she contributed little to the conception and idea of the dish. Meanwhile, the judges liked Adrienne’s contribution of the trout skin cracker to the dish. As for the team’s lamb dish, Rogelio did a poor job cooking it, with portions being close to inedible on Tom and Padma’s plates.

So lack of ambition/weak smoking versus undercooked meat. On most occasions, you’d expect undercooking meat to be the bigger flaw, but today, it’s Claudette who’s going home, who the judges say lacked inspiration and execution. Two episodes in and we’ve lost two female chefs. Hopefully, this isn’t a trend that continues much longer.

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