Cooking as Fast as I Can

by Cat Cora

Alex and I stood on either side of the secret ingredient “altar,” and when they hoisted up the cover, so much dry-ice fog poured out that for several long seconds I couldn’t see anything. The ice was there for dramatic effect and also to help disguise some of the production necessities, like cables and lights. I batted away the fog and saw . . . potatoes. Mounds of russets and red potatoes, ruby crescent fingerlings, yellow Finns, and purple Peruvians. From the moment the ingredient was revealed until my sous chefs and I toasted with ouzo after we’d plated our five dishes, everything was a blur. Battle Potato was slightly more memorable because it was my first.

  Chaos did not even begin to describe it. I threw some ouzo into a pan and nearly singed off an eyebrow. One of Alex Lee’s ovens went down and he ran over to ask whether he could borrow mine. Then one of my ovens malfunctioned and I ran from my kitchen around the cameraman to use Lee’s one working oven, now empty, the metal tray burning my hand through the dishcloth. Someone yelled the time. The fog swirling around my ankles was distracting and crazy-making. Suddenly the plating began. I plated the duck, but I despised it. The sauce I’d made for it looked as if it had been spooned on by a prison cook. It needed something. To be drizzled with a squirt bottle? Maybe puddled, then “smeared” with the back of spoon? Maybe I should slice the duck and fan it out, rather than just plunk it down at six o’clock on the plate? Maybe I should use some micro greens or corn shoots for more color?

  With no time left, I started again, slicing, smearing, and opting for both the greens and the corn shoots. I didn’t love it, but I knew it was good. When we were done, I poured shots of ouzo for my team and we toasted and drank up. Opa!

  I won by one measly point, and damn if it didn’t feel good.

  I didn’t always win, obviously. My next battle was against “rock ’n’ roll chef” Kerry Simon, a fellow CIA grad, who had his own place in Vegas and sported a snarly hairdo that wouldn’t look out of place in a heavy metal band. Bill Murray was in the audience that day. He knew Kerry from a pizza place they had both worked at in suburban Chicago.

  The secret ingredient was actually only semisecret. A few days ahead of filming, the producer would give us a short list. It might be lamb, octopus, butter, or peas. This was helpful, obviously, but we still needed to conceive of five dishes for three or four potential ingredients. My strategy was to choose a cuisine, so that when the ingredient was revealed my team would immediately have a general idea of our direction.

  When the ingredient was apples, for example, I knew that every dish would be prepared in the manner of Asian/French cuisine. If the ingredient was oysters, we would go French/Cajun. I would instruct my sous chefs on the pairings in advance. By selecting the type of cuisine ahead of time, the cooking options would be automatically limited, and also create cohesion in the menu. This relieved my sous chefs and me of wasting precious time trying to figure out whether the dishes “clashed” with one another, and also we’d know right out of the gate the flavor profiles we’d be creating. Deciding the style before the secret ingredient was revealed saved a lot of time, and allowed us to focus.

  That day, in my battle against Kerry Simon, the secret ingredient was hamburger, and our strategy was global street food. I rarely paid attention to what was going on in the other kitchen—there truly wasn’t time to focus on anything but the task in front of you—but I saw that Kerry had taken that tack as well. After filming began, no one was supposed to leave the set, but at some point in the proceedings Bill Murray slipped out for a walk. Twenty minutes later he returned with a handful of plastic packets of ketchup and mustard, walked right onto the set and into Kerry’s kitchen, and slipped them to Kerry.

  I lost by 0.1 percent, the slimmest margin in Iron Chef history. Was the perfect, charming detail of Bill Murray delivering condiments the reason behind Kerry’s one-tenth of a percent win? I’m saying yes. There were no hard feelings in any case. Kerry is a great guy and, well, Bill Murray is the man. It was an honor, no matter what went down.

  Battle Clam, against Sam Choy. I beat him by almost ten points. In fairness, I think he shot himself in the foot with his clam flan. I learned from his mistake: never mix fish with anything sweet. It was simply too nasty.

  Battle Ostrich, against Walter Royal. He beat me by eight. Ostrich is a protein I find so revolting and despise so hardily that the moment the ingredient was revealed I should have just downed my ouzo and shaken the hand of my competitor. And don’t get me started on ostrich eggs.

  All along the way there were missteps, some more entertaining than others. Stoves failed, fires started, some chefs cut themselves so badly the on-set medic was called in. In one battle, Bobby Flay almost electrocuted himself. Once one of my sous chefs turned on the blender without putting on the lid and the avocado puree spewed all over the counters, the floor, his face.

  Battle Pork, against LA chef Neal Fraser, was a calamitous episode. It should have been called Battle Five Hundred Pounds of Pig. The secret ingredient lid ascended into the rafters, the fog rolled away, and there was an entire hog, nose to tail.

  The production schedule was brutal. They often shot all twenty-six episodes in just three weeks, which meant shooting two or three episodes a day. This particular episode began filming around six or seven o’clock. I knew how to break down an animal, and a pig would take at least an hour. When they realized they hadn’t removed the spine, they had to stop filming and wheel the pig back down to the butcher. We didn’t get started until 9:00 p.m.

  Everyone was exhausted. This was entertainment, not the Red Cross airlifting rice into Burundi. No one was going to suffer if we bagged it for the night, and yet we had a schedule to keep. We were cranky and miffed, and one of my sous chefs accidentally turned the oven up to five hundred degrees and burned the pork skewers. It was too late by the time I discovered it and I had to go with it. I got good and spanked by the judges and I completely deserved it.

  In season three I lost to Walter Scheib, who’d been the White House chef for the past eleven years. I couldn’t compete with his sheer expertise. Every day he was making dishes most of us hadn’t given a thought to since culinary school. High-end, highly technical dishes for the likes of Nelson Mandela and Václav Havel, and every other dignitary and ruler of the free world. He simply executed better than I did. There was nothing for it.

  Bobby, Mario, and Morimoto all ran busy New York restaurants. When the honchos at Food Network would summon them to the studios in Chelsea to film, they’d round up their sous chefs and head on over. Sure, they’d have to create a menu on the fly, but otherwise it was pretty much like an average day in their own restaurants, only with cameramen and dry ice.

  It wasn’t like I could just go out and buy myself a restaurant as if it were an SUV. Opening a restaurant requires a lot of thought and consideration and financial backing. My time was consumed by flying back and forth across the country for Iron Chef, and also guest-starring spots on other Food Network shows. Cat Cora’s Kitchen was published in 2004, and I was traveling to promote that. I’d started getting endorsement offers for commercials, and spokesperson jobs for big companies like Johnson & Johnson, Sears, Hunt’s, Pillsbury, and Kraft. I scored a lucrative gig selling garbage disposals for InSinkErator, which would be the biggest paycheck I had ever seen. My life was busy. My life was fast. I was cooking a lot, but it was on the road: charity events, festivals, food shows.

  To open a restaurant requires building a business plan, pondering your concept, finding and courting investors. The logical place for me to open a restaurant would have been somewhere in the Bay Area, Oakland perhaps, or in Napa or Yountville. But I wasn’t home long enough to even unpack my bags. I lived in Fairfield with Jennifer and my infant son, Zoran, but in 2005, the year I became an Iron Chef, I simply wasn’t settled enough. Timing is everything in life, and this just wasn’t the right time.

  Because I didn’t have my own restaurant, I had to assemble different teams of sous chefs for each battle. It was like going into the NBA fina
ls with a pickup team. I’d try to use my old friend Lorilynn as much as possible, but she couldn’t always drop everything and come to New York. I think I won as often as I did because of the generosity of Morimoto, whose own flagship restaurant was within walking distance of the studio. He invited my fledgling team and me to practice cooking together in the mornings before his own chefs arrived for service.

  Molecular gastronomy was all the rage in the mid-aughts. Transparent ravioli. Mango foam. Greek salad granita. All the cool kids were turning anything they could into a powder, gel, or jelly. I called Wylie Dufrense, a pioneer in molecular gastronomy and chef-owner of wd~50, one of those places where during dinner service most days you’d see town cars and stretch limos double-parked in front, and he agreed to give me some lessons. The judges were wowed when you put something in front of them that involved, say, liquid nitrogen, and I knew I needed it in my arsenal. It was time well spent: my truffle foam consistently drew raves.

  I’m constantly reminded that I am the first female Iron Chef. How extraordinary it was made to seem, that I, a mere woman, had made it into Kitchen Stadium! If I ever battled another woman—and I did on five occasions—the script called for mentioning our gender every fifteen seconds if possible.

  It’s ladies’ night! Have at it, sister! Let’s see who emerges victorious in this all-female food fight! On Battle Ricotta, I cooked against Julietta Bellesterous, chef-owner of Crema, and it was apparently necessary to seat three female judges. “Now for some real entertainment,” quipped Alton Brown after we’d finished our dishes. “Me and three women eat some cheese!”

  Early in my tenure I’d brought on Elizabeth Falkner as one of my sous chefs, and she was invited on to challenge me the next season. They billed it as a girl fight, my sous chef coming back, gunning for me, going against her mentor. They couldn’t get enough of the “catfight” jokes.

  I was immune to the trash talking, but what got to me if I let it was the reality beneath the spectacle: there was only room for one female Iron Chef, and if another woman beat me, the odds were good she would replace me. After I lost a battle I could be a pain in the ass. I would demand an explanation of the scoring. I was more emotional. I had more at stake.

  The male Iron Chefs’ (how ridiculous that sounds) battles had a sporting feeling about them. Oh sure, they cooked their asses off. I’m not suggesting Bobby didn’t take it seriously or that Mario didn’t want to win, just that nothing but their egos was at stake. They weren’t battling for their livelihoods.

  In the culinary world women are more welcome now than they were in Julia’s day—almost no one took Julia seriously as a “real” chef—but what remains unchanged is the way we are, at all times, in a position of having to prove ourselves. We’re constantly being pointed out as some adorable or charming anomaly.

  My battles with other females were actual battles. After I beat Elizabeth Falkner, I came upon her in her dressing room sobbing. Alex Guarnaschelli, chef de cuisine at New York’s Butter (who in 2012 would go on to win The Next Iron Chef on her second try), was so nervous during Battle Farmer’s Market she misheard the instructions and failed to use all the required ingredients.

  Mary Dumont, my competitor in Battle Milk and Cream, confessed that for weeks before our showdown she’d had my picture as her laptop wallpaper, and every time she passed it during the day she would stop and say, “I’m taking you down.”

  In that battle, I busted out a menu that I remain proud of to this day:

  Bacalao Soup with Milk and Garlic Cod

  Cardamom Milk with Duck Prosciutto Salad, Taro Chips, and Date Quenelle

  Spiny Lobster in Saffron-Vanilla Bean Milk, steamed in Fata Paper

  Couchon de Lait with Pork and Queso Fresca Ravioli

  Milk and Cookies with Bourbon Spiked Milk and Trio of Homemade Cookies Deconstructed: Oreo, Nutter Butter, and Fig Newton

  I also threw in a delicious beverage for good measure: Dreamsicle Snow Cone with a Grape Anise Flavor Squirt.

  I won 51–46.

  Off camera, my sense of alienation mounted. I never forgot Rocco’s directive from my first days on The Melting Pot, that I had to learn how to schmooze. The part he neglected to mention—or most likely didn’t even know to mention, being a handsome white guy—is that schmoozing isn’t like pole vaulting. You can’t do it alone. And the environment you’re in has to be conducive to schmoozing.

  How many times did I attend a get-acquainted gathering only to find that my fellow chefs, as well as the executives at the network or production company, already knew one another? At one cocktail party to kick off something or other, I arrived at the restaurant to find my costars were already broing it up, buying one another drinks and calling each other and our bosses by their last names. Had they already grabbed a few beers before the event? Caught a play-off game or gotten a poker game going? Whatever it was, I wasn’t invited, and typical for the token female: you’re invited but not included.

  My relationships with women in power were also complex. They fell all over the guys. Isn’t he adorable/charming/funny/oh so cute? The camaraderie they shared with the guys was based on mild flirtation and flattery. In particular there was a woman high up on the food chain at Food Network who was gay, but never took to me. I knew she would go out with some of the other talent, but never with me. Maybe I was too out and that made it awkward for her? I never expected anything special because I’m gay, but I could have used some support from someone who knew what it was like to be gay and struggle.

  Every time I started taking something like Iron Chef too seriously, something would remind me of the true scale of things, of what really mattered. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina decimated not just New Orleans and Mississippi. The storm made landfall in Buras, Louisiana, and then turned and headed north at the mouth of the Pearl River. For seventeen hours hurricane winds pummeled the coast, spawning eleven tornados and a twenty-eight-foot storm surge and fifty-five-foot sea waves. Every Mississippi coastal town was flooded by at least 90 percent, and every county was declared a disaster area. Jackson is in the central part of the state, and while it suffered eighty-five-mile-an-hour winds—which caused a lot of tree damage, downed power lines, and tore off roofs—my family escaped harm, as did the house on Swan Lake Drive.

  Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation. One bright, moneymaking spot had been the Gulf Coast, with its resorts and floating casinos. It suffered near-total obliteration within a seventy-seven-mile-wide swath. Gulfport, gone. Biloxi, gone. My heart, broken.

  Ten months earlier, the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami had struck. I couldn’t stop thinking about how in a matter of minutes people who didn’t have a lot to start with lost everything. In response to this disaster, I’d founded Chefs for Humanity, an organization devoted to addressing world hunger. As chefs, our lives are devoted to making great food and feeding people well. Shouldn’t part of that work also include providing food for people who don’t have enough, or anything, to eat? My parents had always viewed Thanksgiving as an opportunity to feed neighbors, friends, and acquaintances in need. I could hardly stand by and do nothing.

  Part of CFH’s mission includes emergency relief, and after Katrina I rallied some chef friends and we headed to the Gulf Coast. Fellow southerner Tyler Florence heeded the call, as did Ming Tsai.

  Few flights were coming in and out of Jackson; roads were washed out or closed due to downed power lines. We flew in to Jackson and drove to Gulfport. Because we partnered with law enforcement there, we were allowed past the roadblocks.

  In Gulfport the tidal surge penetrated a full half mile inland from the beach. Everything behind the surge line was smashed or wiped away. At the surge line mountains of debris formed the highest elevation in town, perhaps in the entire state. Trees pulled up by their roots, splintered wood, broken windows, entire roofs, chunks of pavement, and dozens of cars, which looked like shiny toys dropped from the sky by the hand of God. Local officers couldn’t even recognize the streets be
cause nothing was left but rubble.

  The Red Cross found an elementary school cafeteria we could use to cook for local citizens as well as the emergency relief teams and law enforcement. Our kitchen hummed 24/7, producing three thousand to five thousand meals a day. We tapped local chefs to be our sous chefs, and rounded up every other person who could scramble an egg.

  The food came from the refrigerators and walk-ins of local restaurants around the area. The structures had been obliterated, but somehow many kitchens escaped. The owners hired refrigerator trucks and brought their food to us. Gulfport had been a resort town and we had everything: lobsters, crab, expensive cuts of beef, burger, pizza dough, pounds of shredded cheese and tomatoes, bushels of lettuce wilting in the heat. We had literally tons of food. The challenge was figuring out how to use it efficiently, to create nourishing, comforting dishes for exhausted, traumatized people.

  We bunked in a local Motel Six, miraculously still standing. They gave us three rooms and we drew straws for the beds. The rest of us got pallets on the floor. No one slept, exhausted as we were; it was Mississippi at the dead end of August with no air-conditioning. We had a few window fans, which served only to blow around the mosquitoes. Mostly, we lay in the dark and talked and compared notes about great meals we’d eaten. Chefs to the end.

  eighteen

  I stood in an airplane bathroom on my way to somewhere. Maybe to New York to shoot Iron Chef. Perhaps I was out promoting the new cookbook. Or headed somewhere or other to participate in an auction or event for Chefs for Humanity. Could have been to meet with the editors and writers of Bon Appétit, where I’d been named executive chef. Or a food festival or trade show. Guest appearance on one of the other Food Network shows. (Iron Chefs were often asked to appear as guest stars.) Very possibly I was on my way to voice a role in a new video game, Iron Chef America: Cuisine Supreme.