Five home cooks remain as the mentors battle head-to-head to bring back an eliminated contestant of their choice, facing tough ingredients to make a dish worthy of a second chance. When the eliminated contestant returns, it's time for the six home cooks to battle it out in front of special guest judge Donatella Arpaia, to see who goes home in the elimination round.
The eliminated mentor returns to serve as the final guest professor, testing the cooks on their history with food. In the first round, the mentors must make an updated version of meatloaf to win an advantage for their cooks in the next round. Then, the home cooks revisit their first challenge cooking with lunch box ingredients, and in the final round, the two remaining cooks must create the best dish of their lives to win the $50,000 prize!
Duff Goldman serves as guest professor for a set of art-inspired challenges. First, the mentors face off in two battles featuring desserts in different colors. The teams with the least successful dishes then compete making a structural dessert that features chocolate and incorporates a circle, a square and a triangle on the plate.
The home cooks enter to meet their new guest professors, Debi Mazar and Aaron Sanchez. The subject is geography, and for their group test, they must compete in a tag team challenge cooking dishes that combine the styles of where they are from. The two teams with the least successful dishes then compete in an elimination test using ingredients from the most popular cuisines in the world: Thai, Italian or Mexican.
The Kitchen's Katie Lee and Jeff Mauro join the Academy as guest professors, where the subject is math and the group test is a numbers game: they'll be split in two groups of three to create an appetizer trio featuring one main ingredient! The trio sent to the elimination test must create a dish using only seven ingredients from the pantry, plus a surprise ingredient from the opposing team's mentor.
Guest professor Adam Richman joins the Academy to test the cooks on science, so first they must dissect iconic dishes and use those ingredients in a new way. Then, Adam makes the mentors switch teams to test how well they can train students. Whoever mentors the cook with the winning dish also gets to save one of their own team members, and the remaining cooks face off creating dishes featuring the four elements -- earth, air, fire and water.
Three home cooks remain, with one last chance to win the $50,000 grand prize! The cooks must make it through three intense rounds of culinary challenges, all representing a meal in the life of your typical home cook; breakfast, lunch and dinner. Plus, the contestants will get to cook side-by-side with their world-class mentor!
Scott Conant and Geoffrey Zakarian serve as guest professors for snack time, and they mix things up by having the mentors cook a gourmet dish featuring a popular snack food. The winning mentor gets a big prize: to bring back any cook that has been eliminated and add them to their team. After the eliminated cook returns, all five cooks try to avoid elimination as they create a gourmet dish using pretzels.
For the first time since Week 1, all 15 finalists are back together. They'll be joined by the Selection Committee as they look back on the biggest fights, failures, successes, plus unseen footage from the entire season. We'll also check in on the most memorable finalists from past seasons. This will all lead into the finale where one of the final three will be crowned a Food Network Star.