Can Ghosts of Bobby’s Holiday Past Change His Victory-Hoarding Ways?

For Season 4's third episode of Beat Bobby Flay: Holiday Throwdown, host Carla Hall carried a candelabra through atmospheric fog and into the arena with Victorian style and solemnity. After hoarding every last win in the previous year’s battles, Bobby was the kitchen studio’s own Ebenezer Scrooge — and it was high time to teach him a lesson in his own house, with Charles Dickens’ classic Christmas Carol as inspiration.

“You’re actually like the modern-day Scrooge, stealing wins from people, no mercy,” Carla chided Bobby. “And just like Scrooge, tonight you will be visited by three ghosts — three chefs who’ve beaten you before in Holiday Throwdown!” In two head-to-head rounds of cooking competition, those chefs would transform 19th-century-appropriate ingredients; the victor after those two battles would choose a partner and a signature dish, then face off against Ebenezer Flay himself.

"Expect the first ghost," Carla thundered, "as the bell tolls … NOW!"

The first chef ever to beat Bobby in a holiday throwdown — with a lavish Korean feast fit for Chuseok, an autumn harvest festival that’s a bit like American Thanksgiving — was Season 1’s victorious Esther Choi, a Korean-American Renaissance chef, host and competitor who helms restaurants and bars in New York, New Jersey and Las Vegas. Handing your host defeat as his final holiday “gift” could be considered ghastly, but what’s a wildly talented gal to do? “I lost, so she’s back for more, because beating me once is not enough for Esther Choi,” Bobby noted.

And in this corner, being wheeled in on a coroner’s gurney in a fabulous velvet shroud … “Your second ghost of holidays past has beaten you more than once, including in a holiday leftover throwdown,” Carla noted.

“Oh, God,” Bobby groaned.

Yup, chef Amanda Freitag (a Chopped judge, longtime Food Network star and seasoned Bobby-trouncer) has pounded two nails in Bobby’s competition coffin, once with leftover-stuffing-stuffed lobster tail(!) and a second time with fesenjan, a spectacular Persian dish “that I had no idea how to make,” Bobby recalled.

Amanda was quite the perky phantasm: “You can’t escape me!” she trilled.

To put his visitors through their paces, Bobby reached for a featured foodstuff even more time-honored than the classic story inspiring his hazing. Time-honored but by no means beloved, mind.

He cracked open a “tombstone” commemorating ghosts of past menus that doubled as a miniature refrigerator (a nifty touch, that) and pulled out … a fruitcake.

“No way!” Amanda yelped. “Come on! Put that in the garbage!”

“Are you serious right now?” Esther sighed.

“I made this seven years ago!” Bobby reported with glee. “And it’s still good!”

Esther secured her first holiday win against Bobby with the big, bold Korean flavors that are her signature, and she knew they were her not-so-secret weapon when it came to redeeming too-treacly fruitcake. “It’s so heavy because [of] all of the sugar. Lots of nuts, pretty much every dried fruit, and they’re all candied! So, it’s like sugar on top of sugar on top of sugar. Not a fan.”

The correctives? Tart, acidic orange juice paired with soy sauce and gochujang (fermented Korean chile paste) to create a punchy fruitcake “glaze” for classic Korean fried chicken, plus fruitcake reimagined as French toast. “Fruitcake French toast? It might be a thing!” she mused. “We’ll see!”

“This holiday season, I’m here to remind Bobby that he can’t close his eyes without thinking of my win,” Amanda said. As a riff on the elevated comfort food she considers her specialty, she prepared a bit of discomfort food for Bobby by slicing, drying and transforming the nasty old fruitcake into a decidedly delicious-looking crouton for her celebrated raw beet salad. “Beets go great with any kind of warm spices,” she explained. Furthermore, “I always love doing these things in competition that I would absolutely never do in real life.” (See: the leftover-stuffing-stuffed lobster tail of Christmas past.)

Battling Bobby is a major through line for Amanda: “He’s been a ghost in my life for a long time,” she told Carla. The very first thing I ever did on Food Network was [compete on] Iron Chef [America] against Bobby!” Payback via an ancient holiday dessert would be sweet (but not too sweet, fruitcake; take it easy, there).

Amanda’s crisp, colorful offering gave sad-sack fruitcake the zing it so desperately needed. “This raw beet salad is a fan favorite, and I made a fruitcake crouton with goat cheese, pickled shallots and a pop of vinegar,” she explained. She folded even more of the crisped-up fruitcake into her goat cheese to add a bit of texture.

“The vinegar really picks up the fruitcake and all of those spices,” Carla said, “but the toasted fruitcake bits could have been toastier.” She had been thoroughly unprepared to find the dish delicious: “Fruitcake is gonna make a comeback because of you two!”

Dredged in a buttermilk batter, then coated with rice flour before frying for out-of-this-world crispness, Esther’s chicken was the ideal platform for her spicy-sweet fruitcake glaze. A newcomer to the world of fruitcake French toast, she worried that it would grow soggy as she caramelized it in her pan — but that fear proved unfounded.

“My favorite part of this is the crunch of the chicken,” Carla said. “I was afraid that the French toast was going to get soggy, but it had a really nice texture! The glaze probably could have used a little more fruitcake, just because it’s a fruitcake glaze, but I do think that the fruitcake was transformed.” Carla loved both contestants’ dishes, but that pitch-perfect chicken and toast won the day. “Congratulations, Esther; you made a beautiful dish, and you changed my opinion of fruitcake!”

As Carla’s congratulations for Esther echoed through the kitchen, crew members wheeled in a larger-than-afterlife coffin that disgorged a third apparition to round out Bobby’s opponents. This specter “knows that you’re still haunted [from] when she beat you at a holiday brunch throwdown,” Carla contended. “You may have thought that you buried her last season … but she’s back from the dead and looking to dig up another win!”

Chef Maneet Chauhan, both a Season 2 holiday-brunch boss and Food Network’s only two-time Tournament of Champions winner, strolled into the spotlight like she’d never left. “Bobby, I am here to bury you,” she said. “I even brought a coffin with me!”

And what would Esther and Maneet prepare to determine who’d give Bobby his comeuppance? Their would-be foe reached into what looked like a church bell that descended from the studio ceiling, because — listen, grocery shopping in Dickensian England would take too long to explain — and emerged with a squab (that is, a farm-raised young pigeon; “squab” makes an appearance as an adjective in A Christmas Carol). “Twenty minutes on the clock, no need to squabble,” he punned. “Make it the star!”

Esther opted to revisit her successful first-round strategy and whip up a dish she knew intimately. She minced and seasoned the squab, then combined it with shiitake mushrooms, Napa cabbage, shallots and garlic to create a delicate spring-roll filling. Spring-roll dough proved a bit more complicated: “It’s really thick, so this is looking like more of an egg roll, which is thicker; it might not be as flaky [and] thin as I want,” she noted. Limited to what she had on hand and unable to taste her rolls before deep-frying, she had to trust that the flavorful nuoc cham she created as a dipping sauce would carry her dish across the finish line.

“I hate squab,” Maneet confessed to Amanda. “It’s the 20 minutes [to cook it in competition] which really pisses me off! There’s a lot that can go wrong: it can be overcooked, it can be undercooked, there is so much.” She hedged her bets by breaking the squab into halves, then marinating it in a three-stage batter, frying it and serving it with a fresh green curry. As a Nashville-based chef with formidable Indian and Southern skill sets, she brought all of her expertise to transforming Bobby’s fiddly little birds.

Served with lettuce wraps, fresh herbs and slices of cucumber and radish, Esther’s rolls were heftier than intended — but how about that flavor? “The crispy-crunchy texture on the outside dipped in the sauce is heavenly,” Amanda said. “The wrapper itself really didn’t get to cook through, but when you get to the squab, it is cooked all the way through.”

Carla agreed that the squab’s flavor paired beautifully with the spicy-sweet nuoc cham. “It’s just that the [undercooked] wrapper got away from the experience. [But] you both brought some great flavors and great ideas!”

“The only thing that I’m worried about is there is a very thin line between overcooked and undercooked,” Maneet remarked as she plated her dish. “We’ll find out!”

“In true Maneet fashion, you brought so many flavors to this plate,” Amanda said. The fragrant green curry and fresh produce delivered depth and heat along with cooling notes, and that balance wasn’t lost on the tasters. That said, “I feel like the squab needed more time in the fryer,” Amanda continued.

Maneet lucked out: Her own charismatic curry plus Esther’s egg roll drama were enough to get the judges past her ever-so-slightly-under-fried squab. She survived the round and would move on to face Bobby with … well, what?

Granted the honor of calling the shots for the final battle, Maneet got crafty and challenged Bobby to a mutton-meat pie-off. “I make it very often at home, the kids absolutely love it, and of course, there’s pastry involved — and Bobby and pastry, they’re not friends. It’s strategy!” She then recruited Amanda to her team. “We have a history, we have a synergy,” she explained.

“So, the good news is I get my good friend Esther Choi, a great chef, as my teammate!” Bobby said. That was all he had time to say, really; 45 minutes to prepare and bake meat pies along with two sides was no joke, and all four chefs hit the ground running.

Maneet charged headlong into pie-dough prep and delegated side-dish duties to Amanda, who would complement the Indian spices in Maneet’s mutton filling with kedgeree — an English dish that combines curried rice, smoked haddock and jammy boiled eggs — and created a delicate raspberry trifle to conclude the presentation with sweetness. “You know they say a cat has nine lives? I think [Bobby’s] nine lives are going to run out very soon,” Maneet observed. “You can’t beat Team Maneet!” Amanda added.

Learning from his first-season loss to his fourth-season teammate, Bobby played second fiddle to Esther’s Korean influences as he plotted out his mutton-based menu. “We’re going with Korean flavors through and through!” As he noted, “It’s important to know the strengths of your partner.” (Especially when those strengths took you out on your own show.) “We’re making a mutton-slash-lamb pie, a Brussels sprout dish with kimchi and bacon, we have a crunchy salad, and Esther wants to make some mulled red wine.”

Bobby had also learned from previous misadventures with pie crust, and he minimized opportunities for error. “I’m going to put the crust on top — so it’s going to be a bottomless pie, but the crust is going to be baked on top of the cast-iron [pan],” he explained.

Less spectral but every bit as daunting in their own way, the trio of experts assembled to mull over the mutton-meat pies were prepared to be as stern as Ebenezer Scrooge’s critics. Leah Cohen (chef and owner of New York City’s Pig & Khao) joined chef and author Jay Reifel and cookbook author Lucinda Scala Quinn behind the festive yet fearsome table of judgment. If Bobby lost, would he have to crawl into that little tombstone-fridge wheeled out at the start of the show?

Maneet’s well-spiced mutton earned universal acclaim from the judges, but she tasted a bit of her own medicine when it came to having to create and bake a plausible pie crust in just 45 minutes: “To get that bottom really crusty enough so it is delicious is, I think, tough in a limited amount of time,” Lucinda observed. The kedgeree was a runaway hit as well: “I love it, I think the jammy egg is cooked perfectly,” Leah said. “This is beautifully balanced, [and] it’s perfectly spiced,” Jay concurred.

Bobby’s decision to perch pastry atop his mutton pie instead of enveloping the filling was a crucial one. “This crust is out of this world,” Leah said. “It is crispy, it is buttery, it is flaky, the only problem is I wish there was more of it!”

“Such a thoughtful notion to just have a top crust,” Lucinda added.

The Brussels sprouts’ rich bacon fat partnered well with the kimchi and found fans around the table, as did what Jay called the “simple and lovely” salad. Esther’s yuzu-inflected mulled wine was the presentation’s only sour note, but given the principal dishes’ success, the onetime opponents stood a very good chance of tasting success as a team.