The TV Zone

What product is Rocco DiSpirito hawking? That’s what I started wondering as soon as I learned he was to be a guest judge on Top Chef.

As it turns out, he was promoting Bertolli Mediterranean-Style Frozen Dinners, a sample of which landed on my desk just a few days ago. Sadly, it had defrosted by the time I got to it so I haven’t taken it for a test drive. Bertolli’s flaks had also, as is the custom with food p.r., sent along some low-level graft—a nonstick skillet, a wooden spoon, a pot holder and a corkscrew.

Bertolli, a once-Italian olive-oil company now owned by food behemoth Unilever, dug deeper into its pockets to run two commercials during the show’s airing and put up four tickets to Italy for the team that won the elimination challenge.

Could there have been a weirder challenge? I was worried that the contestants were going to have to cook something with Bertolli’s frozen dinners, but instead they were instructed to deconstruct Bertolli’s handiwork and then create their own. Creating frozen dinners!

And now the public has been introduced to the great concept of IQF, Individual Quick Freezing. Remember the days when frozen peas came in an icy block? That was pre-IQF. Now blanched fresh peas are placed on a conveyor belt and rolled into an incredibly cold blast freezer that instantly freezes each one—that’s why they rattle around in the package. The quicker you freeze something, the less its texture is affected by being frozen and then defrosted.

The Top Chefs didn’t have access to a commercial blast freezer, but they could still achieve some measure of IQF by freezing each of their dish components separately. Only Tre and CJ got it right—and they were rightfully declared the winners.

Rocco DiSpirito, the Icarus of the culinary world, is best known for having been plucked from his well-regarded Manhattan restaurant Union Pacific to star in a reality series that chronicled his doomed efforts to open an Italian restaurant with Mephistophelean partner Jeffrey Chodorow. A short stint as host of WOR’s Food Talk radio show followed.

Padma, however, introduced him as “James Beard Award winner and author of Rocco’s Real-Life Recipes.” None of the contestants seemed particularly impressed with him, and Tom seemed downright dismissive. At one point Rocco made the staggering pronouncement that “among the great chefs of the world there is a recognition that home-meal-replacement [i.e. frozen dinners] is an important category.”

Yeah, right. Great chefs of the world like Rocco are hawking frozen dinners for Unilever, and pikers like Tom Colicchio are creating ground-breaking restaurants (Craft, Craftbar, ‘wichcraft, Craftsteak), writing excellent cookbooks and actually bringing some class to reality TV.