Alex Guarnaschelli was crowned the winner of The Next Iron Chef: Redemption tonight after beating Amanda Freitag in a head-to-head battle in kitchen stadium. Alex Guarnaschelli will be going against UK Iron Chef Judy Joo next Sunday at 9pm on Iron Chef America.The first challenge of the episode had the competitors cooking a meal for a last supper. Nate Appleman got haddock (Simon's ingredient), Alex Guarnaschelli got sea urchin (Donatella's ingredient), and Amanda Freitag got chicken (Geoffrey's ingredient) as their ingredients. Amanda Freitag was the clear winner of this challenge, and the judges decided to eliminate Nate Appleman from the competition due to the clams he added to his haddock dish.
This put Amanda Freitag against Alex Guarnaschelli for the final challenge in kitchen stadium, with the winner being crowned the Next Iron Chef. The challenge had sets of ingredients based on current Iron Chefs: Southwestern for Bobby Flay, Mediterranean for Michael Symon, and Japanese for Masaharu Morimoto. They needed to pick 3 ingredients from each set of ingredients for their dish, which was meant to show respect to the Iron Chef's who were going to be judges of this battle. We only got to see the chefs cooking for about two minutes as they tried to cram everything into a 1 hour episode. After tasting all of the food, the judges decided that Alex Guarnaschelli's three courses were better and she was chosen as the winner of The Next Iron Chef: Redemption.
Based on the poll on the site from earlier this week, most wanted either Amanda Freitag or Alex Guarnaschelli to win. I think most of us were not suprised to see Alex going against Amanda in the final challege, and the Food Network getting another female Iron Chef. Many think Alex Guarnaschelli was the chosen one from the beginning.
What do you feel about the results tonight? Happy that Alex Guarnaschelli won?
This post was not sponsored by Kikkoman.