POINT PLEASANT BEACH — Chef Meg LaManna, the owner of Arnold Avenue’s own Mugsy’s Mercantile sandwich shop, recently became the latest champion of the cooking competition juggernaut “Chopped,” besting three other professional chefs in a culinary battle of mystery ingredients.
Since 2009, more than 700 episodes of Food Network’s “Chopped” have aired, with four chefs competing on each episode to win $10,000 by turning baskets of mystery ingredients into star-level dishes in an appetizer, entrée and dessert round. The last chef standing after three elimination rounds takes home the prize and the title of “Chopped” champion.
Host Ted Allen presents the show, filmed at Food Network headquarters in New York City, with three people from a rotating cast of chefs, critics and restaurateurs serving as judges for each episode. For LaManna’s episode, which filmed in October 2024 and aired on March 25, Iron Chef Alex Guarnaschelli, Maneet Chauhan and Ayesha Nurdjaja served as the judges.
In the first round, the appetizer round, LaManna and her competitors had to make their starter using peaches, long hot peppers, pancetta and a latte made of pandan, a fragrant plant used as a flavoring in Asian dishes.
“I had no idea what pandan was when I pulled it out,” she said. “Then I just tasted it, and I ended up making a vinaigrette out of that on an arugula salad alongside a charred peach stuffed with ricotta and long hots to kind of mask the heat of the long hots, because they can be either not spicy or spicy as hell.”
With the first chef eliminated, the entrée round mystery basket brought pig’s blood, purple spinach, branzino and ice cream sandwiches made with kouign-amann, a flaky pastry from the Brittany region of France. Unfortunately for LaManna in the moment, with these disparate ingredients came another setback in the form of a cut thumb, which she had to take care of quickly as the timer remained ticking.
“The whole thing is like a blur,” said LaManna. “I’ve got ice cream sandwiches, a whole fish, pig’s blood and purple spinach — that’s the round I cut myself in. So, I end up using seven minutes of the whole competition (in the 30-minute round) because I cut a tendon in my thumb and it won’t stop bleeding. I had to really hustle and buckle down to figure it out.”
“When there’s a ticking clock in the corner, and judges yelling at you like, ‘Hurry up, hurry up’ and you’re working with a whole branzino and pig’s blood — you’re moving at a million miles a minute,” she said.
“So it was kind of like my thoughts were ahead of my body,” she told The Ocean Star. “But I had two options: I could have just completely fallen apart and been like, ‘I’m out…’ but I didn’t even think of that at the moment. It was wild.”
Despite the unintended knife injury, LaManna pushed forward, serving the judges a pan-seared branzino on a bed of sautéed spinach and mushrooms with a pork-blood, butter and wine sauce, garnished with breadcrumbs from the kouign-amann, evading elimination again and leaving only the dessert round unclaimed for a head-to-head battle.
In the dessert round, the chefs’ boxes contained rainbow bagels, pistachio cream, Muddy Buddies (Chex cereal with coatings like chocolate and peanut butter) and longan fruit, which is a relative of lychee. LaManna said that she had, much like the pandan, never encountered this ingredient, but was confident in how to incorporate it based on the taste alone.
“I’d never worked with them before, so I sort of cracked them open and tried them. It’s kind of a lychee flavor, so I took blueberries from the pantry, cooked the blueberries with sugar and the longan fruit and made a pie filling out of that, and I made my own pie crust from scratch,” she said. “I made a galette, and then I put the filling in there and baked it off. Then, there was a pistachio cream in the basket and I made pistachio crema to go on top of it.”
“When I see something I’ve never worked before, and there’s a clock ticking, it’s just fear. I’m thinking, ‘What am I going to do with this?’” said LaManna. “And then you take it little by little; you crack it open, taste it, and you just kind of trust your taste buds and trust that you’re going to know what to do with it.”
LaManna explained her immediate reaction to seeing the cloche leave the table in the final round, revealing that she had not been chopped, thereby making her the episode’s “Chopped” champion.
“My mind was completely blown,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I can’t believe I just won ‘Chopped;’ this is crazy. But I also felt a big validation — it’s been a lot of hard work, and I’ve been cooking for 20 years now. It was kind of like a culmination of all these feelings.”
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