The One-Bite Challenge

On a recent season of Top Chef, the chefs were given a unique challenge: Create one perfect bite of food. There were no other restrictions. Just make one amazing bite of food. Not one bite of a bigger dish–just one, single-serving bite.

I’ve hosted a few Top Chef challenges involving a head-to-head cookoff with secret ingredients, but I’ve wanted to try this one-bite challenge. So I invited some friends to a game day this past weekend, with the request (completely optional) to bring an amazing bite of food to share.

I have to say, I was really impressed with the results, which I’ll post below. There were a few dishes that were definitely bigger than one bite, but that’s fine. There was quite a variety of food, more than enough for both lunch and dinner.

On a whim, I decided my dish would involve chicken skins. I have no idea why–it just seemed like a unique vessel for a one-bite dish. I fried them in lard, which I’ve never used before. My intention was then to layer on cream cheese, baked chicken, and homemade chimichurri, but I realized that not everyone likes chimichurri as much as I do. So I integrated cilantro and parsley into the cream cheese, along with some hot sauce, and the result was a deconstructed buffalo chicken wing. It was actually quite good, especially while it was warm. Here’s what they looked like:

Here are the other dishes, followed by the games we played:

cranberry cream cheese poppers
what is this, a two-bite challenge?
brownie scoopers
cheese, onion, and mayo sandies
turkey meatballs with cheese and cucumber
apples!
ham rolls
lamb fingerlings
goat cheese stuffed mushrooms
Jello shots!

We ate, played games, ate, and played some more games. The only game I played that I forgot to record was Downforce, which we played twice.

Bunny Kingdom
Tiny Epic Galaxies (my first play)
Scotland Yard
The Grimm Forest
Notre Dame (my first play)

If you were to participate in a one-bite challenge, what would you make?

5 thoughts on “The One-Bite Challenge”

  1. Jamey,

    Iron Chef has also been a part of my experience but I’ve never mashed my two passions (coking and board gaming) together. we came close a few weeks ago during a private convention, in which a friend of mine and I were responsible for Sunday breakfast and we each made egg, cheese, ham, and onion casseroles. We ended-up having to sacrifice one of the ovens to another chef for a completely unrelated meal. Anyway, you’ve now made me hungry…it’s time for breakfast.

    Cheers,
    Joe

    Reply
  2. Some of these are making my mouth water just looking at the pictures! Did you and your guests vote on a winning bite?

    Reply
    • Originally I considered making it a competition, but I decided that everyone won since we got to eat such great food. 🙂

      Reply

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