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Aaron ends up as the loser of the challenge and smiles appear on all of the other chefs. This could be the moment when Aaron - hated, hated Aaron with his disdainful comments and condescending behavior - goes home. Blood is in the water and everyone knows it.

As part of the SDQ, Aaron gets to choose one chef to cook against, one-on-one. Keriann recalls his “I could cook you under the table!” comment from two episodes ago and is sure she’s gonna get picked. She’s ready. She wants to send him home.

In a moment showing that Aaron really can’t put his culinary money where his mouth is, he picks Katie for the totally unconvincing reason that she’s a culinary school instructor and wants to beat her to show that you don’t have to go to culinary school to be a great chef. Yeah, whatever.

The twist for the SDQ is that the only source of heat that Aaron and Katie can use is boiling water. Aaron decides to do a play on a spring roll while Katie decides to make pasta. Wow. They both have a few issues - the spring roll “wrapper” made out of shrimp is a bit thick, while Katie can’t get the KitchenAid Stand Mixer working to cut her pasta.

Meanwhile, on the sidelines, everyone is rooting for Katie to win. I’m pretty sure everyone at home is doing so, too.

Aaron serves up his “spring roll” with cucumber, carrot, mint, and raw peanuts wrapped in a wrapper made of shrimp. The judges show no reaction. Katie offers a saffron, hand-cut, pappardelle pasta with smoked mozzarella. Ming asks whether she salted her pasta. Ominous.

And yes, that ends up being the key. Aaron wins because his dish showed great technique, while Katie should have added more salt to her pasta and more sauce overall. The cheftestants are crestfallen. Aaron thinks that his win shows that he belongs there.

We move on to the Elimination Challenge. As baseball stadium vendors walk in while calling out, “Peanuts! Pretzels! Popcorn!” the chefetestants are informed that they’ll be cooking in the venerable Fenway Park, where they’ll be asked to take inspiration from a classic ballpark snack and make a fine dining dish.

Before we know it, the cheftestants are dashing through Whole Foods, trying to plan their dishes. Katie has great memories of going to baseball games with her father, who died of cancer. She wants to dedicate this dish to him. Meanwhile, Keriann wants to take tons of ballpark flavors and get them into a braised short rib dish. Doug is appalled - he has no idea how she thinks she’ll be able to braise short ribs in the time they’ve been given.

Back in the kitchen, Adam notes that he has no idea what type of kitchen equipment will be available in the stadium, and thus wants to poach his fish now so that tomorrow will be nothing more than “scoop and serve.” Rebecca is horrified - she notes that fish can overcook in a second. I’m horrified for a different reason - how on earth can “scoop and serve” be used to put together a fine dining dish?

Katie, at the other end of the kitchen, puts her “crème brûlée” into her cart for tomorrow. She notes that she won’t have any idea whether the mixture has set until tomorrow morning during the challenge. Telling last words?

The next morning, the TC producers treat us to another shot of James shirtless, making coffee, and Greg doing yoga. Greg feels like he has momentum and discusses his journey from chef, to drug addict, to recovering drug addict, to chef with all the momentum.

The Fenway kitchen is pretty small and stocked with only the bare minimum, thus the chefs will be cooking in groups of three. Katie is in the first group and learns that her crème brûlée has not set at all. She starts running around the kitchen madly, trying to do this and that to fix her dish. It’s wildly chaotic. Aaron notes that maybe “Miss Culinary Instructor bit off more than she can chew.” God, I hate him.

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