‘Top Chef: The Dish with Kish’ episode 1: How would Stephanie Izard have handled that sudden death cookoff? [WATCH]

“I think you want to get a lot of flavor in as short an amount of time as possible,” says “Top Chef” season four champion Stephanie Izard during the first episode of “The Dish with Kish,” the new “Top Chef” after show (watch it above). Host Kristen Kish challenges Izard to make a dish using leftover ingredients just like the bottom three chefs did in the season premiere, “Chef’s Test,” before David Murphy was eliminated.

“Chef’s Test” challenged the 15 cheftestants to master a basic dish or preparation: five of them had to make a soup, five had to make stuffed pasta, and the last five were required to roast a chicken. Murphy was on stuffed-pasta duty, but the judges didn’t think his gnocchi was really stuffed or even really gnocchi, so he ended up as the judges’ least favorite of those dishes. But that wasn’t the end of it. The judges then made the bottom three chefs make a dish in 20 minutes using the scraps from the Elimination Challenge. Unfortunately, Murphy never really came up with a game plan and just ended up with green sauces that were both overcomplicated and random.

But “do you think that there’s opportunity in the mess and the chaos of it all?” Kish wonders about cooking with what other chefs discarded. Izard explains, “In restaurants, realistically we have to use all of our scraps. If you have chicken with all of that flavor on it, you’re not just going to throw it in the trash, you’re going to make it into a sauce or you’re going to make it into a broth. If you have little bits of anything left, it’s either going to stocks, sauces, going to another dish, maybe we make a filling with it.”

Izard ends up serving seared snapper with green pozole and hazelnut salsa macha. Kish concludes, “Leftovers or not, great ingredients are great ingredients.”

Be sure to make your predictions so that the contestants can see how they’re faring in our racetrack odds. You can keep changing your predictions until just before the next episode airs every Wednesday on Bravo. You’ll compete to win a spot on our leaderboard and eternal bragging rights. See our contest rules and sound off with other fans in our reality TV forum. Read more Gold Derby entertainment news.