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" On Episode Two of Next Iron Chef: Ming Tsai outsmarts himself, Chef Dumont bleeds all over the kitchen, and Chef Forgione&amp;#039;s pie pot chicken rules. In the latest installment of our weekly recaps, we talk to judge Michael Symon (who&amp;#039;s also host of the upcoming Food Network show Food Feuds) about the meaning of innovation, the perfection of eggs, and the biggest mistake a chef can make. ESQUIRE: The Secret Ingredient Challenge was to innovate donuts and coffee, and Chef Tsai claimed that &amp;quot;Only certain people are good at cooking great breakfast.&amp;quot; Is that true?  MICHAEL SYMON: No. But maybe that&amp;#039;s because I&amp;#039;m fortunate and do breakfast well. But it is true that one of the great skills of a chef is to cook an egg perfectly. If you can cook a perfect sunny-side up egg, a perfect scrambled egg, a perfect omelet, you have the finesse to cook pretty much anything. ESQ: The Chairman&amp;#039;s Challenge was to do something original with classic diner dishes. What&amp;#039;s your favorite diner dish? Do you even go to diners now that you&amp;#039;re a chef? MS: Are you kidding me? I love diners. The things that I always get at a diner \u2014 my two big things are corned beef hash and biscuits and gravy. Those are the two big ones. But liver and onions is another one that I adore.  ESQ: Ordering liver from a diner seems ballsy.  MS: Not if you&amp;#039;re going to the right diner.  ESQ: Chef Tsai was bragging about how many ingredients and techniques he was using. Did he outsmart himself?  MS: He had so much success in the first competition from doing three preparations of food and all these unique techniques. And the biggest mistake you can make is you get a little too cute for yourself. He had too much going on on the plate. ESQ: Is the greatest mistake you can make as a cook not editing yourself?  MS: Absolutely. The greatest advice I ever got was from Jonathan Waxman. He told me once when I was a very young cook, &amp;quot;When you think you have the perfect dish, take three ingredients out.&amp;quot; Usually, the more mature you get as a chef, the simpler the food becomes. That&amp;#039;s what was so surprising about Ming&amp;#039;s dish. Here&amp;#039;s someone who&amp;#039;s very confident, established, and talented, and he made a rookie mistake. ESQ: It seems like it&amp;#039;s easy to over think things when you&amp;#039;re on a show.  MS: It is! We&amp;#039;ve all done it. You get caught up in being judged. You&amp;#039;re in this pressure cooker, time-restrained situation you&amp;#039;re not used to, and it&amp;#039;s easy to get lost. You&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to do this because no one&amp;#039;s ever seen it before!&amp;quot; And typically, there&amp;#039;s a reason for that.  ESQ: Chef Pagan went home. Why him over Chef Tsai?  MS: You look at the dishes and say, &amp;quot;These are equally bad, but one is cooked better.&amp;quot; Ming&amp;#039;s mistake was putting too many ingredients in a dish, put if you pulled items out they were very tasty. That brisket and hash was not easy to do. But what happened to Pagan is his potatoes were pasty because he made them in a Cuisinart and his meatloaf was undercooked. There were some big technique flaws there. ESQ: This week&amp;#039;s theme was &amp;quot;Innovation.&amp;quot; Was Chef Forgione the most innovative this week?  MS: Chef Forgione made almost like an inside out pot pie. It was really inventive to take all these ingredients that you would commonly see in a pot pie and look at the dish in a completely different way. The best dishes are the ones that look simplistic, then when you taste them it&amp;#039;s a revelation. ESQ: Bobby Flay said that Iron Chef is &amp;quot;sixty minutes of hell.&amp;quot;   MS: That&amp;#039;s exactly what it is. The pace is incredibly hectic. I&amp;#039;ll never forget, when Bobby won against Morimoto, and water started leaking on the floor, he started getting electrocuted while he was plugging things in. You&amp;#039;re in an unstable cooking environment. I cut myself on Iron Chef America, and I hadn&amp;#039;t cut myself in fifteen years! Sixty minute minutes of hell. Who can stand on coals and walk across them for an hour. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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