Headscratchers / Chopped

• This one confuses me a bit. Sometimes the chefs run out of time to complete those dishes. Once in a blue moon, a contestant finishes garnishing or plating that last plate a second or so after time is called. With up to four similar looking dishes, how does the judge know that THEIR dish is the one that was plated after time was called? Barring an egregious incident (One chef plated three plates after time was called), how would they know? Do they track it from photography stage to service?
  • Why not? They already have multiple cameras running non-stop so they won't miss any highlights; might as well track which plate is which while they're at it.
  • More importantly, why does it matter? A plate got finished after time was up. It doesn't ultimately matter which plate it was.
• Why don't they ask contestants beforehand if they have major allergies? If you're vegetarian or whatever, yeah, suck it up and chop up that bird, but seriously.
  • Rule of Drama, most likely. Most of the chefs, being professionals, likely encounter the stuff they are allergic to on a semi-regular basis in their restaurants. However, there they have other chefs who can taste the food and comment on it, while here they are on their own.
  • Not quite on their own. There was an episode that (seriously) involved a priest, a rabbi, and a nun, and one of the basket ingredients was a pork product, so the rabbi couldn't taste the food as he was going along. So he asked the nun to do the tasting for him. (Of course, he didn't really heed her advice, and he got chopped. He was told he should have listened to her!)
  • Deliberately invoked as Reality Show Genre Blindness. It is on the signup form for Chopped. Although they gotten to this less after one chef was fatally allergic to at least one ingredient in every basket. That would've been a nightmare PR for FN.
• Isn't it a little suspiscious that almost all finals have a chef of each gender?
  • ...no? And I've found that only about half the episodes have one man and one woman left in the dessert round, the other half of the time being two men (and how rarely does two women happen?).
• Why do people seem to typecast the judges? For example, Maneet Chauhan, in her Iron Chef America debut, was announced as having an Latin-Indian fusion style. On Chopped, they only do mention the "Indian" part. And Aaron Sanchez having to be "Mr. Taco" even though he has roots in New Orleans and France.
  • Why do you assume that this is the work of "people" rather than the chefs themselves? Aaron Sanchez has clearly decided to play himself up that way, even shaming Hispanic contestants for using anything other than Hispanic flavors and cooking styles, I doubt it's "people" making him do that.
• In almost every episode, every contestant finishes their dish literally at the last second. No one ever finishes their dish a few seconds early or a few seconds late. Doesn't anyone else find this a bit suspicious? It doesn't seem realistic.
  • Part of it is editing, so that we get to see all the contestants finish their dishes and hear time run out, even if it doesn't match up exactly in real life. Also, finishing a few seconds late is an illegal move so many of the chefs who do "finish" exactly on time (without re-synced editing) may not have done everything they wanted to.
  • What exactly are you protesting here? That they don't show a chef complete their dish a few seconds early and just be standing there in the final flash-across? Why?
  • There's episodes where chefs have finished a little early, and there's one celebrity cook off where one of the contestants finished several minutes early and drank wine.