Leather Storrs: Confessions of a Reality TV Chef

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Leather Storrs, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Leather Storrs on Extreme Chef

There are plenty of chefs who regret having appeared on a cooking show. I am not one of them. I was on a terrible show called Extreme Chef and it was a gas. I flew down to LA, stayed in the very rock and roll Roosevelt hotel and ran into the gag band LMFAO one minute before their fifteen. Oh, and I won $10,000.

The idea behind the show was that cooks would be pushed from their kitchen comfort zone and forced to work under time constraints with very limited equipment. The ingredients were wacky, never easy to procure and sometimes alive. The host was a hunky Aussie given to hyperbole who guided the chefs through zany challenges and a final head to head battle to make one perfect bite.

I was invited to compete by one of the many casting companies whose job it is to find reality show “characters.” I guess that’s me. I skyped like a champ and won my golden ticket. But I was cautious. As a “character,” I was well aware of the dangers of subjecting myself to the reality show edit. It would not be a stretch to paint me as some blustery buffoon. On top of that, my episode was to be the premiere, so the level of EXTREME-ness was bound to be staggering. A mountaintop? A deserted Island? A blazing inferno?

Nope. A Cul de sac. That’s right, for the premiere, we traveled to Dante’s tenth circle- a Wisteria lane in one of LA’s endless suburbs. Had I not been awake during the hour long drive south, I would have sworn it was a movie set.

I met my opponents around seven am day 1. One chef was a Johnny Depp doppelgänger, with rings and scarves and fancy hair. The other was a hard charging woman who had a new lease on life because she had shed over a hundred pounds. I liked them both, but I didn’t come to make friends.

In the roundabout we all had a plywood table, a janky sterno stove, no tools and one little pan. We were told to find a cart hidden in a pre-determined garage and then run to a truck a half mile away. In the truck bed was a mountain of peeled tin cans. We loaded our carts and returned to our boards. And “Cut!” Thank god. I was fatter and I smoked back then. I was sucking wind and dripping like Pavarotti.

“Action” featured me cutting my finger with a can and cutting spam with the serrated blade of a tin foil box. I made something cute and cheffy, stacked and sauced. I lost. The winner was the weight watcher. She was allowed to pick the grills for the next challenge. She took a big gas grill, gave Johnny a Weber kettle and gave me a tiny, beat-up, propane hibachi.

For challenge number two we put on a block party for our Suburban hosts. We were to run into someone’s house, raid their fridge, pantry, pots and pans and then cook and plate the party. We had to cook our protein on the engine block of a muscle car and we had to work as a rain machine pummeled us with a biblical downpour. But first we had to source our menu and tools from one of the neighbors. The ingredient assembly ended day 1.

Day 2 was the block party and the head to head. As it happens, I’m no stranger to roasting on an engine block. When I was a kid, we’d wrap hot dogs in foil and eat them halfway through road trips. Unfortunately, advances in the auto industry have foiled that technique. The engine block of my muscle car was about 110 degrees. I slathered flank steak with garlic, salt and yogurt, hoping to hurry the cook with enzymes and acid. I wrapped it in foil, slapped it on the block and jammed on the accelerator to heat up the engine. I returned to my little grill to see that Johnny was in trouble.

It’s one thing to cook in your kitchen with all your tools, no surprises and an easy stream of tickets. It’s quite another thing to take your show on the road. I’m pretty sure Johnny had never used a charcoal grill. He put briquettes on, doused them with lighter fluid, replaced the grill, added asparagus and salmon and threw in a match. Whoops. And then the rain started. My opponents ran to retrieve umbrellas. I’m an Oregonian. I kept cooking.

Time’s up. And even though my flank steak is closer to carpaccio than cooked, the yogurt helped, my grilled vegetable garnish is pretty and delicious and my dish works. It also doesn’t hurt that Johnny garnishes Kingsford salmon with his own hair or that Suddenly Skinny serves raw sausage. So he’s out and we’re on to the head to head.

This is the crummy part. My opponent is an excellent cook with loads of energy, but she used to be big enough that swimming was embarrassing, so she didn’t swim. For the head to head, she and I were to jump into a pool, retrieve a spoon from the bottom, return to our board and create a perfect bite. I was at the board in less than a minute. She couldn’t dive under water. As a result, I got a major head start and first pick of the pantry. It was too much for her to overcome.

With limited material she gutted out a kooky spoonful garnished with shredded beef jerky. I knew I had won, but with an asterix. I felt like Sugar Ray Leonard, who was denied the pleasure of simple victory when Roberto Duran called out “No Mas!” and forfeited the bout.

As the sun went down on the cul de sac, I was crowned the Extreme Chef. It was suggested that I respond to the announcement with a throaty victory cry, so I raised my face to the sky and bellowed “I AM the Extreme Chef!” Cameras kept rolling and the producer yelled “That was great Leather, now let’s do it again, just more spontaneous.”

Leather Storrs is an Oregon native who has served 20 years in professional kitchens. He owns a piece of two area restaurants: Noble Rot and Nobleoni at Oregon College of Art and Craft, where he yells and waves arms. He quietly admits to having been a newspaper critic in Austin, Texas and Portland.