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When Gordon Ramsay calls, you pick up the phone. And for Tiffany Derry, chef and owner of Roots Southern Table and Roots Chicken Shack, this call meant coming in to challenge a group of MasterChef: Back to Win contestants to cook some Southern fusion food — her area of expertise.
But this isn’t just some easy challenge. Derry will be helping and critiquing as they work on an “elevated dish with its roots in the South, fused with a second cuisine from around the world.” The catch? The chefs aren’t choosing which cuisine to fuse with Southern cooking. It’s selected at random for them.
In the exclusive clip below, Derry tastes the final dishes and makes her way through the cooking stations of contestants, tasting too-spicy curries and Chinese chicken and waffles.
Obviously, it is not Derry’s first rodeo as a TV chef. She competed on Top Chef in 2009 and has been back on the show since; she’s also been a guest on Top Chef Junior, Chopped, and Bar Rescue. Derry was recently the only Dallas chef from DFW to become a finalist in the James Beard Award nominations. Roots Southern Table, her Farmer’s Branch restaurant, is one of the Eater Dallas Essential 38 Restaurants.
MasterChef: Back to Win features returning contestants who are...well, back to win this time, since they did not previously. In addition to Ramsay, contestants are judged by co-hosts chef Aarón Sánchez and restaurateur Joe Bastianich.
Catch MasterChef: Back to Win with Derry on Fox on Wednesday, July 20 at 8 p.m. ET and PT — that’s 7 p.m. in Texas time.
