This story contains spoilers, so consider waiting to read if you plan to watch the episode.
A former Jacksonville resident and food truck owner recently had the opportunity to compete on the Food Network’s “Chopped.”
Duke Kroger, former owner of Yonder Southern Chikin food truck and Yonder Smokehouse in Jacksonville, competed on “Chopped” Season 56, Episode 10, which aired Tuesday night.
Kroger, who is the executive chef, partner and owner of Cinder Restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, appeared alongside three others on the episode in a battle of the best southern chefs. In his intro, Kroger said he was there to prove the south truly is the culinary hotbed of the United States.
“I think I’m the chef to beat,” Kroger said on the show. “I just kind of need everybody else to get out of the way.”
Kroger competed against Nashville chef Star Maye, Greensboro chef Sean Reaves and Louisville chef Alison Settle and they cooked for a panel of judges including chefs and restaurateurs Kelsey Barnard Clark, Darnell Ferguson and Maneet Chauhan.
For those unfamiliar with how “Chopped” works, each round, the chefs are provided with a basket of ingredients that they must use to create a dish.
For the appetizer round, the chefs had to use vegan fried chicken, corn on the cob, shrimp and a pimento cheese tomato pie. Settle decided to make a New Orleans-style BBQ shrimp with pimento cheese and corn polenta, while Reaves went with pimento-stuffed shrimp with a sweet corn puree, and Maye created shrimp with corn succotash and pimento-tomato sauce.
Kroger stuck to its roots, making low country hash with sauteed shrimp.
During the judge’s critiques, Ferguson said he was impressed with how quickly Kroger was able to pull off the dish. Clark said the shrimp was cooked flawlessly, but she would have liked to see the corn be a bit more prominent, and Chauhan agreed, adding she did think the flavor profiles were great.
The judges ultimately agreed to chop Settle, sending Kroger, Reaves and Maye to the entree round.
The chefs were then tasked with creating an entree using deep-fried deviled eggs, turnip greens, pork chops and a biscuits and gravy casserole. While Maye chose to make honey-glazed pork chops with a sawmill gravy, Reaves went with pan-seared pork chops with a fried deviled egg aioli.
Kroger, on the other hand, chose to make seared pork chops with a biscuit and gravy velouté, which is a sauce made from butter, flour and chicken stock.
“I want to show that southern food isn’t the preconceived one, it’s fried, it’s unhealthy, remind people what it can be,” Kroger said.
Clark told Kroger the dish was beautiful, and the velouté was a success. Ferguson loved the perfectly cooked pork and green curry sauce but was put off by how the curry was so overpowering, adding it made the deviled eggs hard to find. However, he said he’d eat the meal over and over again.
Finally, Chauhan said the flavors were delicious, but agreed one of the sauces should be different as they were competing, not complementing. Unfortunately, because of this, Kroger was chopped after the entree round, and Maye went on to win following the dessert round.
Kroger spoke with The Daily News Wednesday and said the experience was a lot of fun, despite not having won.
He said he got the opportunity after someone reached out to him on Instagram asking if he was interested in coming on the show. He assumed it was a scam at first, but it ended up being legitimate.
He traveled up to New York in November for filming, saying the experience was surreal.
“It’s really fun to interact with the chefs at that point and it’s super relieving to see everyone is as nervous as you are,” Kroger said. “I didn’t feel like it was scripted in a sense, but I was like, you’re kind of pushing it in the direction of what you need and stuff like that, it was kind of funny to see. It’s controlled chaos.”
For example, Kroger says if you have a spoon you’re not using anymore, they have you throw it on the floor and a production crew member crab walks under the cameras to grab it. While the intro of the episode was filmed the day before, the entirety of the episode’s competition was filmed over 12 hours on one day.
“It’s a bum not to take it home but it was a super fun experience and put what I was trying to do on a pedestal there with pushing modern southern food and its approach,” Kroger added. “I wanted people to see that, be like, that’s really cool, that looks really good, that’s a cool twist on that, I want to try something like that and hopefully, somebody will see that and make their own twist on it. That little influence alone is vital.”
The experience also helped Kroger redefine his career, and he looks forward to continuing to learn, as well as teaching and mentoring his employees.
To watch Kroger’s episode of “Chopped,” look out for reruns on the Food Network or view it on demand.