You don’t realize how long the season is of any reality show until they roll the intro showing all of the contestants, including the ones who were eliminated in the first few episodes. Then you think to yourself, “Self, this has been going on forever!” And so it is with Bravo’s “Top Chef: Las Vegas,” which is essentially the sixth season of the extremely popular show. It’s also, at this stage, maybe the most competitive yet.

Last night they began with host Padma Lakshmi and Gavin Kaysen, who competed in a global cooking competition known as Bocuse d’Or, which they say is the Olympics of the culinary world. Kaysen made something for his entry in the competition called a “ballantine,” which was in essence putting a protein inside of a protein inside of a protein. So Padma asked them all to make their own version of a ballantine for the quick fire challenge. Jen joked that she was going to make a turducken…but the thing is, that’s sort of exactly what they had to do…the catch was, they only had 90 minutes to do it.

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