Top Chef Season 23’s Chef Day Anaïs Joseph Shares the One Herb Rule Every Cook Needs

When Top Chef Season 23 premiered, the 15 cheftestants raced to earn the first Elimination Challenge win. With Last Chance Kitchen off the table for the season’s first two eliminated chefestants, the pressure to impress was high. For Chef Day Anaïs Joseph, cooking errors plagued her sweet potato dish, and she was eliminated from the competition. Although her tenure on the season was short, Chef Day shared with FlickDirect a valuable tip about cooking with herbs.

Top Chef Season 23 took place in the Carolinas, both North and South Carolina. As the season unfolds, various cooks feature local ingredients. Both familiar and unusual foods will challenge the cheftestants. Whether it is livermush or collard greens, each item will need to be treated with respect.

For the first Elimination Challenge of Top Chef Season 23, the required ingredient was sweet potatoes. In 1995, sweet potatoes were named North Carolina’s state vegetable. The state is the largest producer of the tuber in the U.S. Choosing to highlight the ingredient in the challenge set the tone and direction for the Carolinas season.

As any Top Chef fan appreciates, a required ingredient needs to be the star of the dish. It can be used in multiple ways; it can replace a protein, or it can be the primary ingredient on the plate. No matter a cheftestant’s approach, no other ingredient should outshine the required element.

Unfortunately, Chef Day’s dish was plagued with cooking errors and did not highlight the sweet potato. While the brief was to turn a humble ingredient into a high-end dish, Chef Day missed the mark. Not only was the flavor unbalanced, but her sweet potatoes were undercooked.

Her Carolina Ruby dish was overpowered by herbs de Provence. The classic dried herbs combine rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, and other ingredients. While common in French and Mediterranean dishes, the flavor can overwhelm a dish when not used in moderation.

Chef Day understands and appreciates herbs in her cooking. Her Haitian heritage celebrates the flavor depth that layering fresh herbs creates. Unfortunately, those cooking concepts take hours. On Top Chef, she only had mere minutes.

While Chef Day’s idea to bring robust flavor to the traditional sweet potato made sense, her approach lacked finesse. Pressure in the moment causes many cheftestants to flounder. Unfortunately, a simple mistake is unrecoverable on Top Chef.

Although this one dish did not represent Chef Day’s culinary journey, the importance of cooking with herbs is a concept that home cooks need to better understand. Upon reflection, Chef Day revealed to FlickDirect her thoughts on cooking with herbs.

Chef Day Anaïs Joseph: “Herbs are one of the most powerful tools in a chef’s arsenal; they can completely transform a dish with very little effort. Fresh herbs bring brightness and life, especially when added at the end of cooking. Dried herbs are more concentrated, so they work beautifully early in the cooking process where they have time to bloom and release their oils. A good rule of thumb: use dried for depth, use fresh for finish.”

Although not written on a tea towel, “dried for depth, fresh for finish” is a mantra that all cooks should remember. Since regular cooks do not have the execution pressures of an Elimination Challenge, experimenting with both dried and fresh herbs is helpful for people to learn to appreciate flavor. When a home cook can apply a Top Chef cooking technique, it makes the beloved food television show even more relevant.

Although Chef Day did not receive a second chance in Top Chef Season 23, her culinary career is flourishing. Her culinary design agency, Dine With Day, offers all types of specialty events. The celebrated chef continues to influence the food world with her creativity.

Hungry for more Top Chef Season 23? New episodes air Monday nights at 9:30 p.m. ET on Bravo. Episodes can be streamed the next day on Peacock.