- Welcome to Mom versus Chef. (in unison) - [Voiceover] A cooking competition where a professional chef and
a mom cook head to head preparing the best dish possible with one secret ingredient. Our first competitor
today is Sharzad Kiadeh. - Hi, I'm Sharzad Kiadeh. I'm a mom, my son is one and a half and his name is Adrice. I make YouTube videos, yay. I have a blog and a YouTube channel and I host a couple
different shows online. I've been experimenting in the kitchen since as long as I can remember. I'm not a professional, I have no training whatsoever. I feel like my mom taught
me everything I know and everything else I
learned from like blogs and watching other YouTube videos. Cooking for a small child
is obviously very different than cooking for my husband,
or my friends and family. Winning Mom versus Chef would be a dream come true. Uh no, it would be awesome bragging rights and I feel like it would make
my mom like really proud. I would give her all the credit. - And competing against her
is Chef Nyesha Arrington. - My name is Chef Nyesha Arrington. I have a restaurant called
Leona in Venice, California. We offer a cuisine that's called progressive Californian cuisine. Cooking is one of those
things that found me. I grew up with my grandmother and would cook next to her and at a very young age I was able to understand what flavor was. Going into this competition, you know, I'm very excited. I love love love kids. I hang out with my eight year old nephew all the time, and we cook together and just winning Mom versus Chef would mean a lot to him. - Sharzad, Chef Nyesha, today you're gonna be competing to see who can make the tastiest dish possible featuring one secret ingredient. Let me introduce you
to our panel of judges. - Hello, my name is Trent,
and I'm 10 years old. And I like playing outside with my friends and on my skateboard. - Hello, my name is
Nathan, I'm 10 years old. And what I like to do for
fun is play video games. - And your last judge is me. My name's Andrew. I'm 25 years old. And I like reading outside. - And by the way, he is my twin. - And I'm not related to them. So I think it's time we find out what the secret ingredient is. Chefs, whatever you cook today will have to incorporate this ingredient. It will not be easy. Nathan, do you want to pull the top off this thing? - Yes I do. Ohhh. - Beets. - Chefs, you're cooking with beets today. - So like, Beats by Dre? - This is more like beets by nature. - [Sharzad] I've never
cooked with them before. And I feel like most kids hate beets. - Chef Nyesha, what do
you think about beets? - I have cooked with beets in the past and have served them. - That smells like nature. - They smell really bad. - Guys, you're gonna have 30 minutes to prepare your dishes. Your time starts now. - Ahhh! - I think you can sneak a lot of veggies in a lot of kids foods. But beets? Bahhh. (laughs) I'm gonna try and do something pizza related. So I see that there are some pitas and I'm thinking that
will be a good crust. Man down, man down. I see that there are jars of pesto. And cheese, of course. Those three things are like foolproof. - I'm running through the pantry I'm looking around I see the sweet potatoes. I see the beets. I see yogurt. Kids like hashbrowns. I'm gonna make a beet soda with a sweet potato and beet latke. - I take all my ingredients and then I just start
putting pesto on the pita. And then I'm getting like
little slivers of beets that I'm just trying to place
all over the little pizza. I don't want it too beet-y. (laughs) Is that a word? - [Nyesha] I start to form
the mixture for my latke which is shredded raw beets, raw sweet potatoes, a little
bit of egg for a binder. And I start to form my patties get those crisping. I want the latke flavors to marry and really be delicious. - I'm going into this trying to like kind of mask the flavor of the beets. I dump a bunch of cheese on then I pop them in the oven for 10-ish minutes, or so. Now I'm just sort of waiting and hoping that it turns out okay. - So I'm grating my beets and I know that I want to sort of
squeeze all of the liquid out and I know I can use the
beet juice for the soda. So I add a little bit of lemon juice, a little bit of honey. I'm going to pour soda
water with the beet juice. - Chefs, there's only 15 minutes left. - You guys are half way there. - Ahhh! - Whoa. - That's cool. - [Trent] She looks like she's
making like Kool-Aid, maybe. - So I make the first
beet cake and I kind of take a piece off and taste
it and it's delicious. But I know I want more texture so I say I'm gonna use the beet greens and sort of crisp those up. - So of course I'm standing
next to Chef Nyesha and she's doing some magical sweet potato beet latke. And truly, I've never thought
beets looked appetizing until she steps in. And I was like, uh, I really want a bite. - Let's go see what the chefs are doing. - Okay, you guys check on Chef Nyesha and I'll check on Chef Sharzad. - How's it going? - Pretty good. - Actually what is that. - This is a yogurt based sauce with a little bit of olive oil. It's basically going to counterbalance with the beet latkes. - That sounds delicious.
- [Nyesha] Right. - Thank you chef. (in unison) - Thank you judges. - Hello.
- Hi Andrew. - How's everything going? - It's going good. - This is one of the few times you've ever cooked with beets, is that right? - This is the first time ever that I've cooked with beets. - I tend to like when the secret ingredient is showcased, rather then let it be covered up. - I feel like that was like a subtle jab. - Oh no no no no no no. I mean, we'll. - I'm a mom, I'm tough. - I don't know what it will turn out like. Well good luck. I can't wait to taste your dish. - Thank you, thank you judge. - Only five minutes left. (in unison) - [Nyesha] You know I
really feel I have a vision when I go through and I'm
picking my ingredients. So I decided to grab the yogurt and I know I want to
fortify it with some flavor and add some olive oil to it. That's gonna go down on the plate to sort of eat and round
out the latke itself. - Now it's time to grab
my pizzas from the oven. They don't look super fancy,
they look very kid friendly. I'm not nervous because our dishes couldn't be more different. Hers is like real deal fancy, like mine is like kid friendly food. - I'm very confident in my dish because I feel that it
offers beets in a new light and I'm hoping they enjoy it. - I decide to just sprinkle a teeny bit of goat cheese on top of the pizza. And that's it, I'm cutting these up. I can't taste any beets. Makes me happy. It's delicious. - [Boys] Five, four, three, two, one. - [Andrew] That's it. Time's up. Stop doing what you're doing. - Sharzad, can you please
bring out the dish. - Yes. - Thank you.
- [Sharzad] There you go. It's a pesto pizza. I know you guys are 10 year old boys. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you probably like pizza. - I love pizza. - Right, okay. So yay. So it's just pita bread with
pesto, mozzarella cheese, and the beets are right
on top of the pesto under the cheese. And then a tiny little bit of
goat cheese on top of there. So, dive in there kiddos, let me know what you think. - I can really taste the beets which, they don't taste that bad. - Okay, good. - I'm not sure about
the pesto and the beets together though.
- Okay. - [Nathan] It's like a pizza mix that nobody would ever come up with. - The goat cheese is just a little bit too much maybe. Yeah, it's just not that good. - I don't know. It did taste very good and I think you did a great job. - Thank you for your honest feedback. - Thank you Sharzad. (laughs)
- You're welcome. - [Nathan] Thank you. Chef, can you describe the dish for us? - So, what I did was take the beet and use it in all of its formats. I sort of grated the beet raw and mixed it with sweet potato and cooked that together in a cake form. On the top is a crispy beet topped chip. And then to accompany that you have a beet juice infused soda that is sweetened with honey and a touch of lemon juice. Just to kind of balance out
your entire beet experience. - Do you guys like how it tastes? - I actually don't really like this drink. When you put in the beets it just it just doesn't taste right. - [Nathan] I think it tastes good. - You definitely get the beet but it's not full frontal dirt water beet. - Right.
- [Andrew] I think it's like very refreshing. - That tasted really good. - What's that? - That tasted really good. - He said it tasted really good. (laughing) I don't know why we had to keep that a secret. (laughing) - I don't really like it. - I don't think I've ever had the beet leaf before. - Yeah.
- [Andrew] It's actually I don't know, it's cool. - This one's gonna be a tough one. (laughing) Thank you chefs for everything. - Give us a moment as
we discuss the winner. - [Sharzad] All right. - Thank you. - This is so weird, I've never really had anybody like, judge my food before. Yours looked amazing though, I just want to put that on record. Andrew was all about it. - [Nyesha] RIght.
(laughs) - Like he nailed your food. With mine, he was like. - Oh he liked it. - No I don't think he liked it. - They were good. - I'm really excited. And you did a killer job. - [Nyesha] You too. - Let's hug it out. Are we there yet? - Definitely. - Okay. (laughing) - So Sharzad made the
pesto pizza with beet. What did you guys think about that? - I just liked everything about the pizza. And I liked how it was like something that kids like. - But the goat cheese it was just too much goat cheese. - I kind of wish she had done something a little more with the beet. - What I did like about the chefs food is that it actually tasted really good. I hated the drink. - Her main dish, I did not really like. I felt like I tasted too much beet. - Yeah, I thought Chef Nyesha's dish was really cool because it used a lot of different parts of the beet. - I think we all know
who the winner is, right? - Okay, yeah, let's bring them back in. - Chef Nyesha, Sharzad. Thank you for coming in today. It was a great competition, you both made some amazing dishes. Unfortunately, we can
only have one winner. - Sharzad, your dish was really tasty. - But Nyesha, we thought
your dish was tastier. - Wow.
- [Andrew] Congratulations. You're the winner of this episode. - [Nyesha] Oh my goodness. - [Andrew] Of Mom versus Chef. - [Nyesha] Oh my goodness. I am so excited I won. I wish little Emmanuel
was here next to me. Honestly, I feel very
honored to win this for him. - [Sharzad] I'm not that upset. Chef Nyesha's dish looked insane it looked amazing. But you know, there
can only be one winner. Sadly today was not my day. - [Andrew] Thank you both for coming in you both made some amazing dishes. This has been Mom versus Chef.
