The Lamb Chop Is Ready For Its Close-Up

Joel Keller reveals how the food on "Top Chef" looks so incredible:

[L]ike food stylists, [Sandee Birdsong, the show's supervising culinary producer] and her staff use some decidedly non-culinary ingredients to make sure the dishes look their best. Like the Windex she mentioned, which is used to wipe fingerprints off the plate. The beet juice is at least edible, though it’s generally used to touch up meat that has lost its rosy glow.

"The biggest problem that we have is when you sear a lamb and they serve it perfectly medium rare, by the time it sits there for a minute and it gets up under the light, that center is no longer a bright beautiful red," she says. If there is a meat product that they need to keep looking pink and juicy, they often take it off the plate and cover it in plastic to keep the meat from oxidizing and turning brown. "Then, once we pull that off, we take beet juice that we’ve made and we brush that red back onto that lamb chop."