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srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Miss Rachel’s Pantry Chef to
Appear on ‘Beat Bobby Flay’
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
C hef Rachel Klein of Miss
Rachel’s Pantry will be the
latest Philadelphia-area
Jewish chef to go into culinary battle
against celebrity chef Bobby Flay.

Klein will face off against Flay in a
vegan-themed episode of “Beat Bobby
Flay,” airing on the Food Network
on May 25. In the episode “‘Glaser’-
Focused,” comedian Nikki Glaser and
chef Michael Voltaggio bring in Klein
and chef Troy Gardner, owner of TLC
Vegan Kitchen in Dallas, Texas, to best
Flay in an all-plant-based challenge.

In the first round of competition,
Klein and Gardner will square off to
prepare a dish with a mystery ingredi-
ent of Flay’s choice in 20 minutes. The
winner of that round, selected by three
celebrity judges, will challenge Flay to
a 45-minute battle to create a dish of
the challenger’s choosing.

The owner of Miss Rachel’s Pantry,
named after her grandmother Sybil
Klein’s Center City luncheonette, Klein
hosts five-course set menu dinners
from the South Philly restaurant. Her
all-vegan menus have previously
incorporated plant-based takes on
Ashkenazi comfort foods such as
matzah ball soup and carrot lox.

But for this episode of “Beat Bobby
Flay,” taped in March 2022, showrun-
ners asked Klein to draw from her
Philly roots in case she made it to the
second round.

“They wanted something iconically
Philly, so I made that happen,” Klein said.

Two weeks before her trip to New
York to film the episode, Klein prepared
for her appearance by timing herself
cooking a quintessential Philly dish in a
messy kitchen to mimic the conditions
of the show.

Preparing for the first round was more
complicated: She made a flowchart of
what to cook, depending on the secret
ingredient revealed at the beginning
Courtesy of Food Network
game” by having policies that are
welcoming and supportive to interna-
tional businesses looking to set up shop
here, Briel said.

This doesn’t mean the food tech
collaborations between Pennsylvania
and Israel have no tangible impacts
today. Jonathan Deutsch, a profes-
sor in the Departments of Food and
Hospitality Management and Nutrition
Sciences at Drexel University and head
of the Drexel Food Lab, urges people to
think of food tech more broadly.

“There are a lot of things that are
technologies, right?” Deutsch said.

“Cooking is a technology, and cellular
engineering is a technology, and they’re
very different.”
The Drexel Food Lab, with a mission
to “apply culinary science and food
innovation to improve the health of
people, planet and economies,” creates
appealing and healthy products using
food waste or upcycled foods that are
gentler on the environment.

Founded in 2014 by Deutsch and
former student Alexandra Zeitz, Drexel
Food Lab was a model for universi-
ties interested in food tech research
grounded in local interests and
resources. It also inspired Rinat Avraham,
post-doctoral fellow and nurse educa-
tor at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev in Israel, to create the Negev
Food Lab, which is in part supported by
Ben-Gurion University and the Jewish
Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

The Negev Food Lab has been custom-
ized to serve the vast Negev region of
Israel, which makes up about 4,650
square miles, or 55% of Israel’s land.

Many people there live in food deserts
and have little access to health care,
making preventative health measures,
such as a healthy diet, important to the
population’s well-being.

The lab has worked with commu-
nity centers in Be’er Sheva to provide
cooking lessons to isolated seniors and
investigated school-provided subsi-
dized lunches to make them more
appealing to students.

“Our perspective is much more wide
about food — not only the nutritional
aspect but also food as [it] affects other
things in the community,” Avraham said. ■
Rachel Klein of Miss Rachel’s Pantry will compete on “Beat Bobby Flay”
on May 25.

of the episode. If the ingredient was
a root vegetable, she would make a
soup. If it was an artichoke, she would
make a riff on a griddle cake she’s
served at the restaurant.

“Things that I know how to do, I’m
going to incorporate them,” Klein said.

“‘Glaser’-Focused” is “Beat Bobby
Flay”’s second entirely-vegan episode,
following “A Deal to Beat Bobby,”
which aired last January. Rodger
Holst, sous chef and co-owner of Miss
Rachel’s Pantry, touts the episode as
good visibility for vegan cuisine and
“proves, hopefully, that vegan food
is not what it’s often perceived to be,
which is boring, very vegetal and all
those things.”
“Hopefully, we’ll get some new, inter-
ested people to come through,” he
said. In the context of “Beat Bobby Flay,”
Flay’s reputation has more notori-
ety than plant-based cooking. While
the chef is depicted as the show’s
villain, Klein said that not only was Flay
pleasant on the set, but the purpose of
“Beat Bobby Flay” is to spotlight fellow
chefs under the guise of competition.

“Some of the shows that he’s on,
he’s positioned — or his company has
positioned him — to be the authority
when he comes in, and he’s like, ‘Oh,
that thing that you do, I’m going to
try to do it better,’” Klein said. “And I
almost think it’s a humbling thing what
he does. Because, without outwardly
saying it, he’s kind of giving people a
space to show off what they do.”
Klein will have the chance to show off
what she can do on May 25 at 9 p.m. on
the Food Network channel and online
streaming. Additional showtimes will
be on May 26 and 28.

If Klein bests Flay, she will join the
ranks of sandwich shop Huda’s Yehuda
Sichel and Essen Bakery’s Tova du
Plessis, both Philadelphia Jewish chefs
who won on “Beat Bobby Flay” in April
and December 2021, respectively. ■
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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