Cooking Like a TV Chef

In many of the television cooking competition reality shows, prospective chefs are tested on basic skills or made to perform repetitive tasks demonstrating that they are proficient at certain tasks. This could be something as simple as dicing an onion or something like shucking an oyster. Shucking oysters, in particular, has even been used as a team punishment for a team that lost the service on Hell's Kitchen. If you're not familiar with oysters, this can be a difficult task. Oysters have evolved for millions of years to prevent predators from getting their shells open. That protection is often quite effective against a novice chef. Fortunately, even novices are smarter than oysters and can learn to quickly shuck an oyster (remove it from the shell). First, oysters should be securely shut without broken shells. That's because they are still alive when you get them and should be holding the shell tightly closed with their abductor muscle. If the shell is open, the oys...