Last Wednesday’s episode of “Top Chef Texas” was all about chili. And Padma Lakshmi riding atop a stallion. But really it was about chili. During the Quickfire Challenge, chefs chose a chili pepper to cook with—each pepper had a monetary value depending on its heat according to the Scoville scale. Only Paul Qui dared to select the hottest pepper available, the ghost chili, with a Scoville rank well over a million heat units. (Hotter varieties are used for police pepper spray, whereas a poblano is normally under a thousand units. The hottest raw pepper I’ve ever eaten was a Scotch bonnet.) Qui incorporated it into a soup that won the judges over and earned him $20,000.

The elimination challenge was a chili cookoff that involved equal parts ingenuity and sleep deprivation. In the end, the three-chef team of Beverly Kim, Nyesha Arrington, and Richie Farina had the least loved chili. Their punishment was a repurposing of the chili into another meal, still while sleep-deprived. Richie, a 28-year-old sous-chef at molecular gastronomy mecca Moto in Chicago, lost and was sent packing.