Who among us has never looked at a bag of Cheetos and thought, “I bet I could turn this into haute cuisine”?

For years my wife Anne and I have been addicted to the Food Network’s cooking-competition series Chopped, in which four chefs must outcook each other under strictly timed conditions using four specific ingredients. Inside every Chopped basket of goods lurks a surprising combination of the rare, the delicate, the expensive, the complicated, the whimsical, the outlandish, and/or the thoroughly disgusting. Every substance can be used, though not every substance is very good.

Food Network continues gifting us with new episodes every week hosted by the amazing colossal Ted Allen, who presides over this fast-paced showcase for chefs of every conceivable demographic from various American restaurants, caterers, bakeries, or other private businesses, each of whom keeps their eyes on the $10,000 prize to be had if they’re the last entrant remaining after three grueling courses of speed-heating, kitchen-racing, and power-serving.

After watching several dozen episodes, Anne and I began to notice recurring patterns and tried to capture those observations and our fandom back in 2014 with a previous MCC entry called “How Not to Get Chopped from ‘Chopped’: A Starter Guide“. I’ve been meaning to overhaul that entry for a while now that we’re four years and literally 200+ episodes later, which includes every episode of the kids-only spinoff Chopped Junior and a handful of episodes of Chopped Canada, which was an interesting effort with its own angle and demeanor but wasn’t quite the same thing. I’m ashamed to confess it was tough to watch for more than a few minutes before I started poking fun in a goofy faux-Fargo accent.

The following compilation is our revised armchair-chef advice for future would-be competitors on how not to do Chopped from where we sit. This list is doubtlessly far from complete, and we welcome any additions in the comments below, especially from those among you who can truly cook. Though neither of us is a trained gourmet by any stretch, we hope this helps someone out there anyway. If you raise a skeptical eyebrow at any of these, well…it’s positively flabbergasting how many of these downfalls we’ve seen happen in actual episodes at the hands of trained professionals who run fantastic eateries back home but who lose their poise in front of the cameras. Even the best can make mistakes or watch their plans spin out of control.

Enjoy! Learn! Win!

1. Forget a basket ingredient or two
2. Serve empty plates with zero ingredients
3. Wait till the last 20 seconds to toss all four ingredients on the plates
4. Run to the pantry at the last second to add something that won’t make that big a difference
5. Refuse to serve a basket ingredient for reasons of faith or belief
6. Heat up basket ingredients, but do nothing else to them
7. Use only the four basket ingredients, no pantry items
8. Fail to get all four ingredients on all four plates
9. Throw too much of an ingredient on one plate
10. Throw too little of an ingredient on one plate
11. Serve food in plates or bowls that don’t fit
12. Panic and toss sauce all over the plates like you’re playing Splatoon
13. Call any dish something it’s not
14. Give Chris Santos exactly one (1) morsel from a basket ingredient
15. Disrespect an expensive ingredient with shoddy manhandling
16. Serve four plates that look completely different from each other
17. Serve components separately so Alex Guarnaschelli has to finish assembling your meal for you
18. Slice up raw basket ingredients, sprinkle on plates, devalue them as “garnish”
19. Divide basket ingredients into two separate, unrelated meals instead of a cohesive whole
20. Present something “deconstructed” out of desperation instead of as a unified concept
21. Make a pantry item the star of your dish, with the basket ingredients as its backup band
22. Don’t have a Plan B in case key equipment fails or is unavailable
23. Expect anything to bake through in seven minutes or less
24. Keep opening the oven door every two minutes so food stays uncooked
25. Overcook a protein
26. Undercook a protein
27. Tear your proteins to shreds when they’ve stuck to the bottom of the pan
28. Don’t let cooked red meat rest
29. Lose track of which parts of which fish species are prized and which are garbage
30. Set food aflame the wrong way and add a charred aftertaste
31. Misuse the blowtorch so your food tastes of gasoline
32. Overwhelm the basket ingredients with similar counterparts you like more
33. Not enough salt
34. Too much salt
35. Skip seasoning altogether
36. Make it so fatally spicy that even Aaron Sanchez is crying
37. Call something “spicy” when it’s actually weaksauce
38. Label anything a “molé” that took less than six hours to cook
39. Puree that which God never intended us to puree
40. Undercook potatoes that weren’t even in the basket
41. Ruin pasta and invoke the wrath of Scott Conant
42. Call your uncooked pasta “al dente”
43. Rush-cook a pot of rice, risotto, or polenta
44. Drench a salad with too much dressing
45. Serve a pile of leaves with no dressing
46. Put raw red onions on Scott Conant’s plate
47. Skimp on acidity when a given cuisine calls for it
48. Serve fried foods with breading that’s still oozing fryer oil
49. Compose a dish entirely of meats and thick carbs, leaving the judges begging for brightness or freshness
50. Serve cold tortillas
51. Serve cold bread
52. Put a sandwich on thickly sliced bread so it’s an awkward bite
53. Watch your carefully wrapped wontons or spring rolls fall apart
54. Demonstrate inconsistent knife skills with ingredients cut into random shapes and sizes
55. Make an appetizer too large
56. Make an entree too small
57. Lay crispy foods atop a liquid that turns them soggy
58. Let a sauce break, solidify, or just turn to gunk on the plate
59. Make food in ugly, unholy colors
60. Slop objects on the plates like a slob
61. Overchurn ice cream
62. Forget or mismeasure an ingredient in the ice cream recipe you worked so hard to memorize
63. Try passing off any failed ice cream or panna cotta as “dessert soup”
64. Turn your back on a caramel so it burns in seconds
65. Bore judges with a bread pudding or napoleon
66. Burn a dozen pancakes or crepes
67. Pretend French toast is a dessert
68. Lose the very real struggle with the uncooperative whipped cream dispenser
69. Expect the blast chiller to lower temperatures from 400 degrees to 0 in three minutes flat
70. Let too many strawberries and blueberries outnumber the fruit in the actual basket
71. Overload every dessert component with sugar as if the chefs were sugar-happy kindergarteners
72. Create a dessert that’s just a bodiless pile of toppings
73. Convince yourself that well actually dough with a raw center is good
74. Assume partially cooked foods will magically finish themselves while sitting on the cold countertop
75. Make something from your own restaurant’s menu instead of getting creative
76. Mix disparate flavors in ways too bizarre even for these experienced judges
77. Go overboard on the molecular gastronomy chemicals
78. Bleed on a dish
79. Serve food you dropped on the floor
80. Serve shrimp with the digestive veins still in
81. Serve the inedible part of an ingredient
82. Serve the poisonous part of the ingredient that Ted just told you could kill a judge
83. Add inedible decorations
84. Touch the plates after time’s up
85. Let your favorite spice or oil overpower all other tastes in the dish
86. Use white truffle oil at all
87. Have white truffle oil at your station
88. Say anything nice about white truffle oil
89. Own a bottle of white truffle oil at home
90. Have relatives or Facebook friends in the white truffle oil industry
91. Confess you once tried white truffle oil but swear it meant nothing and it’s over between you now
92. Argue with judges over cooking basics such as sanitation
93. Sneer at the judges’ constructive criticisms
94. Get cocky and underestimate your competitors’ considerable skills
95. Repeat an error in the entree round that the judges just lectured you for in the appetizer round
96. Finish early and stand around doing nothing instead of finding ways to accentuate your dish
97. Decide what dish you simply insist on making before Ted has even revealed the basket ingredients
98. Have the bad luck of sharing an episode with three 5-star genius chefs
99. Just give up, shrug and assume you can always come back for a “redemption” episode do-over

Unnecessary disclaimer: exceptions can happen, but are extremely rare. We’ve seen at least two chefs with lousy attitudes win. We’ve seen rare instances in which hacking up an ingredient without any further treatment was secretly the best possible option. We once — exactly once — saw a single chef use white truffle oil without being chopped. Once.

For our further adventures in the Chopped televisual universe, be sure to check out these previous MCC entries: