Pizzeria Toro’s Marla Thurman is a Chopped champion
If you can make it through the Friday night dinner rush at Pizzeria Toro, where the day’s pizza total can top 300, you can do just about anything.
So when the Food Network mega-show “Chopped” asked Marla Thurman of Durham’s Pizzeria Toro to compete, she was game.
Thurman is the chef de cuisine of the Gray Brooks-owned wood-fired pizza shop in the middle of downtown Durham. On Tuesday, Feb. 25, Thurman became a Chopped champion, taking home $10,000.
“I came here and conquered,” Thurman said at the end of the episode. “Winning proves I’m a force to be reckoned with.”
Thurman’s episode aired Tuesday, Feb. 25 as Toro hosted a viewing party in the restaurant’s back bar. The episode is named “Give it a Nest!” and a synopsis suggests contestants were tasked with making edible bird’s nests.
A positive experience on ‘Chopped’
“Chopped” is one of the Food Network’s most prolific shows, with hundreds of episodes airing over 43 seasons. In the show, four chefs are asked to each prepare a dish from a basket of surprise ingredients, which one chef kicked off the show after each round.
Though Thurman’s fate on the show is unknown, she said the experience overall was positive.
“Oh yeah, it was positive,” Thurman said. “I would do it again.”
Thurman has led the kitchen at Pizzeria Toro for five years as the pizza shop has grown into one of Durham’s most popular restaurants. Running a busy kitchen and experience as a teacher at the now-closed culinary school at Durham Art Institute, set her up to be competitive on “Chopped,” Thurman said.
“I was a little more comfortable with people staring at me,” Thurman said of being a culinary instructor.
Unique ingredients don’t scare her
The menu at Pizzeria Toro features a few standards that’ll never leave, like Durham’s most popular kale salad and a plate of fried pig ears, along with those blistered-crust pizzas. But many other dishes change with the seasons, and Thurman said working in that kind of versatility prepared her for any ingredient she might find in the “Chopped” box.
“We cook with a lot of rare ingredients: pig’s ears, ox tongue, shad roe,” Thurman said. “As a chef, that’s kind of what we do all the time anyway. It’s like, here’s a bunch of greens we just got, make it into a special.”
Thurman said her episode was filmed last March in New York City and that she only found out this month that it would be making its premiere. The Food Network crew came to Durham last year and filmed Thurman at work in Pizzeria Toro.
As the five-year chef de cuisine of one of Durham’s busiest restaurants, she said it was nice to step into the spotlight, which she said often leaves out the workers running the kitchen day-in and day-out.
“It’s exciting because for me this is the first time I’ve been recognized,” Thurman said. “I have a great team at Toro that works hard every day.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2020 at 3:09 PM.
