Nick DiGiovanni handed five grown men aprons and a single warning: keep up or get left behind. The five members of Dude Perfect, famous for trick shots watched by billions, were about to discover that a professional kitchen runs on a clock that waits for no one, and that clock was DiGiovanni himself. The challenge was a creamy tomato pasta with fresh handmade spaghetti and flambeed shrimp, and the only rule was that when Nick finished, everyone had exactly 60 more seconds to plate a dish that looked identical to his.
The gap between confidence and competence opened in the first five minutes. DiGiovanni called for a flour well on the cutting board, a shallow crater to hold cracked eggs before mixing. Cory set to work, and his volcano, as he called it, immediately collapsed. Egg ran across the board. ‘My volcano was not deep enough,’ he admitted, ‘and everything else has gone downhill from there.’ He spent the next several minutes fighting a sheet of plastic wrap he could never quite peel apart, while the rest of the group moved on to shallots and garlic.
Sharp knives and sharper onions
The shallot station produced genuine tears. Tyler worked through streaming eyes and offered a reasonable theory: ‘If you chop it properly, you’re not gonna cry. If you chop it incorrectly, you’re gonna cry.’ He paused, then added, ‘I must have done something wrong.’ Cody claimed he had not cried in 10 years. Garrett reported no tears at all, only mild annoyance. Meanwhile Cory, still untangling plastic wrap, missed the garlic demonstration entirely and described his situation plainly: ‘I missed 100 percent of the explanation for everything to do with garlic and shallots.’
The pasta roller attachment raised the stakes further. Dough had to be rolled thin enough to feed through a mechanical mixer at progressively higher settings, from 1 through 6, without tearing. Cody accidentally started at setting 9. Cory’s attachment fell off on its own because he had never screwed it in tightly. When the spaghetti finally cut through and landed in curled piles on the floured board, Cody stopped and watched: ‘I’m gonna go home and watch Ratatouille.’
Flambe, four shrimp, and the final 60 seconds
The shrimp course required a flambe, tilting a hot pan toward an open flame to ignite the brandy. Every station produced a fireball. Garrett’s took a beat longer than the others before it caught. Cory, who had been the furthest behind for most of the afternoon, managed his flambe cleanly and then, in the final countdown, twirled his pasta with surprising precision.
The plating review found Garrett with burnt shrimp and an untwirled pile of pasta, though DiGiovanni acknowledged his sauce color was dead on. Coby’s pasta had stuck together from too much moisture. Tyler’s portion was thin, earning the note that double the pasta ‘would have been near perfect.’ Cody’s chives were cut a touch large. Cory had four shrimp on his plate instead of three, and his sauce ran dark, but his pasta twirl held up.
DiGiovanni put the verdict to the audience, inviting viewers to vote in the comments on who actually won.
A flour-covered cutting board nobody cleaned in time
Garrett’s cutting board, coated in a thick drift of flour, shallot scraps, and scattered pasta dust, sat at his station when the countdown hit zero, the dish plated beside it still missing its twirl.
Cory, who had never cooked before arriving that afternoon and said so without apology, walked out with three shrimp, one extra shrimp, and a pasta twirl that DiGiovanni called ‘actually pretty good.’
