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Chopped Basket Ingredients List

Breaking Down the Baskets

Each Chopped mystery basket contains four items. Chefs receive a new basket for each of the three rounds on the competition cooking show. The implosion of an otherwise talented chef often follows the receipt of a particularly challenging set.

Sweet for the appetizer, snack food for the entrée, and protein for dessert? Time for a meltdown, and we’re not talking cheesy goodness. The challenge of Chopped is in the baskets, but how often do the show’s producers throw curveballs at the contestants? Let’s find out!

Data Methodology

Using a list of the basket ingredients on Chopped, I developed a three-tiered system for categorizing the foods. After developing the system and plugging in 300 food items from Chopped Season 12, I used a free tool called Flourish to create this interactive, explorable graphic. You can view ingredients by round or all together and see for yourself which types of items really are most often encountered.

The top tier consists of eight classes of edible items. Half of them align to typical dietary food groups, and the other half are natural groupings based on the baskets.

  • Fruits

  • Vegetables

  • Proteins

  • Dairy

  • Sweets

  • Pantry Items

  • Beverages

  • Condiments & Seasonings

Each of the eight classes has two sets of subcategories to further segment it and characterize the challenge that its contents might present to a chef in the Chopped kitchen. Subcategory one adds unique identifiers of type. For example, proteins might be common cuts of beef, pork, or poultry – or whole seafood, or exotic game meats.

Subcategory two describes how the item has already been treated. Raw foods give chefs the most leeway to address them in their own chosen style. But, many mystery basket ingredients are presented to the chefs already processed in some way, such as canned/jarred, dried, pickled, fermented, frozen, or fried. Each provides a distinct puzzle to solve.

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