All-Star Academy

Nine home cooks enter the kitchen and meet their mentors: Alex Guarnaschelli, Robert Irvine, Curtis Stone and Andrew Zimmern. Challenges include making a dish from the contents of a lunch box and impressing guest judge Carla Hall.

The home cooks compete in geography-themed tests, beginning with a tag team challenge to combine styles from their home regions. Two teams then compete by making world cuisine. Guest judges are Debi Mazar and Aaron Sanchez.

First, the cooks face off in two battles featuring desserts in different colors. Then the remaining teams make structural chocolate desserts that incorporate a circle, a square and a triangle. Duff Goldman is the guest professor.

The subject is math and the home cooks are divided into two groups of three, where they create an appetizer trio with one main ingredient. The group in the elimination round creates a seven-ingredient dish, plus a curve ball.

Guest professors Scott Conant and Geoffrey Zakarian judge the mentors this round, with each mentor creating a gourmet dish using snack food. The winning mentor gets the chance to add an eliminated chef to their team.

Guest professor Adam Richman tests the cooks on science, so first they dissect iconic dishes and find a new way to use those ingredients. The remaining cooks then face off by creating dishes featuring the four elements.

Professors Richard Blais and Haylie Duff test the cooks on literature in three rounds. Challenges include creating dishes inspired by a literature genre, parts-of-speech dishes and ingredients starting with "p" or "f."

It's the last day of school and the cooks revisit their own history by re-imagining the first lunch box challenge. In the final round, the remaining cooks go head-to-head to win the $50,000 prize.