Cable's #1 Top Chef series returns to the Bravo airwaves on Wednesday, November 12 for it's fifth season, this time in New York City in what the network is billing as a "super-sized" premiere with the multi-talented author, cook Padma Lakshmi and renowned Craft Restaurants owner and chef Tom Colicchio as hosts. 17 culinary contestants descend upon New York to battle it out in the kitchen to become this season's Top Chef, which is quite the leg up for any chef when you're competing in The Big Apple.

In an effort to learn the secret of how to become a Top Chef, our own Troy Rogers hopped on the line for a conference call to ask Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi a couple of questions about the upcoming fifth season recipe.

THE DEADBOLT: What types of guest judges do you have this year?

TOM COLICCHIO: Guest judges? Eric Ripert comes back. I think we have Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters and Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart is on. Who else? I don’t know, a bunch of...

PADMA LAKSHMI: Yeah, I don’t know how many more of those guest judges we can reveal. But I will say that...

COLICCHIO: No, we can reveal all of them.

LAKSHMI: Yeah, we can. Okay. I mean, I think the last supper was pretty incredible to sit at one table with not only Wiley Dufresne and Marcus Samuelsson, of course, but really Jacques Pepin and Lydia - I mean that was incredible. To have all of those palates on one table was, for me, a great, great honor. And also, obviously, the Foo Fighters being on was pretty damn cool.

Other Conference Call Highlights:

Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio on the simple food they like to eat at home:

LAKSHMI: Oh, lots of stuff. I like grilled cheeses. I mean, that’s pretty simple. I like scrambled eggs. I like Tom’s scrambled eggs. He made them once in the dressing room when we were in Chicago. I don’t know, Tom?

COLICCHIO: You know, usually I don’t eat fancy food [at night], and most chefs don’t. You know, I like a good burger. I like [simple] pastas. Usually every morning I wake up eating dry cereal. So, I think this idea that chefs eat fancy food all the time, I usually find that chefs crave a lot of sort of junk food.

Tom Colicchio on how the chefs are picked for the show:

"We look to see how much butter they use. No, I’m kidding. Well, I think that’s been sort of a mission of the show - to try to always find better contestants. Also, I think as has become accepted in our industry as something that more chefs of notoriety are coming out. So I think it’s a combination of something that we’ve been trying to do and all our chefs are making themselves available to the show."

Padma Lakshmi on gaining weight over the course of a season:

"Yeah. I mean I gain about 10 to 15 pounds over the course of six weeks. And luckily for me I gain it all over so I just get kind of exponentially bigger by one size. I would say one - yeah, I’ve never gone up two dress sizes, but I certainly always go up one dress size without fail.

I mean, it’s incredible. I can actually feel it. I mean the woman who irons and gets out clothes for us, she has a lot of work to do because she really has to think about that when she’s planning my dresses because we often buy things in two dresses for the first half and the second half of the show. So, you know, Tom is probably better at only taking small bites than I am. I haven’t mastered that skill yet."

Tom on how often he changes the menu at his restaurants:

"We change the menu constantly because the menu is printed everyday and it changes according to what’s in season and what’s available. A lot of what we buy is from small family farmers so they’re only available in small quantities. I mean I’m in Los Angeles now. I’ve been here for the last three days and the menu is constantly changing.

"The chef in Los Angeles, Matthew Accarrino, has pretty much full charge and range to change the menu how he sees fit as long as the cooking stays within a certain sort of reference. But again, the menu - and we have a woman who pulls up in a truck that she gathers vegetables from different farmers all through, probably, within a twenty mile radius of Los Angeles. And she pulls up three days a week and opens the truck, and that’s when we start planning the menu."

Padma on what cooking shows she considers a guilty pleasure:

"I don’t know if they’re on TV now. But somebody gave me one of the best presents I ever received which was a complete collection of all of Julia Child’s cooking shows from the 50s and 60s in black and white. I love those. When I was growing up - I know he’s a pedophile but I didn’t know this then and neither did anyone else - but when I grew up on public television I would watch the Frugal Gourmet. And I loved that, you know, he would pick a country and he would learn all about that country and all about its food. And I watched that program as religiously, as I watched, you know, Sesame Street or The Electric Company.

"And so those are my two. And I also like the Galloping Gourmet - Graham Kerr was great. I was always waiting for his (fular) to get set on fire. He seemed a bit toasted. I like those old school shows. I have to admit I don’t watch a lot of TV now. If I do, it tends to be like Flight of the Conchords or Mad Men."

Padma Lakshmi on the quick fire challenge and the knife skills:

"I loved that quick fire. I really loved it because I’m a home cook and I’m a good cook. But I don’t work in a restaurant so I don’t have the knife skills of someone like Tom or the other chefs. So that was a fun, fun quick fire. It was a long day. It was a hot day, but it was so much fun to watch these guys go at it. You know, it’s a relay race. It was great.

"One comment I want to make about Fabio, too, is that I had a lot of - I had to really watch myself with Fabio because I would revert into Italian. I didn’t do it on camera. I’m sure they edited it out... I spent a lot of time in Italy, so I love to speak in Italian. So that was a real because I didn’t want the other chefs to think that I was saying anything that they couldn’t hear, you know?"