Chef Daniel Lipson, as seen on "Chopped," season 62. Courtesy photo

After seeing himself on the Food Network’s reality cooking gameshow, “Chopped,” Chef Daniel Lipson of Maui is pretty happy with his cut.

The founder of Elite Maui Chef was among the four competitors featured in the show’s ninth episode of its 63rd season, “In Cod We Trust,” which aired Tuesday. In the episode, Lipson survived elimination to advance to the final round before winning it all and becoming a “Chopped Champion” in front of a national audience.

“You know, they made me look pretty good,” Lipson said. “It was done very, very well. That show came out really representing what I wanted it to.”

With the victory, Lipson secured the $10,000 prize, but he said representing himself, his food, his family and the Maui community well was more important to him than the prize money.

“It’s a good representation of my character and my heart and my will to succeed, and I think I put my best food forward,” he said. “It shows that I’m determined to make my clients happy with my art, which is my food.”

In each episode of “Chopped,” four contestants square off in a series of timed challenges where they must use a handful of surprise ingredients the chefs didn’t know they’d be working with prior to the taping.

A panel of accomplished chefs then judges the contestants’ culinary creations, and the ones who survive elimination in the early rounds move on to the last and final challenge where they must plate a dessert.

Cottage cheese and enoki mushrooms were two of the surprise ingredients Lipson had to contend with in Tuesday’s episode. According to Lipson, the trick to advancing on “Chopped” is to enlist all the ingredients provided and use them as best you can.

For his first dish, Lipson paired his cod with the enoki mushrooms and mustard pickles to make a crostini that served as his “take on a bagna cauda.”

“(The judges) wouldn’t agree with me that it was, but I definitely did say, ‘This is a take on a bagna cauda,’ and the reason I said that is because it definitely wasn’t a full a bagna cauda,” Lipson said. “It had similar ingredients … but they wouldn’t agree with me on that. That’s fine.”

For the next course, Lipson prepared a strip loin steak with a five-spice sweet potato puree containing tea eggs, bitter melon and cottage cheese.

“I felt like that was probably my easiest course,” he said, adding that he might have felt a little too comfortable and his steak “was undercooked a bit” as a result.

“But the rest of it, everything was great, and it was good enough to advance me to the next course,” he said.

For dessert, Lipson utilized a rainbow cake with a strawberry ganache, Asian pears poached in white wine and a fresh vanilla ice cream.

“It was executed well,” he said. “The only critique they gave me (on the dessert) was that they would have combined the ingredients together to make it kind of like a Ben & Jerry’s style ice cream. They didn’t quote Ben & Jerry’s, but that’s the idea.”

Looking back, Lipson said he was genuinely surprised when he advanced in each round, but with some mistakes by the other contestants, he rose to the top.

“I thought I was gonna get eliminated, but turns out I didn’t, and you definitely see my facial expression in there when I don’t get eliminated,” he said.

Lipson was a little surprised by the demanding schedule over two days of taping after a long plane flight from Hawaii to New York.

“I really didn’t realize how intense that would be,” Lipson said. “It was probably more intense for me than the cooking to be honest. … The cooking comes naturally, but then the filming part, you’re like, ‘Whoah, this is a whole different thing.’ You don’t really anticipate that when you’re getting ready to do the show.”

Still, Lipson said that the time change, the lack of sleep, the long flight and the two days of filming were well worth it.

“I was just really thankful and happy that this all happened,” he said.

If given the opportunity, Lipson said he has an appetite to do the show again and would love to appear on an episode featuring “Chopped Champions.”

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but yeah, I definitely would if given the opportunity or something along the lines of that,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”