by Kevin Burton
Yesterday we rode the wayback machine and looked at one of my earliest Page 7 blog posts, one that made fun of the weird meals they make on Food Network.
We also established that since that time I have developed an appetite for Food Network and have stopped dialing up sports on our hotel TV when my wife and I are on the road, to watch their shows.
It’s still true that the food that shows up on TV almost never resembles anything that would ever appear on my dining room table or yours. But if you think about it, it’s not so much of a stretch that we watch the master chefs at work.
I used to watch The Rockford Files and Moonlighting and the like without emulating the chase scenes. So I can watch Food Network without combining seven or eight disparate ingredients into one dish, or learning what a pomegranate is.
Plus, have you seen these shows? Well it ain’t The French Chef with Julia Child, I can tell you that. By switching from sports to food we lose the grown men in pajamas thing. but I am still getting my competition fix.
Food Network has a number of shows, almost all of them involving some type of competition. Our favorite is Beat Bobby Flay. Flay is a renowned chef who used to appear on the Iron Chef show, which is something I read about in Newsweek years ago but never watched.
In round one, two professional chefs have a ridiculously short time, like 20 or 25 minutes, to create a finished dish and have it judged by two people invited to the show by the host. Flay gives them an ingredient – could be prawns, cauliflower, pineapple you never know – and they have to make that ingredient the centerpiece of their dish.
The chef judged the winner of round one, based on taste, texture and presentation of their dish, then continues to round two where they compete against Flay. The round one winner now has his or her choice of what to cook in round two. They get to make their “signature dish” and have to chance to Beat Bobby Flay.
The challengers don’t wear jerseys but they do represent something. Could be their family, ethnic heritage or the style of cooking they grew up with. Many of them have family watching and they want to make them proud.
The clock is the most artificial element of most of these shows. But I guess if you are cooking at a restaurant, time is money and is a big factor.
My second favorite show is any of the various vehicles of Guy Fieri, who I just learned is from Columbus, Ohio, my old stomping grounds.
After graduating from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Fieri began working as a corporate restaurant manager before opening several restaurants of his own.
Fieri won the competition on the second season of The Next Food Network Star in 2006 and soon after began hosting his own shows.
On Diners, Drive Ins and Dives he travels the whole county looking for chefs that make exotic food from complicated recipes. The New York Times called the series “not a cooking show as much as a carefully engineered reality show.”
At the end of each segment, Fieri is shoveling down all this food and loves each and every dish without fail. Jeannette calls it “a heart attack waiting to happen.” I call it mathematically improbable that he would love all that stuff.
A better Fieri show is Guy’s Grocery Games, which started in 2013, It features a three judge panel and four cooks battling through three rounds of competition.
The cooks have to shop for ingredients in a little grocery store then battle the clock and each other through three rounds to win a cash prize.
The chefs are cooking for a good cause, usually some kind of non-profit. As they talk about their cause you learn about them. These are real people, not culinary snobs.
Jeannette’s second-favorite show is one where bakers face off making cakes. We’re not sure which show it is actually. I think the competition is at a resort. There are so many similar shows we can’t figure out which one she liked.
We’re pretty sure it wasn’t Cake Wars, because the online promo for that one shows Smurfs in the kitchen and we don’t remember that from any of our road trips.
But the tagline for that show is “The sweet taste of victory and cake.” So you get the idea. It’s all about the competition.
Sometimes I think these TV chefs should be judged by teenagers, then they wouldn’t create such bizarre “meals.” Whoever makes the dish that makes the teens ask for seconds, that one is the winner.
Hey Food Network, food for thought?
When Jeannette and I first started dating, I got off work at 4. She would always arrive at my apartment at 5. I would then have an hour to get home and prepare a meal for her on our Monday night dates. So I guess I can relate, in some small measure, to the clock element on these Food Network shows.
Jeannette used to eat my mediocre offerings as if those master chefs on TV had created them. I should have known right then that she was the girl for me.
As I write this, we don’t have the Food Network at home, as years ago we pared down our cable package to save money (we don’t have ESPN either).
We discovered that older episodes of Beat Bobby Flay, and Iron Chef are available through Amazon TV. We aren’t sure if can binge watch them, or if we have to start paying for them after a trial period.
We may end up streaming, joining the “cut the cable” wave, to keep those Food Network morsels coming at home.
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