The Genius of Cooking Competition Shows
Cooking shows are one of the longest running staples of reality television. Starting with personalities such as Julia Child and carried on now by the likes of Rachael Ray and Gordon Ramsay, the sub-genre originally featured hosts showing viewers how to dish out delicious-looking meals and eventually branched off to gastronomic tourism and helping struggling owner fix their restaurants. The best cooking shows, though, are the competition ones, where groups of chefs square off and, given the same ingredients, try to create a more delectable concoction than their opponent. We take a look at the best of the best of these culinary bullfights:
Iron Chef – Is there any other place to start than with the show that started it all? Because you may add "television cooking competitions" to sturdy cars, sushi, and the Power Rangers on the list of things that Japan has given us. Still the greatest cooking showdown ever, episodes of Iron Chef featured a challenger facing off against one of the show’s resident "iron chefs" as each tried to create the best possible meal based on a theme ingredient. The meals were sumptuous, of course, but what really made the show such a campy treat was the overdubbed narration, which focused with sportscasterly detail on everything from onion-chopping technique ("just look at how thin he’s making those pieces") to the boldness of the chef’s wine selection. Beginning in 1992, it took some time for Iron Chef to make its way to American shores – but when it did, TV enthusiasts knew that they had been introduced to an entirely new phenomenon.
Hell’s Kitchen – In 2005, Fox introduced the American edition of Hell’s Kitchen, a UK cooking show created by English celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Where Iron Chef was episodic, with each week’s show featuring a new challenger and a new competition, Hell’s Kitchen cleaves closer to a reality television format, following a group of contestants that is winnowed down to a single winner by the end of the season. Maybe the coolest thing about it, though, is how it combines the competition with a didactic element, in which Ramsay shows the contestants (and, by extension, the audience) proper technique and approach for various ingredients. It also benefits from the colorful and exacting Ramsay, who may be accurately deemed the Simon Cowell of cooking shows.
Chopped – Chopped has the same episodic structure of Iron Chef, but changes the set-up so that there are multiple contestants and multiple rounds, with the eventual winner taking home a $10,000 prize. These multiple rounds have the benefit of offering additional clarity to what each chef is doing, and having a contestant eliminated between each round ratchets up the intensity. It’s a guilty pleasure, even in the context of the cooking show, but then – at least you’re not actually eating the things that they’re preparing!
[Pic via Flickr - counterculturecoffee]
