Breaking Down Cooking Shows

If you’re like me, you love food but can’t always afford or aren’t skilled enough to cook awesome food.  So I watch cooking shows, a lot of them. In order to save you the time of flipping between them, or god forbid watch the bad ones, here’s a breakdown:

The Worst: Hell’s Kitchen.  Hell’s Kitchen is one of the many places on TV you can watch British chef Gordon Ramsay insult people he has selected to be on his show so that he can insult them.  It’s a vicious cycle for him to endure.  The show pits seemingly untalented chefs against each other, all competing to be the head chef at one of Ramsay’s restaurants, though looking at them you’d guess this is a figurehead position they’re winning.

Marginally entertaining, Mostly educational:  Any Food Network Daytime show.  These shows are all inter-changeable, it’s just a matter of personal taste.  I’m partial to the Sandwich King and Everyday Italian because they’re food styles I can appreciate and handle most of the time. 

Good: MasterChef. The premise is great, home cooks compete against each other to be the best home cook in America and win some cash, unfortunately it’s a Gordon Ramsay show. So the contestants suck and I don’t want to root for any of them. Good enough to watch weekly though.

The Classic:  Iron Chef America.  ICA is the first competitive cooking show I can remember seeing.  It pits great chefs AND their sous chefs against each other and make 5+ dishes in 1 hour all featuring the mystery ingredient.  Always entertaining if the techniques and combinations of ingredients interest you, and always a little disappointing when you realize you don’t have their ingredients or toys to work with at home.

Entertaining: Chopped. For the longest time, I thought this was just the Food Network’s rip-off of Top Chef, than I actually watched it.  It’s actually really entertaining.  The show pits 4 chefs of generally quality backgrounds against each as they make a three-course meal over the course of three rounds with one chef eliminated after each round.  The show’s big twist is that they have to use roughly 5 mystery ingredients that don’t obviously go together, like gummi bears and steak, or veal and some random herb? vegetable? I’ve never heard of let alone seen.  I think it’s biggest flaw is its judges, but the contestants struggling every round easily makes up for it. Great show to stop at while flipping around.

The Crème de la Crème (see what I tried to do there?): Top Chef.   Top Chef is Emmy winning and perennially nominated for a reason.  It features the most talented up and coming chefs, some James Beard nominated, battling for title and prize money.  The chefs are always on point, the challenges interesting, and the judges the best chefs in the industry.  This is the show I compare all others to because the challenges are creative, technically challenging, and the chefs cook with products I can buy at my grocery store, if at a greater cost than I would like.

Matt Brickell is a contributing writer and an amateur cook who talks a big game, but can't back it up