Tag Archives: cooking channel

Nov 13

Gummy cuisine

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I was a huge fan of the original Japanese “Iron Chef,” and for a good while I was a fan of “Iron Chef America,” especially because of the involvement of Alton Brown.  But as Food Network became obsessed with a glut of food competition shows, I got tired of the phenomenon. And, strangely enough, I was never really a fan of “The Next Iron Chef,” although I can’t really explain why. One of the few times I did watch it, a chef who I thought behaved like a total jerk (*coff*JoseGarces*coff*) ended up winning. Yes, it’s a cooking contest, not a popularity contest, but that’s sort of the point – I’d rather the producers pick an Iron Chef who is both talented and likeable.

Anyway, when Cooking Channel debuted – with everything I used to like about Food Network – I started watching it, and now I rarely watch Food Network at all. (Even Alton’s “Good Eats” reruns have moved to Cooking Channel).

But tonight, with nothing else to watch and not ready to go to bed just yet, I’m watching an episode of “The Next Iron Chef.” This season, unlike previous seasons, is an all-star edition featuring well-known chefs, most of them already current or past Food Network or Cooking Channel personalities. (They stole that idea, like much of the “Next Iron Chef” format, from “Top Chef.”) They’re preparing two dishes – one sweet, one savory – and each of them has been assigned a movie theater snack or candy as a secret ingredient. Alex Guarnischelli, who apparently won last week’s episode, got to choose her own candy – chocolate-covered raisins – and then assign each of the other chefs with their treats, which included cinnamon “red hot” candies, gummies and those super-sour-coated sweet candies, as well as popcorn and root beer. Surprisingly, Chuck Hughes got poor marks for his popcorn dishes; you’d think that popcorn would have been the least-objectionable of the options for savory cooking.

Anyway, this episode is relatively entertaining, and several of the participants – like Guarnischelli and Michael Chiarello – are chefs whose programs I’ve enjoyed in the past. I might tune in again some time between now and the finale.

There was also a foodie theme to “The Simpsons” tonight, with guest voices from Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Oct 27

Pitchin’ in

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When I first saw a promo for the Cooking Channel show “Pitchin’ In,” I nearly went crazy trying to figure out where I’d seen Lynn Crawford before – I was sure it was a Food Network or PBS cooking show, but I couldn’t place her any further than that, and yet she was so familiar I felt like I ought to know who she was.

I finally had to look it up, and then felt like an idiot. She was one of the small pool of rotating chefs in “Restaurant Makeover,” a Canadian import which Food Network used to run a few years ago before they switched to a 24-7 format of Guy Fieri prancing around spouting catch phrases.

“Restaurant Makeover” was a nice show; there have been a few shows since with similar formats, and I haven’t really seen most of them, but I liked “Makeover” and found it non-exploitative, non-voyeuristic and yet still compelling. The premise was that you would start with a struggling little mom-and-pop restaurant. If the owners would agree to put up $15,000 (Canadian) for a remodel, the producers would match it, and would provide a designer to redecorate the restaurant and a top chef to help revamp the menu. The designer and the chef typically pushed the mom-and-pop owners out of their comfort zones. The owners would not be present for the renovation, leading to a big reveal moment when they got to see the results for the first time. Typically, the chef (working with the restaurant’s normal cook to experiment with new menu items) would react with horror at overuse of deep-fried and/or pre-made frozen foods, insisting that such-and-such an item be removed from the menu, only to have the cook insist that the item in question was the favorite of regulars and could not possibly be eliminated.

The show had a short list of designers and a short list of chefs who would turn up over and over in various combinations. Crawford was easily my favorite among the chefs; she insisted on quality but seemed more sincere about it and less condescending than some of the other chefs in the rotation.

The Cooking Channel web site shows “Pitchin’ In” as premiering next week, and yet I’m sitting here watching it tonight. Must be a sneak preview. It seems to be a travelogue show focusing on a single ingredient, sort of a less-cutesy version of “The Secret Life Of…” but with a host-participation element like “Dirty Jobs.” I’ll certainly watch it again.

Jul 09

Spatula city!

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I have blogged before about my love for “Bitchin’ Kitchen” on Cooking Channel. Well, Nadia G. is now selling this at her website:

spatula_lauch

Love it.

If you haven’t heeded my nagging and tuned in, here’s a sample of what you’re missing. It’s goofy fun, but the recipes are good and well-explained. Reruns are airing now, and the second season starts later this month.

Bitchin’!

Of course, I wonder if the guitar spatula will be available here:

From the “Weird Al” Yankovic movie “UHF” (and its soundtrack album).
May 28

Bitchin’ Kitchen

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I had a Facebook conversation about Jacques Pepin with one of my “Cash On Delivery” castmates, Sharon Kay Edwards, the other night . Apparently, one of NPT’s secondary digital channels carries his most recent cooking show. I don’t get the secondary channels from my satellite provider; Sharon, on the other hand, doesn’t get any of the cable channels, so she can’t watch Food Network or Cooking Channel. I told her I really enjoyed chefs like Pepin who know what they’re talking about, as compared to some of the catchphrase-spewing attention hogs on Food Network. (Mr. Fieri …. paging Mr. Fieri ….)

One of the reasons I like Cooking Channel is that its chefs (like the ones on public TV) tend to be lower-key, more about cooking and less about self-promotion. But one of the exceptions happens to be one of my favorites: “Bitchin’ Kitchen.” This is something unique – part cooking show, part comedy performance. It started as a series of web videos before being picked up as a TV show.

Nadia Giosia (billed as “Nadia G.”) hosts the show in character, as a sort of Italian biker chick. (That’s probably a bad description, so feel free to provide a better one.) But it’s obviously a character, and she even has goofy supporting characters who provide supporting information about various ingredients. But the show is actually quite serious about its cooking; the recipes are solid, but presented in an accessible fashion, with explanation of terms and so on. (It’s a great entry-level cooking show, and I mean that in a positive way.)

Each episode has a theme, like meals to console you after a breakup, meals to serve the in-laws, low-cal meals to serve your overweight spouse, and so on. There’s sometimes a little playful, but not entirely unserious, life lesson mixed in.

Maybe I’m off-base and only trying to justify my love of the show, but I think there’s a difference between Nadia G. – who uses humor and fun in the service of the content — and the Food Network people, who too often seem to be promoting themselves instead of what they’re cooking.

Then again, the other great example of comedy mixed with cooking is on Food Network – Alton Brown’s “Good Eats,” which unfortunately is about to go out of production after a dozen years of Peabody Award-winning brilliance.

Jul 09

From the pages of Duh! magazine

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I really like Roger Mooking, host of the Canadian import “Everyday Exotic” on Cooking Channel. I not only enjoy his cooking, but I love his theme song, which he sings himself. (He’s a recording artist as well as a chef.) He’s fun to watch but doesn’t make too big a deal of it and also seems to know what he’s talking about.

But I have to call them as I see them. Just now, he was talking about Szechuan peppercorns. He explained that they are named for a Chinese province.

“It’s harvested there, as well as grown there.”

That’s good to know, because I’d hate to know that a plant was grown in one province and harvested in some other province. How would that work, exactly?

Jun 26

Food Jammers

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I posted here about Food Jammers after seeing one of the first episodes aired on Cooking Channel. (We’re watching the first season; the show has already had three seasons in its native Canada, according to its web site.)

I’ve now seen four episodes, all four of which ran as a mini-marathon this morning on Cooking Channel. I tried to describe this show to someone at the church fish fry last night, and I’m afraid I didn’t do a very good job. It’s hard to describe.

The three hosts have the sort of good natured, amazed-by-everything personality associated in popular culture with — forgive me, guys — stoners. But their work ethic, and their gourmet tastes, are not those of stoners. They create various food-related contraptions, more amazing than practical. As I said in my earlier post, these are more like something the Mythbusters would make than like the unusual cooking rigs Alton Brown sometimes makes, because Alton actually encourages you to try his ideas at home.

Here are my descriptions of the four “Food Jammers” episodes I’ve seen so far:

  • The guys decide to make their own flavors of gourmet soda. After an experiment with yeast-carbonated soda ends up bursting bottles, they abandon it and turn a spare refrigerator into a keg-and-tap system like those used by concession stands and restaurants. Ultimately, they run hoses from the fridge into their living room so that they can try out all their soda flavors from the comfort of the sofa.
  • An “ultimate barbecue” episode includes a chicken roasted on a sort of gyroscopic, wheel-within-a-wheel rotisserie which rotates it in every direction; a 10-foot-long homemade sausage cooking on 10-foot-long convenience store-style steel rollers; and a bamboo tower which can steam a dozen miniature tofu burgers at once.
  • The guys build their own brick pizza oven so that they can create “3-D pizzas” — one draped over a geodesic dome, one draped over a sort of spiral staircase, and one in cube form with the toppings inside the cube.
  • They install a high-powered exhaust fan (with the hood of a junked car as the hood) so that they can operate a propane deep fryer inside the house. They deep fry donuts, hush puppies, croquettes, fish, fries and homemade taco shells, among other things.

It’s an entertaining show, even if it doesn’t have the practical application of a stand-and-stir cooking show. I look forward to seeing some of the future episodes.

Jun 23

Chuck’s Day Off

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Since I’m on a Cooking Channel theme:

Some stand-and-stir cooking shows make no excuses for their existence, but some employ the conceit of a sort of slight storyline. Ina “Barefoot Contessa” Garten isn’t baking those scones for (horrors!) a television show; no, she’s making them for her husband Jeffrey or for her book editor or for one of her interior decorator friends. The friend or family member is shown at the end of the episode oohing and aahhhing over the finished product before scarfing it down.

Of course, these little setups are fiction, and not to be taken too seriously. (“Repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show / I should really just relax,’” to quote the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song.) But I’m going to blither about one of them anyway.

“Chuck’s Day Off” is one of Cooking Channel’s Canadian imports, filmed in Montreal. The premise is identical to Jamie Oliver’s original TV show, “The Naked Chef”*: what does a restaurant chef serve his friends and family when he’s not on duty?

But Oliver’s show made it seem like he had a life outside the restaurant business. It was filmed in what looked like a home kitchen (probably not Oliver’s real home kitchen, but you get the drift), and Oliver was shown practicing with his rock band and interacting with non-restaurant friends.

“Chuck’s Day Off,” on the other hand, doesn’t really seem like a day off. It’s shot in a restaurant kitchen — which Hughes explains in one show by saying he’s most comfortable there and doesn’t really know his way around a home kitchen. And for a show presumably about a chef’s day off, the setup is often work-related.

In one episode, Hughes is serving what restaurant people sometimes call a “family meal” — a dinner meeting of the restaurant staff, at which the wait staff and kitchen staff can be brought up to speed on changes to the menu or discuss other business matters. In another episode, when Hughes is cooking at the restaurant for several beautiful women, he expresses pleasure — but he also says it will be a great opportunity to use them as a “focus group” and try out some new dishes he’s thinking of adding to the menu.

Obviously, Chuck Hughes — or, perhaps more accurately, the character named “Chuck Hughes” he portrays for the TV show — is so tied to the restaurant that even his “day off” isn’t really a day off. I’m not sure whether to envy him for loving his job that much or to pity him for not having any other life.

*”The Naked Chef,” a name concocted by a BBC executive, was supposed to refer to the fact that the dishes Oliver cooked at home were stripped down to their essentials, as opposed to frou-frou restaurant entrees. Oliver hated the name and hated being introduced that way for a year or two after the show aired.

Jun 23

Tyler’s Ultimate

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I continue to enjoy the new Cooking Channel, which is everything I used to love about Food Network. Cooking Channel has a nice mix of original programming, but I’m also pleased that they’re recycling some of the better shows from the old Food Network library.

One thing I’ve enjoyed seeing again is the first season of “Tyler’s Ultimate,” with Tyler Florence. I’m not sure exactly how many seasons “Tyler’s Ultimate” ran on Food Network, but for most of its life it was a standard cooking show — well-done, certainly, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The first season, however, had an entirely different format. In the first season, Florence would focus on a particular dish — let’s say, roast chicken. In remote segments, he would visit two or three chefs or home cooks who specialized in that dish, observing their tricks and techniques. Then, in the studio segment of the show, he would prepare his own “ultimate” version, incorporating or adapting the best elements from each of the previous recipes. It was nice, because it showed you different approaches to the same dish.

It was obviously an expensive format, because the remote segments were filmed in a variety of locations, including some overseas. So I’m not surprised that Florence was transitioned into a more traditional stand-and-stir format. They probably should have changed the title, though, to indicate that it was a different show.

Of course, his first Food Network show — “Food 911″ — also involved travel, as he visited the home kitchens of viewers who needed help with their recipe-related problems.

Anyway, it’s nice seeing that first season of “Tyler’s Ultimate” again. It fits in well with the other Cooking Channel programming, especially given how much of the schedule is imported from the U.K., Canada and Australia.

Jun 02

We be jammin’

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I’m continuing to enjoy Cooking Channel, which launched Monday, and I just hope they manage to keep it distinctive and avoid dumbing it down like its sister channel.

One show I’ve just finished watching for the first time is “Food Jammers,” which I’m not quite sure how to describe. It’s about three young, laid-back musicians who come up with unusual, food-related contraptions. I read a brief description of the show, and saw a teaser that one episode would be about homemade soda. I pictured some sort of Alton Brown-style jury-rigged contraption, like one of the smokers Alton is always telling you to assemble from hot plates, terra cotta planters and cardboard boxes.

When the episode first started, the three hosts talked about carbonating their homemade gourmet sodas with yeast — not enough yeast or enough time to make the beverages alcoholic, just enough to make them fizzy. I started looking for a recipe on the Cooking Channel web site, just out of curiosity. But there was no recipe to be had. Now that I’ve seen the whole episode, I realize this was because their ultimate solution turned out to be a lot more involved and expensive than the ordinary viewer would ever want to attempt. This show turns out to be less like “Good Eats” and more like “Mythbusters.” They don’t actually tell you not to try this at home, but it’s on a scale that would effectively prohibit most people from doing so.

You see, the yeast recipe pop turned out too fizzy, bursting the bottles. So their plan B turned out to involve kegs — not unlike the ones you find in restaurant soft drink fountains — and drilling holes in a working refrigerator. They literally created a system with a variety of spigots, at the end of plastic tubes which ran from the kitchen to the den. Using this elaborate system, they could dispense their own exotic flavored soft drinks while sitting on the couch.

So the show wasn’t practical, but it was extremely entertaining, in “Mythbusters” fashion.

I’m really curious about the taco vending machine that seems to be scheduled for an upcoming episode.

Jun 01

Cooking Channel goes to the vault

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Me, yesterday:

I’d love it if Cooking Channel pulled out a few shows from the Food Network vault from time to time — Ming Tsai’s “East Meets West,” for example, or “Molto Mario.” I don’t think that’s likely, though.

I’m watching “Molto Mario” right now, and I just got through watching “Sara’s Secrets” with Sara Moulton. I stand happily corrected.

Yesterday’s opening-day schedule emphasized the channel’s new programming, in some cases doubling up on shows. But today, what seems to be the regular schedule does indeed include some items from the vault — not just Mario and Sara but even Graham Kerr and Julia Child!

I was amazed, by the way, at how many of the channel’s new cooking shows are imports. The prime-time schedule, which is more travelogue and documentary-oriented, is home-grown, but virtually all of the stand-and-stir cooking shows which premiered on Monday were imports from Canada, the U.K. or Australia. There’s nothing wrong with that; I just hope that as Cooking Channel matures and does more of its own programming, that programming takes the same tone, rather than the approach now common at Food Network.