In many shows, competitors are forced to work with a limited and pre-set list of ingredients, and they’re often strange such as seaweed, squash and animal crackers. But if you play close attention, you’ll realize the finished products incorporated added ingredients. For example, chefs will make creamy purees that obviously required, well, cream! Or fried ingredients that obviously required batter and frying oil. So where is the line between add-ons and entirely new ingredients? The line seems to move with every episode of every show, making things unfair for the competitors and for viewers at home.
If you do judge a chef based on what he comes up with using seaweed, squash and animal crackers, that’s not quite fair. In a real restaurant a chef would never just have no idea what ingredients he would be working with that day. Also keep in mind that some of the competitors have worked with the strange ingredients in the past, and had a leg up over the others. For all you know, an animal cracker seaweed ice cream with squash glaze is the specialty dessert at one of those chef’s restaurants.
The timed grocery runs are meant to make chefs look like klutzes. Chefs often have a select number of markets they shop at exclusively, know their way around, and know the staff. Put them in there, and they would do an incredible job on a 30-minute time limit. But nobody knows what he or she is doing in a market they’ve never been in before, with just 30 minutes to find the best ingredients.
Aside from the chef competitor shows that happen in a studio, there are the pop-up restaurant shows, where chefs have to open a limited-time restaurant in a location they’re totally unfamiliar with and have no connections to, with the hope their restaurant gets the most customers. However, it doesn’t say that much for the restaurants that they get customers. There are camera crews surrounding the restaurant. Of course people will eat there just for a chance to get on TV.
Sure, chefs can be critical and major perfectionists, but the type of verbal abuse you see on some chef competitor shows is just not realistic or what you’d see in a restaurant kitchen. If it were, that chef would have a class action lawsuit against him.
Some shows match professional chefs with amateurs who can barely microwave mac ‘n cheese, and pin teams against one another. Within days, amateurs who thought it was OK to eat raw chicken suddenly know how to properly slice sashimi, brown crème brûlée and properly stand a soufflé. In real culinary schools, most of these techniques aren’t introduced for months and take weeks to perfect. Our suspicion is the chefs do most of the work on those shows. Don’t believe, after watching TV, that you could be a professional chef with just a couple of weeks of training.
When chefs try the dishes of four competitors, the third and fourth dish are bound to be cold! And thereby don’t get a fair chance in judging as flavors and textures change when food temperature does.
Sometimes a plate is presented to the judges that looks dull, sloppy and poorly cooked and you just know it’s going to fail. But the show runners set it up that way, often making the dish look uglier on TV than it is in real life, misrepresenting the chef’s work. But hey — having an exploded soufflé just makes for good TV.
Are we supposed to believe that some of the totally svelte judges, who presumably judge these shows several times a week, really eat fourcomplete dishes in one sitting?
Camera crew loves to zoom in on the shocked expressions of contestants when they find out they’ll only get three ingredients to work with or 30 minutes to go grocery shopping. How are they shocked? Haven’t they seen this show before? The format is repeated every single time…
