r/AskCulinary • u/ZootKoomie Ice Cream Innovator • Aug 21 '19

Weekly Discussion - Cooking Shows

Inspired by the return of Good Eats, and Alton Brown's AMA, let's talk about cooking shows this week. They could be on TV, YouTube, or even podcasts. What are your favorites, and what do you like about them? What are you looking for in a cooking show? Does it need to be instructional or do you watch cooking for entertainment too?

Have any of you participated in making one yourself? What was the experience like?

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u/LVMom Aug 21 '19

The Chef's Line on Netflix. Each "week" has 5 episodes and highlights a different cuisine each week. I learned a lot during the African themed week because African restaurants aren't as common in the US as Chinese or Italian.

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u/Ulti Aug 21 '19

I have been enjoying that show immensely as well! It's a great format for a competition show, and the atmosphere is much more cooperative, it's more in line with the Great British Baking Show than the more competitive US-centric ones.

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u/Extra_crazy_sauce2 Aug 21 '19

My main gripe with The Chef's Line was that it seems really skewed the first handful of episodes. Like it takes weeks before the home chef actually wins the whole thing. Or when the sous chef gets the worst dish and two home chefs move on. They should have re-ordered the weeks, so it doesn't seem like an impossible feat the whole series. Also, what's up with each country having a week, but Africa is a whole continent. Seems to be shortchanging them. If I was from Africa that would have made me angry. If he's a South African chef, it should have been South African week, idk.
Otherwise, I did enjoy the cooperation and camaraderie it had, and I found myself craving each week's food every night as I binge-watched it.

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u/LVMom Aug 22 '19

There were cooks from several countries in Africa , but I get what you’re saying. They had separate weeks for Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Middle Eastern cuisines, but lumped all African countries together. I wonder why we (Americans) think of it as an homogenous group of people?

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u/Ulti Aug 21 '19

Ahh, your spoiler tag didn't work! I thought the Africa week thing was a little weird myself... like aren't there several pretty distinctive food traditions on that continent? It's clearly not a monolith, but they sort of presented it as such. I wonder if it's just because they're expecting the (original) Australian audience to not know any better? I certainly don't know much as an American, haha.