Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Chopped: The Best Cooking Show Ever

By Bob Wire, 4-20-11

	"So you're using olive oil and Everclear to create a combustible glaze for your pan-seared electric eel. That would not have occcured to me!"

“Chefs, open your basket. Inside, you’ll find these ingredients: a raw head of skunk cabbage, a horseshoe crab, the left kidney from a cross-eyed lamb, and a single-serving box of Cocoa Puffs. You have thirty minutes to create an entrée. Go.”

Welcome to my latest TV obsession, Chopped. It’s like the Rachael Ray Show, if she were held captive in a Nazi concentration camp, and the menu was created by William Burroughs. The Food Network has somehow hit on the perfect combination of elements to create the most devilish, entertaining game show on TV.

For those of you who do have a life, and don’t take your meals in front of the television like I do, here’s the premise: Four real-world chefs (from caterers to restaurant owners) are brought together to face off over a three-course meal. They are provided with a to-die-for kitchen with all the latest appliances and gadgets, as well as a fully-stocked pantry and fridge. Then they are given identical baskets containing three or four weirdly combined ingredients, all freshly harvested from left field.

They are given 20 or 30 minutes, depending on the course, to whip up some kind of culinary masterpiece using all of the ingredients in any fashion they see fit. These masterpieces are tasted and judged by a panel of bitchy, egotistical, whiny celebrity foodies who all act like they’re Frank Lloyd Wright critiquing some schmuck’s homemade tool shed. They’re drawn from the pool of Food Network regulars who also appear in other shows, either cooking their asses off while being screamed at by some unhinged German, or sometimes even being at the other end of the spatula on Chopped itself. The Food Network has more inbreeding than a West Virginia family reunion.

The judges nibble on each round of fried, baked, sautéed, steamed or fricasseed whatever, and decide which one is the weakest effort. That chef then gets “chopped,” and the remaining hash-slingers move onto the next course. Pretty simple premise, really, and maybe that’s part of the appeal. The rounds are short, focused and brisk, and the breathless editing makes it all seem as intense and gut-wrenching as one of the Vietnam firefight scenes in Platoon. There’s the appetizer (example: a yak tongue, an artichoke, a can of sardines and a Nutty Buddy), the entrée (a cleaned and dressed barn owl, some rhinoceros toe jam, three Swedish fish and a vial of bong water), and of course dessert (raspberry-scented feminine spray, a bundle of badger hair, a pyramid of boullion cubes and a Chick-O-Stick).

The fun part is watching these supposedly world-class contestants figure out how to open a container of Pillsbury crescent rolls, say, or how to deal with a cherimoya, a large testicle-shaped fruit no one’s ever heard of and may or may not be poisonous. Most of the contestants are flamboyant, tattooed, flame-haired dandies who talk a lot of smack but couldn’t filet a coelacanth to save their lives. And they have no shame about pandering to the judges for sympathy, constantly yammering about their father who died the day before the show, or their adopted son who is suffering from some neurological disorder that can only be transmitted through direct contact with a coelacanth. I can’t help but think, man, you’re skipping your dad’s funeral so you can have a shot at a measly ten grand by trying to make soup out of a jar of hobo spiders and a Slim Jim? That’s some cold shit, Jasper.

The host, whose job it is to goad the judges into harping on every little mistake made by the contestants, is Ted Allen. He was the wine and food connoisseur from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” a Bravo show that spurted a load of gay personalities into the fertile cable show universe. Allen comes off like a radio announcer who suddenly finds himself on TV. He has exactly one facial expression: smugly bored, like his Lunestra is starting to kick in.

The judges are introduced as “legendary restaurateurs,” “maverick foodies,” and “chefs extraordinaire.” They mostly seem annoyed and impatient, like they’re battling constipation. They complain if a portion is too small, or too large (sometimes on the same dish). They bitch and moan if some ingredient has not undergone a major state change, like transforming bowl of gooseberries into chocolate cake frosting. They refuse to eat undercooked poultry, but they’ll chop the hapless sous chef who had the audacity to arrange the elements of his appetizer in the wrong order on the plate. Their unpredictability and superior attitudes are necessary to the dynamic of the show because there has to be a bad guy to root against. They decide what the right answers are, and their dressing down of the contestants is always accompanied by a soundtrack of shameful minor chords.

Chefs routinely cut themselves badly, requiring the donning of a rubber glove, which quickly fills up with blood. They constantly “double dip,” tasting the food then putting the spoon back in the pot. Flop sweat and nervous swearing fill the air, while the judges sit back and idly watch the proceedings as if they’re witnessing a Roman being devoured by a lion. All the while, host Allen gently prods them with comments like, “I see Chef Bambi has decided to put salt on her crisped potatoes. Odd choice, don’t you think?”

In the end, one cook wins ten large (not exactly a life-changing amount of cheddar) and gets to brag about putting the smack down on three other culinary hot shots. The other three are sent away to question their choice of careers, and the wisdom of all those neck tattoos and the flame orange Mohawk. I think it would be more dramatic if each contestant that got drummed off the show actually got a pinkie hacked off with a cleaver. Maybe they would, if Quentin Tarantino were a producer.

Chopped is the perfect marriage of game show and cooking show. It’s American Idol with food and a shell game, sans the histrionic warbling. It provides an endless stream of fresh ideas to try in my own kitchen, like making a reduction from gummi bears, or coating a pan-fried chicken breast with crumbled Milk Bones. It can get a little uncomfortable when one of the judges (they’re all Simon Cowell at some point) questions a contestant’s very right to exist on this planet because they put some puréed ramps on a goat leg, but it’s always entertaining. There’s usually a bit of trash talking between the contestants, which the producers maximize by inserting a shot of a dirty look and a soap opera-style “I’m carrying your love child” blast of menacing horns.

The Chopped influence has already seeped into the Wire household, evidenced in the way I introduced last night’s dinner: “Family, what you see before you is a boneless pork chop from the discount bin in the Safeway meat counter. It’s been marinated in a combination of homemade plum teriyaki given to us by a family friend in 2002, mixed with a jar of orange stuff I found in the back of the fridge. It’s been cooked on a dirty grill, and served on a puddle of sauce I created from the variety of condiment packets I found in the glove box of my car.

“Hunkered down next to the pork is a heaping mound of powdered mashed potatoes imported from Idaho, which were prepared not by applying heat on the stove, but by adding water and rearranging the molecules in the microwave. The potatoes du crème, as I call them, are enhanced by a generous pat of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and a light sprinkle of red “mystery powder” from an unlabeled jar.

“Rounding out your plate is a delicious blend of three succulent vegetables which have been liberated from their can with the aid of a Swingaway can opener and heated in a small saucepan. There is no seasoning, as I want the pure flavors of these expertly paired vegetables to mix together in a natural dance of, uh, naturalness.”

The kids looked up from examining their beautifully plated meals, and Rusty said, “What is this? Are we out of Totino’s?”

Dude, you are so chopped.

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