Cooking Showdown Notch - A Cheaper, Older Iron Chef
This is how you examine your roots. If you’re the Iron Chef. And wondered what your show would look like without as much spit & polish. On TV. In Japan.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Classic, Competition, Food, Vegetables. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Interesting clip: it looks like a variety program in which celebrity panelists must decide which of two popular delicious foods is the best. One chef is a master of making chocolate deserts, and the other is a master of making macha deserts.
It really has no relation to Iron Chef other than the fact that it’s got two chefs who present judges with food to taste and comment on, and I think it’s probably newer than Iron Chef.
January 25th, 2008 at 3:26 am
Dotch Cooking Showdown! Man, I was so bummed when they stopped making new episodes. My wife and I always made sure to watch it every Saturday night on KSCI (Channel 18 here in L.A.).
Yes, it’s newer that Iron Chef — it went off the air in something like 2001 or 2002.
The premise of the show was this… There were two hosts and a panel of celebrity judges (which was augmented by a panel of people off the street in the last season or two). Each host had a guest chef and they would do battle with themed meals, usually closely related (i.e., summer foods, winter foods, popular salarymen’s lunches, etc.) Both meals would be prepared simultaneously as the judges would comment on the proceedings.
Each side would also have a special ingredient which they would profile. This consisted of video packages they would roll in, in which a field reporter would go out and find out how it was made. This part was fascinating, with lots of farmers showing how they bred their crops, ranchers massaging and play music for their pigs to make gourmet pork, 10th generation soy sauce makers, and the like.
Then, at the end, everyone on the panel would vote for which meal they wanted to eat. The catch was (and this was the gimmick for the whole show) that only those on the winning side of the vote got to eat. The losers had to look forlornly over the shoulders of the winners, who would taunt them with how good the food was. (Since a whole episode took a couple hours to shoot in the studio and no one was allowed to eat in that time, the celebrities became starving and pathetic.) Finally, there was the obligatory shot of the losing chef eating his own meal all by himself.
Lots of celebrities cycled through the panel, including Bob Sapp, the Downtown guys, a few pro baseball players who later made the jump to the American major leagues, and even a couple former Iron Chefs (Sakai and Chen). The one celebrity regular on the panel was Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, one of the SMAP guys.
Sorry to ramble on so much, but I really loved this show!
January 25th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Eric B…I totally also fell in love with this show when I lived in LA. It was really great and I keep trying to find full length episodes elsewhere online. My favorite part was also the end where the losing chef would say things like, “Well, I did my best and I think this food is great!”. Very cute. That and almost every episode I watched the SMAP guy didn’t get to eat. >_<
Also, when I spent some time in Japan teaching they showed re-reruns every once in a while. Yay!
I noticed this episode had one of the women from Mecha Ike. And that girl that started off on the chocolate side (with the shorter hair on the far left of the table) hosted a talk show with a semi creepy old dude. Can’t remember her name!
Good post, thanks for this!
January 28th, 2008 at 10:49 am
i would KILL for that Maccha parfait
January 29th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Nice post I like the video, thanks :)
July 6th, 2008 at 8:30 am