Best Cooking on Television

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPSH9Qv7u78
If only we got this on TV. Dietary differences aside, the fact that one of the regular comic panelists rocks a Hitler moustache without anyone mentioning it is very puzzling. In a way, this program builds off of the hunger supposedly endured by anyone who goes to an Iron Chef taping and makes it an essential part of the competition. It’s a culinary coup d’état, and if you don’t vote for the winner, you don’t get to eat anything! In Iron Chef, the extreme quality and expense of the ingredients is sometimes gleefully mentioned in passing, as if it isn’t that big of a deal that these are rare hermaphrodite albino salmon. In Cooking Show Dotch, each ingredient is given a huge amount of reverence, to the point where it now frustrates me that I can’t find a store that sells hishio, or sake kasu. It’s well possible to translate this concept to the U.S.- fancy burger vs fancy taco- unless it would seem tasteless in these times to have a game show built on the idea of food waste. The one thing that Cooking Show Dotch is somewhat thankfully missing is the final shot of the losing chef’s dish being thrown into the garbage.