It's amazing what a couple of rabbit ears will pick up, and it pays to do a little futzing around with the remote to sample the bevy of weird and wonderful channels and sub-channels blazing through the airwaves in all their pixelated glory.

Case in point: "The Dotch Cooking Show." This little gem of Japanese pop culture may have ended in 2007, but it lives on thanks to Los Angeles' KSCI-TV channel 18.2 -- not to mention online, in countless YouTube clips and less-than-legal downloads.

America's cook-off shows seem downright sleep-inducing by comparison. As TV spectacles go, Dotch occupies a space somewhere between the loose, tipsy fun of the celebrity-studded '70s staple "The Match Game" and the free-wheeling nuttiness of "Peewee's Playhouse."
Like so much Japanese TV, the premise is blissfully simple: Two chefs each whip up a dish along a similar theme -- meat bun versus curry bun -- to be judged by a panel of 11 tasters. The catch is that if you vote for the losing dish, you're forced to watch the others enjoy the wares of the winning chef. (Cue the moment where an exaggeratedly hungry husband stands over his wife's shoulder as she tries, unsuccessfully, to demurely devour some fried rice.)

The competition may be the show's hook, but it's the dish prep -- including chef selection and and ingredient hunt -- that makes the show a keeper. The hosts take us on a journey through both the city's seamy underbelly and the rural countryside for "the finest ingredients."

We're treated to such spectacles as free-range chickens being fed grape skins to produce the fullest-yolked eggs for an omelet, and Hidesan, a farmer whose ability to talk with his vegetables results in the sweetest onions for curry buns. The English translations are often hilarious and perplexing at once: Meat buns are "fancy and healthy and very popular among women."

Once you get acclimated to the whiplash editing and pachinko-machine sound effects, Dotch starts to resemble nothing so much as a tripped-out, foodie-centric version of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," but with a tour of Japan's culinary legends, tall tales and practices.

The best part? Unlike the judges, you don't have to fast in agony while you watch and learn.