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."
Rick Bayless on Top Chef Masters. Photo: BravoTV.com
What fresh hell is this?
We could tell "Top Chef Masters" producers were hoping to get an "eww, gross" rise out of audiences with their elimination challenge last night: Cooking with organ meat. (They even dedicated a text message poll to the matter: "Which offal is the most awful? Ears, heart, stomach or tongue?") But to more adventurous viewers -- and to the four masters who regarded their ordained ingredients with either laid-back geekiness or "bring it on" vigor -- the far grislier prospect was the choice of guest judges: amusement-park patrons.
To be fair, the hungry throngs waiting to sample the results of the "street food" challenge seemed mostly to be savvy foodie-hipsters and not some stereotypical coaster-riding troglodytes to whom a mall pretzel with mustard is a culinary leap of faith. But that didn't stop LudoBites bad boy Ludo Lefebvre from burying his tenderly simmered pig's ear pieces under mounds of gloppy cheese in an attempt to fool the masses; similarly, Pikayo's Wilo Benet sliced the beef heart in his colorful pita pockets so thin as to be unrecognizable.
So you think you're out playing hooky from work on the promise of a lovely Southern lunch stewed up by your favorite cookbook authors and then all of a sudden, in strides Bobby Flay.
Matt Lee and Ted Lee and the rest of the assembled had been lured to a barge on the Hudson River -- Matt's preferred canoeing channel -- on the premise that the brothers would be filming a segment for a Food Network special called "Lowcountry Lowdown." They'd filmed the first half in Charleston, S.C., and reportedly, the duel would have gone down on their home turf, had Chef Flay not fallen prey to the vagaries of air travel.
Read more about throwing down with the Country Captain after the jump.
Now this is more like it. If the paragon of haute cuisine civility that is "Top Chef Masters" isn't going to provide the kind of back-stabbing, dish-sabotaging enfant terrible tantrums its more proletarian cousin offers, the least they can do is give us some righteously fiery, four-letter angst. And who better to unleash a torrent of obscenities than Wylie Dufresne?
Proving yet again that this particular season might as well be named "Top Chef: Comeuppance," this latest installment saw the "don't call me a molecular gastronomist" proprietor of wd-50 -- as well as Citizen Cake's Elizabeth Falkner -- graded by the same Season 2 hopefuls who were once subject to their withering critiques as "Top Chef" judges.
Dufresne's food may have been Vulcan-like in its futurist logic -- eggs poached in an immersion circulator, oozing toothpaste-consistency yolks; squares of crispy-skinned chicken breast -- but his mouth on Wednesday was closer to William Shatner on a bender.
"Hey, hon, let's go see a film about mushrooms tonight."
The words could stop even the most ardent foodie dead in her tracks. Mushrooms -- whether parsed in dry botanical terms in dusty old textbooks or discussed manically by hippies in their "magical" incarnation (click above) -- hold little intrigue for many of us. (Not to mention that whole "Alice in Wonderland thing.")
After an event held by the NYC Food Film Festival on Sunday where we were feted with 'shroom dishes of every stripe (shrimp-stuffed morels; shiitake ice cream ... anyone?) and watched a hilarious film titled "Know Your Mushrooms" (find local screenings here), we consider ourselves schooled. Mycologists, evidently, are ready for their closeups.
Photos, the Flaming Lips and magic mushrooms after the jump.
We were wondering what to serve for our weekly viewing party of that guilty little pleasure "True Blood." Chef Tom Colicchio has the answer.
Fresh from his Diet Coke ad, the Craft-y chef has done a campy viral video for the HBO vampire series, making a drink to satiate Colicchio's vampire pals while the "Top Chef" host dines out.
"I have a few friends that are vampires and I've had this issue," Colicchio tells the host of the fake show "The Perspective." We go out, and I'm sitting there through an appetizer, an entree and dessert, and they're just kind of nursing a Tru Blood [the blood substitute vampires drink on the show]. It's a little awkward."
In uncertain times, we count on simple pleasures: Home cooking, unemployment checks and the heady mix of ego, chutzpah and alcohol-fueled drama we have come to anticipate from "Top Chef."
So when Bravo announced that "Top Chef Masters," the show's latest iteration (hosted by Kelly Choi, right), would be given over to established culinary superstars, fans had reason to worry: Would decorum and professionalism win out over brash experimentation? Would upstart bickering be replaced by upper-crust camaraderie? Would the fauxhawk go the way of the dodo?
The answer after the inaugural hour is a qualified "yes." But what "Top Chef Masters" loses in amateur hour enthusiasm it gains in hyper-astute commentary. It is a knowing look at what it means to be a celebrity chef in an era when celebrity chefs are often made overnight on cable TV. Every week, by stripping four different "masters" of their sous chefs, sommeliers and Cuisinarts -- in one instance forcing them to make do with nothing more than a dorm room's toaster oven, microwave and hot plate -- it resets the bar for gourmet ingenuity.
Read on to learn about the Girl Scout mafia's dessert tastes and prosciutto-popcorn risotto.
Spinning off the wildly popular "Top Chef," Bravo TV is pitting 24 of the best chefs around the globe against one another in a no-holds-barred knife fight for the chance to win $100,000 for charity in "Top Chef Masters." The show, which debuts Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST, comes complete with its very own Padma in Kelly Choi, a 33-year-old former model born in Seoul and raised in the suburbs of Richmond, Va.
She was cherry-picked straight from local access TV in New York, where, dressed in skimpy outfits and armed with an inquisitive mind, she gave New Yorkers an intimate view of some of the city's top kitchens. We caught up with her to talk about her rise to national stardom, how the best chefs in the world handle criticism and what the deal is with magicians acting as judges.
How did you get involved with the show? Someone from Bravo called me out of the blue and asked me to fly out to L.A. to meet the producers. What I do on ["Eat Out NY"] is pick a dish and cook it with a chef on TV. I pick all the restaurants that I want to feature and dishes that I think the readers would be into. This Bravo exec saw me on TV and flew me out and my dream came true.
Why do you think this show matters in this economy? Why not? Everybody loves food. The alternative is to cook at home and you can totally pick up tips. It's a fun way -- to be inspired by fun and passionate people -- to cook at home.
Fret not, Southern beer drinkers: While the region's craft beer scene has gone and grown up, its fans (if a newly released documentary is any indication) show no signs of maturing.
"Beer Y'all," billed as "rock-and-roll road trip across North Carolina," follows a scruffy septet of wannabe homebrewers on a nine-day pilgrimage to 27 microbreweries across the state. Like any great epic, the film has a hero (the guy in Allegheny County who lets the travelers crash on his couch); obstacles (drunken ping-pong); encounters with inscrutable seers (brewmasters who mumble about keg conditioning) and a moral that inspired the industry crowd at last night's world premiere screening to hoist their pitchers in appreciation: Beer shouldn't be taken too seriously.
While the dudes filmmakers marvel politely at the tanks their hosts show off, they have little patience for academic discussions of wort and hops. They'd rather get drunk and watch "Lethal Weapon 2." They like to nap. It takes 48 minutes before anyone in the film mentions how the ales taste, which leaves plenty of time for backyard volleyball playin', lazy guitar pickin' and mongrel dog scratchin'. That's Southern beer, y'all.
"Beer Y'all" will be screening in parts of the Tarheel State this summer.
Troubled by what he had been reading about his dinner, documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner embarked on a 6-year, cross-country journey to expose the nation's agribusiness industry. "Food, Inc." (see the trailer above) features interviews with authors Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and quotes from some of the heads of Big Farming from Walmart to Tyson. Kenner examines recent salmonella scares, chats with organic farmers and calls his film -- which hits the big screen next month -- "entertaining and hard-hitting." We caught up by phone with Kenner in L.A. to chat mutant chicken nuggets, Oprah's legal issues and his quest to leave you "delightfully disturbed." What made you want to make this film? We spend less of our paycheck on food now than at any time in our history, which is great, but it also comes at a great cost to us ... I made a film that I hope will leave you delightfully disturbed.
What do you mean by "a great cost to us"? One out of every three babies born after 2000 will develop early onset diabetes. A lot of that is attributed to corn and corn byproducts. We can't sustain that. There are environmental costs and ultimately it is a cost to the consumer. You might be paying less money, but you are paying additional [health] costs that are becoming very, very expensive.
Men in suits, their strawberries and Oprah after the jump.
Love her or hate her, Sandra Lee can stretch a dollar.
For her latest Food Network show, the queen of "semi-homemade" cuisine is teaching her viewers "Money Saving Meals" with tips on how to make dishes like this French toast without breaking the bank.
"This show is like Suze Orman meets Julia Child," she told Slashfood Thursday in the Food Network test kitchens.
Get her three tips on how to save at the grocery store and the French toast recipe after the jump.
We wanted to ignore this, we really did, but it's too infectious. Talk about turning an infomercial into entertainment. Bravo, DJ Steve Porter. Bravo! Slashfoodies, beware of the "breakfast to go."
Meryl can do the voice! Slashfood's sister site Moviefone has the trailer for the new Julia Child flick "Julie and Julia," and the two-time Academy Award winning Streep appears to be a delightful "French Chef."
We've been eagerly awaiting Nora Ephron's retelling of Child's story with that of blogger Julie Powell (she spent a year writing about her adventures cooking through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"), and the trailer has us salivating for more. (We even spied a purchase made at the "Julie and Julia" sale held earlier this month hanging behind Julia!)
You'll have to wait until August to see the film. Till then, "Bon Appetit!"
Although the film adaption of "Julie & Julia" isn't coming out until August, Julia Child fans are already excited at the prospect of seeing America's most iconic cooking superstar served up onscreen. Following last weekend's sale of the film's props, your devoted Slashfood staff has been searching for images of the upcoming film.
Everything about Julia Child was outsized, from her flamboyant cooking style to her rich, fluttering falsetto, to her famously dry humor. This, after all, was the great chef who started her professional life as a purported spy in the OSS during World War II, became one of the few women to attend Paris' Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, and ended up spearheading a home-cooking movement that transformed American cuisine with her TV show "The French Chef."
Given Child's impressive height (she was 6-foot-2), it's perhaps unsurprising that the majority of her imitators have been men. The most famous was probably Dan Aykroyd on "Saturday Night Live." His repeated exhortation to "Save the liver!" captured Child's forceful personality and occasional tendency toward self-parody. An even better tribute was offered by John Candy, with a spot-on impression of Child boxing with Fred Rogers in "Battle of the PBS Stars" on "SCTV."
At the intersection of "South Park," the Food Network and professional figure skating there comes this news flash: Brian Boitano is apparently a foodie.
The gold-medal-winning Olympian who spent a career on the ice has decided to heat things up with a Food Network show. Beginning in August, "What Would Brian Boitano Make?" will follow the skater reality-TV style as he whips up "amazing food for a new event in each episode," according to the network.
We are as surprised at this development as we were when we learned of the culinary prowess of the late Danny Kaye (thanks Ruth!). Boitano's sport is known for a jump called the Salchow. Will he dare to go to triple sow-cow territory? Will he cook skate? We'll have to wait and see.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
In uncertain times, we count on simple pleasures: Home cooking, unemployment checks and the heady mix of ego, chutzpah and alcohol-fueled drama we have come to anticipate from "
Spinning off the wildly popular 
Second Helping of Slashfood - June 19
Competitive-Eating Contest to Pit Humans Against Elephants
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