8 Underrated Cooking Competition Shows!
12My fellow A-Meh-ricans: Sean here, back with a few more recommendations. First, we did podcasts, then police procedurals. This week, we’re sticking with TV, but looking towards the culinary. Do you love Chopped and Iron Chef? Then you’ll love some of these lesser-known cooking competition shows!
1. Bachelor Bake-Off
Five single recent college graduates compete in the ultimate baking challenge: making sugar cookies. Who will win? None of them! Because none of them have flour!
2. Bird Watching
What’s harder than plucking, preparing, brining, and cooking the perfect bird? Plucking, preparing, brining, and cooking the perfect bird while an audience of birds watches you!
3. Cupfake Wars
The judges believe they’re judging a real cupcake making competition, but the bakers aren’t making cupcakes. They’re using mirrors, smoke machines, hypnosis, and the latest in virtual reality and 3d printing to create the illusion of a cupcake. Whoever can trick the judges wins!
4. Dethrone The Scrampion
Ricky “The Yolk Whisperer” Gate is known for two things: his tattoos and his wild unorthodox egg-scrambling techniques. Now, he’s opening up his kitchen to talented chefs from around the globe to see if anyone can challenge his right to the title of scrambled egg world champion. Come for the fierce competition! stay for the liberal use of Gate’s catchphrase: “Hey you, scram!”
5. Three-To-One, Chi For Fun
One chef has a hand tied behind his back. The other is equipped with, and forced to use, a third animatronic arm without any training on how it functions. But which one will make the best kimchi?
6. Do You S.M.E.A.R. What I Smear?
Modeled after H.O.R.S.E. in basketball, four of the most renowned cream cheese artists in New York City come together each week, challenging each other with a series of decadent smear-related stunts!
7. Taste Therapy
The judges from Cupfake Wars are back, but this time they’re the contestants, competing through a series of therapeutic cooking exercises to repair their fractured perceptions of reality! Whoever believes in food again first wins!
8. Infinite Kitchen
Each week, celebrity chef Dale Holden makes his signature sweet potato gnocchi in zesty cream sauce, and each week, noted mage Thorlan the Majestic reduces the dish through a series of spells back to its base ingredients. Every episode, the cycle begins anew. It is unending. There are no winners. There is only gnocchi.
Those are mine! Now it’s your turn: what are your favorite cooking competition shows?
- 17 comments, 11 replies
- Comment
My name is TheRealJRN and I’m a cooking show addict. I could never poke fun at them. I want to watch 7 of the 8 shows listed above.
I’m pretty sure I saw #5 on Cutthroat Kitchen.
I watch Guy’s Grocery Games, just to see what weird rules he makes up for each game.
Yeah I’m pretty hooked on cooking shows. Sometimes I even burn myself out.
@ivannabc
@therealjrn believe it or not, that was totally unintentional. I wasn’t fully awake lol
@ivannabc i’m watching The Great British Baking Show seasons 1-4 (America, seasons 4-7 Briton) for the 3rd time right now
PRISON CELL CUISINE-
Watch, as actual prison inmates cook up fine meals, using just the food scraps that they can smuggle into their cell. The action intensifies as they show the areas and crevices they use to hide the food!
@daveinwarsh i watch wentworth, OITNB, and another prison show but i forgot the name (it was men). So i would totally watch this!
@daveinwarsh pruno!
@ivannabc @stecker Pretty sure the above still came from this video on pruno
WELCOME TO THE CAR-B-QUE!
All contestants will be given the same ingredients, an equal 1968 Chevelle SS 454 engine compartment to use, and the same 200 miles of driving to cook the entire meal!
They can use all the aluminum foil, wire and string that is needed to cook the meal to perfection. Cameras follow along as they encounter the occasional engine fire and mechanical breakdown. It’s non-stop action for cooking show and car enthusiasts.
Food will be judged by looks, taste and tested for carbon monoxide.
@daveinwarsh
Yeah, I guess using chevies they’d have to be prepared for those breakdowns…
Creme Fraiche Prince of Bel-Air
You guessed it. Each week, the renowned Creme Fraiche tournament champion himself, Mitch Hinkles, puts his skills to the test by crafting a different 5 course meal centered around his signature ingredient; creme fraiche! Oh, and it takes place in Bel-Air, Los Angeles! (you know, cuz the title)
Two bakers grow restless as their promised ingredients are never delivered. Join us as we overhear their conversations on the hardships of life, their nostalgic musings, and their most intimate philosophical thoughts. Deeply personal and candid, this is Waiting for the Dough.
(Premieres 9/8 Central, right after Nude Deep Frying)
Living Sous Vide Loca
A Jeopardy-style immersion into the Sous Vide lifestyle with a board full of answers with a cooking time and a temperature, where the contestants identify the item being cooked in the form of a question.
Play along in the at-home drinking version!
Antiques Roadstew
An ever-cooking pot of stew sits in the far corner of a rented warehouse. Excited fans line up with their food item. A judge rates it and explains the history of the food item. They throw it in the pot, and only then does the fan find out how much the food item was worth. Submitters can take home bowls of stew equal to the cost of the submitted item if they choose, but tax penalties apply.
Roadkill Survivor
Last chef to send his tasters to the ER with a preparation of random roadkill, wins!
Cook or be Cooked.
A Survivor meets Hell’s Kitchen show where each week a chef is voted out of the kitchen and into next weeks challenge.
Instant-Pot Bake-off
Chopped-style, three contestants use an Instant-Pot, a baker’s pantry of ingredients, and one mandatory ingredient: food-grade ‘sticky kush’
The contestants have an hour to bake something, with required taste-testing every five minutes as the clock ticks.
The panel of judges have one question:
Did the baker or the bakery get baked in time?
[Kill It, Cook It, Eat It][1]
Great show on how animals get processed into meat. A group of volunteers have to kill, clean, cook and eat. Later seasons included vegetarians in the mix. I don’t know why a vegetarian would think that they could convince meat eaters to give it up but they always tried.
Food Safari - an Australian series that was filmed beautifully and had some great ethnic recipes. If you can catch the early series, you will learn a lot of the culture and unique spices/dishes.
I’m 'merican, so if you want to marry me, hit me up.
@wew You forgot something.
Must have own boat.
@mike808 Oh, you now got me thinking of the only thing that matters in life, Maryland Blue Crabs. Man oh man do I miss those. How often I’ve dreamt of having a few dozen air mailed to me.
@wew Louisiana soft-shells for me.
@mike808 @wew Can’t star this enough. My first job was in a Baltimore seafood house, steaming Blue Crabs with Old Bay Seasoning. We also served soft-shell crab sandwiches that would blow your mind. Crab cakes!
Now crabs cost about 20 times what they did then, and are 1/3 the size because of over-harvesting.
What’s for Dinner?
Follow Lenard Drupydik as he returns home everyday from his 8am-5pm job and hour long commute to ask his spouse, “What’s for dinner?” Tip-tow through the minefield of passive-aggressive comments regarding the meal that has been prepared.
Yeah, I really like the cooking shows myself, and I have the weight gain to prove it.
TIL Alton Brown has an album out called “Bitter Like Me”.
(Alton Brown and the Edible Inedivable Trio). So, in a YT clip I saw, he’s performing live and says how his daughter asked “Daddy, is your work hard?” And he says “No, not at all, but we have to make it look hard for TV.” Ha!