SusieJ's Advent Calendar December 15, 2010

TV shows for beginning bakers

I'm a bit curmudgeonly about television. Most shows are too much like chips — I watch TV (and eat chips) because that's what's there, not because it's interesting or yummy. "Yummy" food programming is, for me, only about learning how to cook, no reality, not "games," just people teaching how to cook well. (Iron Chef is the bad Chinese dumplings of food programming; I rather like it in spite of myself, but too much is off-putting.)

There are only a few people whose shows are in-depth enough to really teach a novice how to bake. Most TV chefs cook a three-course meal in half an hour, something possible only with trained staff or prepared ingredients.

Sara Moulton, on the other hand, would cook a meal in an hour of live television, incuding all the chopping and measuring that takes most of the time. Food TV jettisoned Cooking Live with Sara Moulton, but you can still find her on public TV, although no longer cooking live.

[The icicles on our house were so big during the blizzards I wanted to donate them to the effort to preserve the icebergs.]In The French Chef, Julia Child did most, if not all, of the prep work on-camera because she focused on one dish at a time. She would demonstrate how to chop the vegetables and describe a heretofore-unheard-of ingredient. When it was time to saute the vegetables, rather than pulling out a pan of pre-sauteed vegetables, she would saute and discuss the history of the dish, variations or pitfalls. Her earliest shows are available on DVD.

Alton Brown also goes in-depth into a single dish in one program. He devotes one episode to chocolate chip cookies, showing how varying the ingredients changes the texture of the cookie to crisp or chewy or puffy. He slips science and culinary history into the program under goofiness. Early episodes of Good Eats are also available on DVD and he's one of the last trained chefs on Food TV.