I am in the habit of watching shows like “Cupcake Wars”; “Chopped”; and “Iron Chefs” with my family. It’s one of the few things we all enjoy watching together.
I’ve noticed that in almost every competition, on almost every show, it seems like the bakers and chefs are frantically plating their food; putting on frosting; etc. as the final 10 or 15 seconds run out. It seems like 99% of the time, they have just enough time, no more no less to get finished.
Thinking about it, this doesn’t seem very believable to me. I would think that a competent chef or baker in such a competition would sometimes go down to the wire, but would normally have an extra few minutes at the end.
It occurs to me that what must be going on is that the shows are edited. In order to intensify the drama, they take a clip of the baker frantically applying frosting which actually took place 10 minutes before the clock ran out, and run it with an audio of the host shouting “one minute left”; and then cut to a shot of the clock counting down the last 20 seconds. All to give the false impression that the baker or chef is working frantically to the last second and has just enough time to get finished.
Does anyone happen to know if my hypothesis is correct?
I agree with your hypothesis and would add that at least one cooking show was publicly exposed for doing this recently when a contestant committed suicide. The show still ran the footage of the contestant, only adding a “sympathy card” at the end credits of the episode acknowledging that the contestant had died. It really creeped me out and made it seem that the cooking show was trying to drag the last possible ounce of entertainment value out of the contestant before finally being forced to own up to reality at the very end.
As has been discussed in previous threads, Iron Chef America is deceptive in several ways. First, the guest chef chooses the Iron Chef well before the program. The other Iron Chefs are not there for the filming. They use stock footage and stand-ins to make it appear that they’re there. Second, both the guest chef and the Iron Chef are given three possibilities for the secret ingredient, so they can both prepare menus for each of the three possibilities well before the filming. Third, it appears that after grabbing their share of the secret ingredient, they don’t run to the kitchen and start immediately. They are given time to get their other ingredients and bring them to the kitchen. Fourth, it apparently is true that they have to finish all five dishes during the filming. However, it also seems that they then throw that food out after the filming. They then are given time to prepare the dishes again. One of them prepares their dishes and lets the judges taste them in front of the camera. Then the other one prepares their dishes and lets the judges taste them in front of the camera. Fifth, sometimes one of the chefs don’t finish all five dishes in time. The filming stops and all the footage is thrown out. Sometimes the guest chef is invited back for another try.
I have only seen this show a couple of times, but when I watched last week it seemed like the dishes plated within the time limit were on the sloppy side but the dishes set before the judges were perfectly arranged. This would explain it.
Reality tv loves to create action by forcing people to frantically run.
Top Chef loves to make their chefs run in Whole Foods just buying the ingredients. Then they impose totally ridiculous time constraints on the cooking. It’s all designed to create frantic action and drama on a cooking show. It also forces great chefs to make cooking errors and that’s even more manufactured drama & ratings.
I wish they’d just film a normal cooking show like Julia Child did for thirty years. But they didn’t ask for my advice.
On a cooking show there is a great advantage to plating at the last possible minute. First your food is hotter. Second you can control the level of doneness better since food continues to cook as long as it is hot. Third, food can lose moisture and texture waiting to be served. Fourth you can add garnishes and sides that have contrasting temperatures without the temperatures offsetting. In a competition style show such as Top Chef, serving as close to a la minute is a great advantage and I expect that part of the show is usually for real.
Based on ‘‘curiosity research’’ and a friend who is a Food Network regular (Iron Chef a half dozen times as sous Chef and twice a contestant on Chopped).
Iron Chef requires one plate (you sort of qualify your food by finishing one plate of each). Before serving judges, you make up all the plates as fresh as possible.
Chopped requires four plates be finished in X time, and they go just as they were finished.
There is editing in Chopped so you can see all the contestants. For example, they announce there are 90 seconds left, but to show the final contestant getting things together, some of what you see might be at the 2-minute mark for that contestant.
In Chopped, they come down to the wire pretty much all the time.
Other notes about Iron Chef are accurate.
My peeve: Of all the things these shows do, it’s the edits/quotes that mislead the viewer into thinking that a chef has no chance, or is doing well, and then the results say otherwise. On the Food Network, it’s so transparent that if a chef offers any confidence in food X, food X is going to do them in.
Slight Hijack
I love the editing in TAR when they try to make it seem like every leg the last two are separated by a few feet. Then of course there have been a few legs that the Philiminated team actually is a few yards behind the penultimate team giving what could be a great ending, but one lost on the overuse of suspense every other week.
Wendell Wegner’s summary of the Iron Chef America deceptions makes sense in the context of the show (and, ultimately, I’m not too bothered by them). But the fact that the contestants are re-making the dishes for the actual judging makes me even more curious about how this works in Chopped, where the dishes are served as-is: the contestants’ dishes are not being served to the judges at the same time even though they’re plated within seconds of each other. That would seem to have a pretty substantial effect on the dishes of the 3rd and 4th dishes judged. Is that taken into account in judging? Or is it not really that big a deal, and mitigated via heating lamps or other means of keeping consistency?
One episode where this came up pretty significantly (it seemed to me, anyway!): a chef had prepared a venison dish which she had just barely finished cooking to a medium rare before the time limit. One of the judges commented that it was cooked enough–barely–but suffered by not having time to rest prior to being served. I can’t remember if she was up first for judging, but it seems like a situation where she would have been fine if her food was judged later. Does something like this factor into the order of judging and/or what they’re critical about or gloss over?
Yeah, in the last episode it looked like the winning team’s taxi GPS could not find the destination and kept recalculating over and over. I suspect they filmed the GPS saying “recalculating” several times at the first (only) wrong turn, then had the bit spliced in to the montage along with the guy saying “turn here… no over there… where is it?” or something like that.
I don’t know the answer to the question, and there are certainly situations where this would be a factor, but meat needs to rest *before *it is sliced, to prevent loss of natural juices. Resting after it is plated doesn’t do much for it.
There are plenty of them on Food Network, but they’re all on during the daylight hours: Ina Garten, Mario Batali, the Neelys, Aarti Sequeira, Rachel Ray, Giada De Laurentis, Paula Deen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the evenings they focus on competition shows.
For what it’s worth, a lot of the last minute work could be left out. On Chopped, you see a lot of people who are short on time, so they just slop down some spoonfuls of food and call it done. Those who have more time, carefully place each morsel, wipe the edges of the plate, sprinkle some extra garnish, etc. So it is possible to spend anywhere between 1 and 5 minutes plating depending on how much time you have left.
But are these things cleverly edited? Clearly they are. Iron Chef is so bad that I’d call it a total fiction. I tend to believe that Chopped is a little closer to the truth, but you can pick up on cases where the editing has clearly distorted time and shown events out of sequence.
Food Network has a sister channel called the Cooking Channel, which features more of the traditional instructional cooking shows. (But given that channel drift appears to be inevitable, I don’t know how long that will last.)
They do tend to show people rushing to plate at the end. I agree with the earlier post about the food being hotter and less likely to wilt greens, etc. However, contestants are actively admonished for finishing with time to spare on Chopped. The judges usually natter on about how the contestant didn’t devote enough effort or whatever.
I think that’s hogwash, of course. Unless the dish is blatantly simple, I often think it’s a sign of better planning and understanding of time constraints.
Nine times out of ten the dish is either 1) too simple, or 2) done so quickly that something might be invariably forgotten – a basket ingredient, for instance.
On one of the Chopped episodes I saw last night, there was one particular cheftestant who I thought was a shoo-in to win. He sailed through the first two courses. He finished his dessert course with maybe 7 or 8 minutes to spare? He explained on the voiceover that he wanted to keep everything simple because he’s not a pastry person, but the more he studied what he had made, the more he realized that maybe he should do something else to “elevate” it. He didn’t though. The judged praised the dish and awarded the win to the other cheftestant, who struggled with his dessert up to the last minute.
On shows like Top Chef, if they didn’t edit it, you’d see all the chefs prepping at first, making stock, etc., but you often see meat sizzling in a pan. If you’ve got an hour to cook, searing a sirloin isn’t the first thing you’re doing. They just mix things up to keep the pace going - sizzling meat is sexier than chopping vegetables.
They had a show on Sunday with Guy Fieri and Rachel Ray guiding some C-list celebrities through a cooking competition, and the edited in displays of over-the-top emotions pretty much ruined it.
