Hey! David Rosengarten is making food videos on YouTube!

Yes! I just discovered that David Rosengarten, the best (and for a while, nearly only) thing on Food TV. His show Taste is very fondly remembered. This was back when they couldn’t afford sets, audiences or game shows or any of that extraneous crap. Taste was about food.

I got nostalgic, and searched YouTube to see if any of his old shows were up. One is, but sadly it’s by one of those goobers who videotapes the TV screen (Attn GOOBERS! A USB video capture device can be bought for less than $50!)

So I did a bit more searching, and found that he has his own, rarely visited channel!

Check it out!

Cool find!

David Rosengarten was the guy who got me interested in cooking, his show was great. Really ahead of its time considering the glut of generally mediocre cooking shows these days.

I never really understood why Food Network booted all the talent they had when the name changed a few years ago.

Love David’s work, but the editing of the slicer episode was absolutely jarring. I hope the rest aren’t like that.

Sadly, they are. The guy kept cutting them tighter and tighter, which is fine. But he needs to re-shoot the scenes of David talking and have him repeat exactly the edited dialog, and use that as the new soundtrack.

The one about frying eggs in extra virgin olive oil is the worst: “You want/about/half an inch/of oil…”

That’s really disappointing, but I think I’ll still watch.

Is it a matter of trying to save time, or is it a stylistic choice?

I suspect it is a combination of several things: an inexperienced (though reasonably talented) director with limited access to the talent, who tends to make a lot of parenthetical remarks. So you either fully script something, which requires a TelePrompter (and an operator for that) or you just let them talk and hope you can cut something together afterwards. They obviously wanted to convey a lot of information in a short amount of time, based on the reality that people are far less willing to watch long programs on-line. These things exist as inserts on the web site mentioned at the end of each clip.

Personally, I’d pay to have access to the Taste library, which is just sitting on a shelf somewhere.