I liked Jacques Pepin’s shows. The ones he did by himself were good for the cooking, the ones with his daughter had a little less technique but made up for it in charm. I’m going to try to learn how to make a Paris-Brest cake this summer.
I also like America’s Test Kitchen; the focus is on the food more than the personalities. (Possibly because the host doesn’t have one.)
Ming Tsai had a show, don’t know if it was local to Boston or not. His restaurant is not too far away. I’ve been meaning to try it just to see if the stuff that looks so good on television is any good in real life.
I grew up in a very stoic traditional family and never explored food out of traditional american, spaghetti was about as exotic as it got.
Jeff smith/frugal gourmet opened up a whole new world for me. I’d never evem eaten pizza before, and then I tried chinese food and holy hell nothing held me back. ( the west side of indianapolis startee becoming little mexico and thanks to lovely little grandmother down the street I regularly got pans of homemade goodies with all the fixings after I sent some of the local redneck punks packing when I caught them beating on her much younger grandson and trying to take his bike.
I hate bullies.
so she sent me food and I sent back roses from my garden her name was rosita, and her grandson turned out to really like hekping me garden and my tutoring his english and him helping me with spanish,
I miss good neighbors. I miss enchiladas.
damn now I’m hungry.
Part of it was, indeed, that he sobered up. Part was also that his wife suffered a stroke, and he decided to change his style of cooking, away from the fat-intensive traditional French style he had done, towards going very low-fat.
I got to meet him ~15 years ago; I was working for Quaker Oats at the time, and he did healthy-cooking demonstrations at our booth at the AARP national convention. He was extremely gracious, and treated every person who wanted to speak to him with great kindness.
Julia Child, Graham Kerr and Jeff “the frug” Smith were all ground-breaking TV cooking show hosts, and all of them were very influencial on my love of food and wine. But people got bored of the same old “chop and drop” cooking shows, especially at places like the Food Network that had 24 hours of such programming. So they started (like so many others) with the reality shows; which are much MUCH cheaper to produce. PBS has different budget/viewership structures, so they stayed with the traditional C&D format for cooking shows.
I also miss Justin (Joo-STAN) Wilson and Keith Floyd, who were both hilarious in their times.
There are a few old-style shows on the Food Network’s sister channel, the Cooking Network. For example, Chinese Food Made Easy, with host Ching-He Huang.
She’s also easy on the eyes, and the show’s actually interesting, even if you’re not watching it for the recipes.
I’m guessing that Alton (or whoever wrote the episode) thought for some reason they needed a mashout, so they heated it up with the grains still in to kill the enzymes. However if you’re using extract with some crushed specialty grains, you don’t need a mashout because there’s no enzymatic activity going on, so this was a mistake.
Still wouldn’t make the resulting beer undrinkable; just maybe slightly more astringent or something- isn’t the threat polyphenols from the husks?
