For those who have never cooked Vietmanese food before, it can often be quite disconcerting the degree of caramelization required for a good nuoc mau.
Everybody on FN mispronounces plantain. Not a dictionary in the whole network, I gather.
This. There’s a podcast I listen to that includes an interview segment. Unfortunately, the host is very reluctant to ask questions to which she already knows the answer. She’s gotten a little better lately, but only a little (as in, she’s gone from not doing it to doing it reluctantly). I suspect that’s one of the hardest things for a journalist to learn, and she’s not really a journalist.
Many if not most of the food network hosts I’m aware of have run kitchens and/or authored cookbooks; even in the era of Next Food Network Star, almost no one goes straight from the home kitchen to Chelsea Market. (Alton Brown is an exception, but he at least went to culinary school, and he’s been pretty firm about not being a chef).
The chef with the canned corned beef problem was Amanda Freitag. (And she actually is a chef, as are the other contestants on that program.) A quick Google shows her to be 38. Considering I’m 45 and I can only remember seeing my grandmother open a can with a key like that in my very early childhood (like preschool), I think it’s an age thing.