Usual disclaimer: I'm not a professional chef, I don't belong in this forum....
Frankly, I think Ed does not in any way expect too much. Very basic technique should be a bare minimum. If you're going to show people how to do anything, you ought to have some idea how to do it yourself. Julia Child, who more or less invented cooking TV as a significant thing in the USA, trained at the Cordon Bleu, and while she was never a professional chef, she had quite good technique. And PBS has been very good about retaining this: the people who do their shows continue to be people who have a reasonable claim to know what they're doing. But Food Network has reached the point, it seems, that for their low-budget filler programs they just grab any vaguely attractive person who can put out food that their families like and say, "hey, let's do a cooking show." These people have no business teaching a large audience how to cook. I mean, frightening though it is, I could do a lot of this stuff better, and I have never in my life attended a regular cooking class: I just read good people, absorb and think about technique, and practice trying to do things right. The notion that people who do basic cooking significantly less well than I are on TV showing a nation how to cook is terrifying to me.  |