Teaching nonfoodies how to cook

“Chef in Your Ear’s” Greg Komorowski (right)

It’s standing room only for cooking shows and competitions on TV this season, so programs have to work harder than usual to stand out and catch foodies’ fancy.

Some shows do so by featuring exotic cuisine (“Bizarre Foods,” “Unique Eats”), while others focus on star value (Anthony Bourdain, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson).

For its part, “Chef in Your Ear” stands out by cleverly tweaking the TV cooking show concept to add its own “signature” touch, which involves the “hands-off” use of expert mentors to transform the world’s worst cooks into confident and competition-ready witches and mavens in the kitchen.

As its unique title indicates, the program does this by having each chef-mentor taking his amateur ward through the complicated recipe to create a fancy dish—just by talking his student through the entire process, step by step.

Contestants and mentors aren’t even in the same room, and each coach talks to his assigned ward via mouth and earpiece. This “hands-off” limitation makes the tutoring task much harder, and the added stress soon affects both teacher and student.

The professional chef may know exactly what to do to come up with the perfect, tilt-winning dish, but the fact that his student is blissfully clueless sometimes makes him feel like he’s speaking in a foreign language!

On the telecast we viewed recently, the tyro contestant didn’t even know the names of some vegetables, and couldn’t figure out how to use even simple and obvious kitchen implements!

To be sure, such built-in problems and stresses have been intentionally put in place by the production to generate the tension, “drama” and inadvertent comedy needed to keep the TV competition pithily, colorfully and edgily valuable.

So, both mentors and students pushed the tilt’s “conflict quotient” to the hilt, for culinary “entertainment’s” sake.

The female contestant, Kim, made it a point to talk too much and too loudly, shattering her mentor’s professional equanimity and self-confidence. Her constant yakking also wasted a lot of time, so her mentor really lost his cool and had to skip some steps just to beat the clock.

The other contestant, Jace, was cooler, quieter and more cooperative, so he and his chef-mentor, Fil-Am Jordan Andino, had an easier time coming up with a more “professional-looking” dish, with time to spare.

Instructively, however, Kim was the more colorful and thus more interesting (if occasionally irritating) contestant.

And, most tellingly of all—her dish won the lone judge’s nod! Yes, Jace’s creation looked better, but hers was more delicious. Go figure.