Cooking challenge is a stressful viewing experience

Recently, we watched the ongoing cooking challenge, “The Big Break,” Sundays on the Asian Food Channel, and found it an exciting but excessively stressful viewing experience. Its contestants appear to be youths from different Asian countries, including two surviving bets from the Philippines, Ruth and Lawrence.

The telecast proved to be particularly stressful for Ruth, who was almost booted out due to her less-than-competent leadership of one of the episode’s two cooking teams.

We felt that the cooking tilt pressured the student cooks too much when it required them to come up with a six-course meal for 15 “VIP” guests. Hey, mentors, these are teenagers taken out of their respective countries’ comfort zones, so cut them some slack—please!

Bundle of nerves

The next challenge was even more stressful: The young cooks were given only 20-25 minutes to each come up with a “creative” pizza! Naturally, they were a bundle of nerves, frazzled due to the exceedingly rigorous time limit, so mistakes were made—big time.

“Our” Ruth accidentally pushed another young cook’s pizza out of its intended position in the oven they shared. To make things worse, the contestant was later eliminated from the show. —Can you imagine Ruth’s guilt over accidentally contributing to the hapless contestant’s poor showing?!

Throughout the telecast, Ruth was so stressed out that she even fainted briefly before a big challenge, so we feared that she wouldn’t be able to participate in it. But, she “miraculously” recovered in time to tackle the challenge—and managed to survive for another week, by the skin of her teeth!

Extra motivation

On the plus side, we’re glad that the contestants don’t come from well-connected families—in fact, many of them don’t speak English all that well. This gives them extra motivation to do well in the tilt, to significantly improve their families’ prospects after the competition shall have been concluded.

And we understand why the mentors are being so hard on the student cooks, in order for them to be “battle-ready” once opportunity knocks.

It’s just that, in achieving that laudable objective, they run the risk of pushing their students to the breaking point, as has already happened several times thus far. If the mentors don’t let up, can you imagine how physically and psychologically spent the remaining survivors will be during the tilt’s final-finals?

Big Break

“The big break.” The show’s mentors push their students to  their breaking point. www.asianfoodchannel.com