If you’ve never watched the show before, allow me give to you a quick rundown...
In a nutshell (haha, food puns) contestants are required to cook their best dish, sometimes from a pre-determined set of ingredients, sometimes from their imaginations, and sometimes straight from a recipe, and in many instances the worst dish of the day goes home, eliminating it’s maker from the competition.
From auditions right through to the grand finale, I noticed a common theme.
What set an aspiring chef up for success was usually determined in the first few minutes of the cook - and that marker of success was the quality of their idea. Contestants who were stumped by the challenge and failed to develop a clear idea of what they wanted to cook, soon found themselves in an elimination cook-off.
But having a good idea and clear direction isn’t enough, often cooks would have a winner of an idea, but find time constraints a challenge which forced them to cut corners and skip steps, or restrictions on ingredients that forced them to make inadequate substitutions. These dishes would never quite make the grade.
But contestants (even the seemingly average ones) who were able to get a clear picture of what they wanted to cook early on, taking the allotted time and allowed ingredients into account, and who then spent all their energy on achieving this goal, were consistently more successful than those who chose to wing it - even when they were technically less skilled.
I think there’s a lesson we can all take from this, don’t you?
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