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The Chef Show on Netflix

Most of us would like to be better cooks. Most of us also have day jobs that occupy our time and most of our energy so we don't all have the ability or desire to attend culinary school. Nor do we generally have direct access to a top professional chef to oversee our efforts, provide instruction, and correct our mistakes. Our efforts to improve generally need to fall into our leisure activities: cooking, reading, or watching TV. Maybe we'll ask a friend with a particularly good barbecue sauce for his secret, but in general, if it's too much like work, well who wants more work at the end of a busy day.

If, however, you're a famous actor/ director with a strong track record, you get to tell your company (the studio), that you'd like them to get you a top chef to train you and that you would like them to pay both of you. That is pretty much what Jon Favreau did with the 2014 movie Chef. I'm not going to review the movie, but I bring it up because it served as the launching point for the Netflix series The Chef Show.

The Chef Show is a cooking show that's actually about cooking. Jon Favreau teams up with Roy Choi, renowned chef and the Chief Chef of Kogi BBQ, a fleet of gourmet food trucks and restaurants. Choi was the technical adviser for the movie Chef and helped train Jon Favreau to cook for the film. The premise of The Chef Show is that Jon took those lessons and a stint at a real culinary school seriously and actually learned to cook like a professional.
Here's the official trailer:



There's some chit-chat and celebrity guests from time to time (Gwyneth Paltrow and Seth Rogen, among others), but the show is really about cooking. Even when there are celebrity guests, they are cooking something using professional techniques. Often the guests are professional chefs and restaurant owners who allow Jon and Roy to come into their restaurants and help prepare one of their signature dishes. The discussion is often about why a certain technique is used, how the chef achieves a unique flavor, and a little bit about where they learned to cook.

The show is not going to make you a professional chef, although it may make you want to be one. It will, however, show you the way real chefs cook real dishes and give you real tips that you can use to make your cooking better. So far, The Chef Show consists of 20 episodes available only on Netflix.
They don't really give you recipes, although a few are available on The Chef Show official website. Instead, they provide a quick list of ingredients, without quantities, to show you the flavors and textures that go into the dish.

If you read this blog, I have to assume that you enjoy cooking. If you enjoy cooking, and learning about cooking while being entertained, skip the game-show format shows  and watch The Chef Show on Netflix. 

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