The Taste is like MasterChef meets The Voice with professional and novice cooks pitted against each other in a blind competition to decide who can create the best single spoonful of food.
Gone are any pretensions of serving dishes up on slate or the back of a hedgehog, or cooking with dry ice or the power of your mind. None of that matters now, it’s all about as the title suggests; the taste.
And a bit about Nigella Lawson.
The taste test
First up is an audition round in which 25 competitors, home cooks and professional chefs present one spoonful of a winning dish to wow the judges; Nigella Lawson, Anthony Bourdain and Ludo Lefebvre.
Each wannabe Oliver/Ramsay/Roux Jr is competing to reach the final 12 when judges will pick four finalists each to mentor, with one being kicked out each week. If two mentors like a contestant, again like The Voice, the contestant can choose one whose kitchen to inhabit.
The contestants
Ranging from 18 to middle-aged they were cooking up everything from duck to roasted figs.
In fact there was a lot of duck and figs. The unifying factor seemed to be though that all of their spoonfuls were MASSIVE. Obviously this was a desperate attempt to impress, but they were unlikely to make it through if a judge was choking on a 12oz steak.
Dixie is a professional chef who prepared a combination of lamb and tahini puree. It may have felt like baby food in their mouths but both Anthony and Ludo wanted her.
James is a novice that fooled the judges with his chestnutty pasta portion. It was enough to get him onto Ludo’s team, ironic given Ludo doesn’t believe in home cooks.
There were of course the slightly odd ones, the same ones that stalk the X Factor, one apparently a professional with celeb clients, served up a spoonful that looked like it nearly broke one of Nigella’s teeth. Off with his head!
Judges’ comments
The judges were trapped in some kind of cage with no windows save for an interior window, making it feel like we’d been allowed into Channel 4′s Sex Box and it turns out it contains a working kitchen.
Ludo is a caricature Frenchman, he says things like ‘meestake’, ‘way too much shut-ney’ and ‘I don’t speak English good’.
It’s brilliant.
Anthony is New York-mean saying an eighteen year old hopeful should ‘tough the f*** up’ when he didn’t get through. MEAN.
Nigella doesn’t even need to make any comments, she seems to have been shot so that her eyes are permanently sparkling and her hair perfectly curled. Despite that though, after saying yes to the first spoonful to touch her lips she became a nay-sayer, relentlessly veto-ing every chef almost instantly.
The finalists
Each chef has four finalists at this point, though as of yet they form one anomalous glob, as the competition continues we’ll get to see who can make tastebuds tingle and who’s not too tempting.
Next time
12 becomes 11 as one unlucky chef is kicked out of the kitchen, surely not from #TeamNigella.
