Food Network's Behind-The-Scenes System That Makes A Timed Cooking Show Possible

There are a surprising number of home cooks that think they can outcook professional chefs on television shows. While the professional chefs often make the challenges look easy, they are not for the faint of heart. Popular food competition shows are usually timed, making them exciting to watch for viewers while simultaneously making the competitors often feel rushed under the time constraints. While there aren't many ways to speed up baking a cake or searing a steak, there are some olive branches extended to the competitors on screen that allow them to shave a few minutes off of their food preparation. 

On Food Network's popular competition show "Chopped", famous for its quirky ingredients hiding in a mystery box, contestants are allowed to take five to ten minutes to walk through the kitchen set to get familiar with the environment where they'll be cooking, allowing them to figure out where the ingredients, appliances, and tools are located before the competition starts. This walk through is essential for chefs, giving them a familiarity with the set and allowing them to more quickly run to exact locations of anything they might need. Knowing where the pantry is, where the pots and pans are, and what tools and ingredients you have at your disposal ahead of time can shave valuable seconds off a chef's movements and decision making, as well as help them plan a dish in their heads on the fly. Contestants are again given this short walk through in the pantry area before each segment, as the ingredients can change between the various rounds of competition. 

On the "Chopped" set, the competitors' individual stations are set up to help ease the more time-consuming aspects of cooking, like waiting for water to boil. On each station, the ovens are preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, pots of water have been brought to a simmer, and deep-fryers are already hot and ready to go. Bringing a pot of water to a boil can range anywhere from just a few minutes to ten minutes, while waiting for a fryer to heat up can often take up to thirty minutes, making these pre-heating steps extremely valuable to contestants who already have a small window of time to create a dish. 

Without these systems in place for the chefs, they would either have to wait around for these various appliances and liquids to come to the proper temperature, or would have to drastically alter their dishes to omit those cooking techniques, which would likely not be favorable to the final outcome of the dish. There is already so much that the "Chopped" contestants need to focus on, like incorporating the ingredients from the mystery box, seasoning everything properly, and keeping an eye on the clock, that adding pre-heating an oven to their tasks would likely make the show less enjoyable to watch. Learn more from chefs and culinary stars about what working for Food Network is actually like.