The Great American Recipe

A competition show that doesn't eliminate contestants. A quest for "the best home cook in America" with no stakes or reward that constantly overlooks poor protein cookery. A reality show that offers no reality other than saccharine melodrama that's often undercut by edits that I swear were done to make the contestants look like liars.

This is a mess of a show that has a good idea but needs to cut out all the pro-forma cruft and focus on home cooks cooking, sharing their home life, and improving their skills. Don't try to shoehorn vapid talking heads and poorly-formed reality TV challenges just because it was trending well on Food Network 15 years ago.

Where the Great British Bake Off gets people from all around the isles to to bake and add their spin to classic or invent new British bakes.

The Great American Recipe encourages Americans from all walks of life to share their own recipes and takes on how they interpret American food. The show attempts to show regional and cultural variations of different foods.

Some highlights are a Korean Americans gochujang tacos. A Vietnamese Americans spaghetti and meatballs with sriracha, and that's only in the first 2 episodes. Personally I believe the show does a good job of showing the complexity of American food and how good in America changes over time through the influence of immigration.

Really enjoyed The Great American Recipe. Home cooks represented many diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and prepared unique and interesting recipes. And they all got along; no cut-throat maneuvers in any episodes. Great show to watch if you are into cooking shows.

It's not the recipes that are judged, it's the cooks who get sent home. It would make more sense if all the contestants stayed for the entire show, and each time a cook created something, the RECIPE would receive a numerical score. At the end, the top scoring recipe would get the award, as would the cook who brought it.

Each week, the cooks pretty much get to cook whatever they want. It's usually something they've cooked a million times before. Where's the challenge? Only on the week that they had to swap recipes did they have to do something unfamiliar. The challenges needed to be much more clearly defined, and they needed to be a genuine challenge so the cooks had to get out of their comfort zone.

Wow. I like a good cooking show as much as the next guy. But this show is a joke. They have categories like love on a plate and put your DNA on a plate. And then the judges go around and tell these people who have been making a dish for their whole lives how to do it properly. And then they base their decisions on whether or not they cry during the judging or have a heartfelt story. This is absolutely ridiculous. I can't believe I watched it as long as I did. Some of the dishes are actually quite good. But, the fake smiles, the ridiculous sappy stories and constant flashbacks to love and family gets so old. If I hear the word family one more time I'm going to vomit.