Miscellaneous

Future Food

By jeremyblachman

I stumbled across a TV show I've instantly become addicted to.  It's called Future Food, on the Planet Green network (which I did not know existed until I stumbled on this show) and it's a reality show about the chefs at a restaurant called Moto, in Chicago, which seems like it's from the El Bulli /WD-50 / Alinea school of molecular gastronomy and having fun with textures and tastes and doing all sorts of neat things with food.

Each episode has the chefs exploring a specific challenge they set for themselves-- make stuff that tastes like junk food entirely out of pulverized granola bars and those green super-food smoothies; make "seafood" out of not-seafood; make a veggie burger out of what cows eat that tastes better than a burger made from meat.  Those are the three episodes I've seen so far.  Apparently the show was new in the spring, and these are reruns.  Wikipedia doesn't even have an episode guide for this thing, so, really, I figure I'm the only person who has ever seen it.  The number of blogs I've found that mention this show is a smaller number than the number of blogs I have in my blogger account, so it really seems like it's pretty obscure.

But it's awesome.

It's a reality show only in the best sense-- there's no personal drama, it's all about the food.  And the "challenges" aren't artificial and pumped up with fake stakes-- they're having fun, they're trying to do some cool things with food, that's all.

There's a disclaimer at the beginning of the show that I think is funny: "Some of the recipes in this program are prepared using dangerous techniques.  Please do not attempt to replicate them at home."

Well, since I don't have a centrifuge or any calcium chloride, even if I wanted to...

Anyway, check it out, it seems to be on twelve times a week, so it's not that hard to find, assuming you get the Planet Green network, I guess.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on July 21, 2010 (boomark / email).