Well Fed Network

Posted by Harry Kenney on Edible TV

There’s a new and wonderful cooking show on, in case it has passed your attention. It certainly may have, as it’s part of the new Planet Green channel on cable from the folks at Discovery. Unless you’re madly into saving the world from itself, are reincarnated hippies or a card-carrying member of Greenpeace, you might not watch this network, so it is very possible you’ve missed this new show. If that’s the case, you’re missing a good one.

I’m talking, of course, about Emeril Green, the first new show in over five years from master chef Emeril Lagasse — and his first ever away from the Food Network. I didn’t know what this show was going to be about. I honestly expected a version of Jamie at Home where Jamie Oliver grows his own veggies then walks into a shack and cooks. This is nothing like that actually.

What it is, is something like the cooking show genre called “help me” shows. You’ve seen those with Tyler Florence’s Rescue 911 or the current Rescue Me with Danny Boome or Take Home Chef with Curtis Stone. This is like those for sure, but it has two things going for it, one is unique twist and the second is obvious, it has Emeril.

First off, the entire show is in a supermarket, a Whole Foods store in Washington, DC to be specific. And this special supermarket has places set up for cooking — including an entire kitchen. So when Emeril wants to show the person he’s helping fresh diakon, he walks down the produce aisle and picks it up. (Aha, so that’s what it looks like, a friend of mine watching the show with me exclaimed). If he wants to talk about exotic ingredients, he walks down the Asian aisle and says, “let’s pick up some Sriracha hot sauce” (funny, I’d seen Tyler do this in something a week ago and I couldn’t remember the name; now I know the name and saw what it looks like.) In short, it’s the world’s greatest pantry: It’s an entire supermarket as a pantry!

Having viewed the first ten Emeril Green episodes, let me tell you this: This is an excellent teaching show. And I mean that from beginners to more established cooks too. Why beginners? Pretty obvious; it goes through the paces. Why more established cooks?  Because as the bunch of shows demonstrate, not everyone knows everything. The very first episode, “Fish Tales,” has to do with a very experienced home cook, but one who just had a block when it came to fish. And another episode was yet another experienced cook who wanted to make Southern food for her husband, but being she’s a seafood-vegetarian (whatever they call that), she didn’t know how to make a meatless yet full-bodied Southern meal. I know of people who are exactly like both those folks, experienced but don’t know everything. Well, except a five star chef, natch.

Does the teaching get in the way if you are experienced? Nope! I’m pretty good with fish, but not great; I learned a few things. I have zero problems with pork and from that episode I didn’t learn anything new, but it didn’t matter because I got to see some excellent dishes made. And that’s the beauty of this new show; in fact, that’s the beauty of any really good cooking show in my opinion: find a new recipe, get some new ideas, maybe learn a little tip or a new technique. If you know the ingredients well, the teaching is done in a way that doesn’t take anything away from it; and if you don’t know the ingredient well, you learn even more. Emeril Green nicely hits this balance. It’s a lot more instructive than Emeril Live was; it’s much more like Essence of Emeril and then some.

If there’s any gripe at all about this show, it was something that was apparent only on the two very first episodes, where Emeril was slightly nervous and a few hokey things came out of his mouth — like “we’re going to tackle her fish problem” and “we’re going to toss her in the deep end now” or “we help her come face to face with her foul fish phobia” — which thankfully all ended after the first two episodes and he didn’t do anything like that since. So we’ll dismiss that as a shake out of the concept or as opening show jitters. Hey, Emeril is a pro; it doesn’t take him long with his experience to slip more comfortably into a groove. And by episode three, he had it down.

In short, think of this concept — at first seeming a tad strange because it’s not been done before, certainly not to this degree — of cooking and gathering ingredients at a supermarket as the world’s ultimate pantry. I know I’ve mentioned this, but it’s worth mentioning yet again. How would you love to — as he did during the Asian meat show — in the middle of cooking say I want a radish and walk 20 feet and pick up radishes super fresh off the produce shelf and start slicing?! Wow! Cook’s dream come true. Same thing when he’s showing people fish or meat cuts. Entire whole fish, maybe 30 varieties sitting there. Need advice on meat? Emeril and the person he’s helping walk over to the butcher, and, of course, he’s laden with hundreds of “show and tell” beef cuts right there. A cook, a real foodie, can quickly fall in love with this idea. I know I have. The only bad thing is how do I go about figuring out how I can move into and live inside a supermarket too?

Among some of the highlights from the first group of shows: Emeril using lentils, definitely one of those foods you do not see used enough on television cooking shows. A woman showed Emeril (yes, it can happen, love the give and take) that for making Cuban beans, you need cloves, and he showed her how putting in ham hocks ups the flavor. Making a nice east makes west meal using bibb lettuce leaves instead of bread. And speaking of leaves, one dish was an entire snapper with citrus in the oven, roasted and poached in a giant banana leaf. (I think he has the “green” part down.) Or when he showed a firefighter how to make as a bit of a side a chicory coffee with orange peel studded with cloves.

In the end, the food looks sensational and you really want to both eat it and make it yourself. You learn some techniques, some new ingredients. He made a mojito with Jamaican ugli fruit — now I have to try that. It’s Emeril, probably the most comfortable chef to be around and one of the most knowledgeable, and all with a pantry as big as a supermarket. What’s not to love here? Both because I hate to give any show a five out of five star rating — I like to see how they do over the longer haul before crowning my top rating — and because I don’t have half stars, Emeril Green gets four out of five stars.