The race continues to create the most ridiculous cooking programme on TV. Channel 4’s new brainchild, Crazy Delicious, finds the culinary nutty professor Heston Blumenthal teaming up with fellow-judges Carla Hall and Niklas Ekstedt to become the “Gods of Food”.
Each week, three amateur contestants turn up on a studio set which supposedly represents some kind of mythical garden or bosky glade from classical mythology (though with its warped scenery and funny-coloured foliage, it mostly looks like something out of an ancient episode of Star Trek), where they can find an exotic array of ingredients with which they must create new dishes. The “Gods” present the eventual winner with a symbolic Golden Apple.
This is an excuse to visit the farthest frontiers of crackpot foodism, abetted by the bellowing emcee Jayde Adams, crashing around the scenery with a shock of vermilion hair and a sparkly fairy-godmother dress. "Go forth and forage!" she likes to bawl at the contestants. For their first task this week, the hopefuls had to cook with strawberries, which gave us such marvels as Adam’s strawberry cheesecake buffalo wings with strawberry chilli sauce, and Hardeep’s giant chocolate egg with strawberry Eton Mess filling. Impressively, the divine referees managed to cope with these without resorting to a stomach pump, but there was worse to follow. Hannah’s “Woodland Wild Dog” was supposedly a hot dog made out of wild boar meat, but emerged resembling a flame-blackened chunk of wood. Adam’s “Birth and Turf” creation featured deep-fried burgers containing peanut butter, jelly and ice cream.
It was as if everyone had been dragooned to a fancy-dress party and plied with drugs which suppressed the powers of reason and re-mapped the tastebuds, so “yummy!” and “bleurggggh!” had changed places. Mind you, a lot of Heston’s food has always been like that.
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