Over at my parents house they were watching this show, from beginning to end. Honestly, I have to say not one of the people who were accepted were bad cooks. The first oddity is exactly how bad they were. If you are a fan of Ranma 1/2 you’d remember how comically bad Akane’s cooking is. It was that bad.
The whole series takes place over the course of 10 days, the first competition was making shrimp and clams, with a light sauce. With no formal training they were to watch the chefs and then work from a recipe.
Only one person really did poorly, and only because he ran out of time before the clams opened.
That’s right, nearly every person who couldn’t cook a bowl of ramen was capable of understanding and duplicating from memory a successful shrimp and clam dish armed with nothing more than a recipe card. I’m not a terrible cook, and my mom and grandfather on my father’s side are great cooks. My grandfather even taught classes, and I can tell you, it is impossible to learn something like that so quickly without hardly any personal instruction. Even starting from an average skill level.
Within days, they were chopping vegetables with ease, butting the back of the knife with their palms in order to chop faster, and safer, capable of chopping far faster than I’ve even seen my mother do it. Making ravioli noodles from scratch. Balancing temperature and cook time, only a few times did they burn or under cook. Even delicate deserts were made, with a level of technique that takes TIME to develop, movements that require practice to master.
It would be like being left handed and by sight whittling with your right hand and making a perfect sculpture. It’d be like joining your first FPS and getting a 20 kill streak against players who have been playing for years. Like learning another language fluently in less than a week.
It. Is. Not. Possible. You simply cannot go from being comically incapable of making edible food to understanding advanced cooking techniques with little more than a note card telling you to do it and a single visual demonstration. It does not work that way for any skill, and far less cooking. I’d believe it if they could barely function til day 3, but mastering by sight on day one? They have been cooking, and cooking well for years long before claiming to be the worst.