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Britain's Best Home Cook with Mary Berry

Publicity shot from the BBC: judges and host of Britain's Best Home Cook.

This week, still locked down to avoid the resurgence of the dreaded coronavirus, we've been watching food shows. On Hulu, we watched all eight episodes of Britain's Best Home Cook, Season 1, originally from the BBC. Throughout the show, the immortal Mary Berry and two lesser judges gently but firmly critique the cooking of the contestants, who come from many backgrounds in Britain and Wales. During three assigned cooking challenges on each episode, the contestants must be very quick as they are usually given too little time for any reasonable cook to complete the task.

The format is very much like The Great British Baking Show, except that the third challenge on each episode is the "elimination round" where only the weakest contestants are required to cook, usually following a set recipe. At the end of each episode, one contestant "goes home." Finally, in the last episode, the last three competitors vie for the top honor. It's enjoyable to observe these talented home cooks create amazing dishes, which they don't necessarily know beforehand, and to watch the contestants with various ethnic backgrounds use recipes, spices, and techniques that they had learned from their mothers.

Throughout the contest, there's a lot of hugging and comradery as the contestants encourage one another, and even at times help each other to finish a dish when time is running out, as it always does. They are very good-natured and never cut-throat in their attitudes.

The food the contestants make always looks scrumptious, too. For example these chocolate desserts from Episode 5:

Barbecue, a Documentary by Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker

The second show we watched was a repeat viewing of Barbecue, a 2017 documentary from Australia. This film consists of a large number of different brief episodes about barbecuing meat over an open fire, in a pit, or on a spit. These vignettes come from all over the world -- Mongolia, New Zealand, Texas, Uruguay, Sweden, the Philippines, and many more. I found it disconcerting that some of the episodes this time were different from the ones we saw in 2017; in particular, we didn't see the one on Yakitori in Japan, and the first episode was completely different. Searching for reviews or other news about the show, I can't find any mention of these changes. I wrote a review in 2017 here.

This review copyright © 2020 mae sander. 

BBC images are screen shots from the streaming video.