The Great American Recipe

Really enjoyed The Great American Recipe. Home cooks represented many diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and prepared unique and interesting recipes. And they all got along; no cut-throat maneuvers in any episodes. Great show to watch if you are into cooking shows.

Where the Great British Bake Off gets people from all around the isles to to bake and add their spin to classic or invent new British bakes.

The Great American Recipe encourages Americans from all walks of life to share their own recipes and takes on how they interpret American food. The show attempts to show regional and cultural variations of different foods.

Some highlights are a Korean Americans gochujang tacos. A Vietnamese Americans spaghetti and meatballs with sriracha, and that's only in the first 2 episodes. Personally I believe the show does a good job of showing the complexity of American food and how good in America changes over time through the influence of immigration.

I'm not sure why the production is rendered in extra-vivid color, oversharpened. It has a look that reminds me of early astronomical photos from the Hubble telescope that were processed with unsharp masking. The result is unrealistic.

A competition show that doesn't eliminate contestants. A quest for "the best home cook in America" with no stakes or reward that constantly overlooks poor protein cookery. A reality show that offers no reality other than saccharine melodrama that's often undercut by edits that I swear were done to make the contestants look like liars.

This is a mess of a show that has a good idea but needs to cut out all the pro-forma cruft and focus on home cooks cooking, sharing their home life, and improving their skills. Don't try to shoehorn vapid talking heads and poorly-formed reality TV challenges just because it was trending well on Food Network 15 years ago.

The contestants are all full of Heart and great personalities, as for the judgeing team, all top notch except for Leah Cohen who rude to contestants, cuts them off, talks down to them, and is extremely rude to some contestants about there family recipies.

Its is a dissapointement for PBS to allow this, If this show gets more seasons, would suggest you keep the judges who care about food and people. Not a stuck up Judge Leah Cohen, is really just an awful A**hole.

The editing style is very well done, the background stories and cooking blend cleanly and not full of jump cuts.

In the end I did really enjoy this Show. But again axe Leah Cohen from any future shows. She is the worst.