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.

It's not the recipes that are judged, it's the cooks who get sent home. It would make more sense if all the contestants stayed for the entire show, and each time a cook created something, the RECIPE would receive a numerical score. At the end, the top scoring recipe would get the award, as would the cook who brought it.

Each week, the cooks pretty much get to cook whatever they want. It's usually something they've cooked a million times before. Where's the challenge? Only on the week that they had to swap recipes did they have to do something unfamiliar. The challenges needed to be much more clearly defined, and they needed to be a genuine challenge so the cooks had to get out of their comfort zone.

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.

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.