+34Adam Liaw and Pia Miranda host Recipe of the Year on the ABC, a new cooking competition featuring 10 home cooks, CWA judge Ellice Schrader and a focus on real food.
Adam Liaw and Pia Miranda host Recipe of the Year, a new cooking show on the ABC. The series features 10 home cooks, drawn from 20 hopefuls in the first episode, competing to achieve Australia's recipe of the year.
It is created and produced by i8 Studio, the Sydney production company Liaw runs with co-executive producer and director Josh Martin. The show is filmed in a barn on the edges of a farm on Sydney's south-western fringe. Handmade wooden benchtops sit against a backdrop of green pastureland beyond the barn's wide open doors. Rustic wooden walls display retro tea towels, souvenir teaspoon displays, hanging copper pans and ceramic jugs filled with eucalyptus and banksia branches.
In one scene, Liaw takes a phone and films a golden, oat-flecked Anzac biscuit being broken in two. It is perfectly crisp and, after a bite, nicely chewy. Ellice Schrader, a judge on the series and a member of the Country Women's Association of NSW, overhears and says of the biscuit: It needs to snap. She also confirms that the CWA advises Anzac biscuits must never, ever, be called cookies.
Liaw calls Schrader formidable, a label he also gives her in the series' first episode. Schrader replies: I'm a pussycat. Josh Martin says Ellice was the biggest surprise. She had never done television before in her life and really has not much interest in it.
But she was such a natural, such a joy, and at times quite scary. She's like the Margaret Pomeranz of cooking, or a Simon Cowell-esque role. It's hard feedback, but done with a completely different approach. Recipe of the Year's format features three challenges: the blue ribbon, the gold ribbon and a feature recipe section.
The first is about creativity. The second focuses on precision and is judged by the CWA, with recipes ranging from a jam roll to scones and Anzac biscuits. The third is a recipe brought in by competitors. Across the series, themes include comfort food, budget cooking, the big barbecue, weekend brunch recipes and more.
Martin says the final challenge is the only one with stakes on it. They all bake a dish and at the end, rather than the judges tasting and judging like a lot of other shows, everybody sits around the table and votes for their favourite to least favourite.
Then we tally the votes. Because everybody's opinion on food matters, not just the expert. Liaw says it is a really familiar space for a lot of viewers, and they are genuinely trying their hardest to do things that are different. Not just for the sake of being different, but because they felt there were important reasons to make the show feel accessible and more like cooking feels at home.
Those reasons include the current cost of living, time constraints for everyday cooks and how and why people cook for themselves, friends and family. Unlike shows like My Kitchen Rules, Liaw says Australians love recipes. We love them in the newspaper, online and in books. We were really thinking through what's the experience with somebody when they're making a recipe?
And, when they choose to cook something, is it a recipe that makes sense for the purpose that is being set for it? Then, when you actually make it, what's the process of eating? Liaw adds there are not many circumstances in home cooking where three members of your family stand there in front of you and taste it, give stern expressions and then give you feedback.
Even though it is a competition, there's also an atmosphere of home cooking on the show around the way we instruct the challengers and the way we judge. Pia Miranda, a passionate cook and food lover, says making the show inspired great warmth and conviviality. It's one of the best experiences I've ever had, and I'm not just saying that because it's about to come out. It really was.
Everyone who was there just had a great time. It felt like a fourth or fifth season, not like the first season of a TV show. It was a real celebration of life. The show's location also resulted in a passing parade of animal life beyond the barn's doors.
Miranda says: We had cows. We had kangaroos. There were deer and beautiful, beautiful birds. Adam's so cute: every time kangaroos went past, he got misty-eyed.
He gets so excited by kangaroos. We had to stop and just look at them. Josh Martin believes the show's focus on recipes, along with the contestants' stories about their recipes' origins and histories, will inspire a broad range of viewers. Adam and I have made a lot of food shows, Martin says.
And don't get me wrong: we love MasterChef. We love Bake Off. Six hours for a challenge to do something? That's great.
But we thought, let's just get back to real food that people cook. In the second episode, the very first challenge they do is make a sandwich. But it really works. Today, contestants are getting ready to bake more Anzac biscuits.
Contestants And CWA Judging
They stand at benchtops fitted with ovens, cooktops and kitchen equipment while crew members bustle around them. Contestants have been given tea towels printed with the Anzac biscuit recipe: Bake at 175 degrees for 15 to 20 mins or until golden brown. The contestants have a wide variety of ages, experience and cultural and geographical backgrounds. They include a 19-year-old aspiring chef who experiments passionately with cannoli, and a builder from Sydney celebrating his mother's cooking.
There is also a Malaysian-born home cook sharing flavours of her homeland, and a teacher who, expressing the importance of connecting with family via food, shares her late mother's recipes. Schrader, decked out in pearls and a total natural in front of the cameras, judges the gold ribbon category with warmth, generosity and strict CWA criteria. As with food competitions at major Australian agricultural shows, judging cakes, slices, biscuits and other baked goods is not done lightly.
In one episode, she wields a tape measure to assess the talents of a scone. Contestants are told that a good jam roll must have no cracks, no skin missing and a neat roll. Schrader slices one open to show a perfect, evenly layered swirl of jam inside the sponge. Martin says a lot of the main shows on air in Australia are imported formats.
There are very few original formats and that's fine, they're popular. But the ability for Australian IP and ideas to be created here, and then, if successful, exported to other countries, that's what the ABC should be doing, that's what all our cultural institutions should be doing: supporting Australian IP. I'd love to see a UK version or an American version or a Japanese version, or whatever it might be, of the show.
The show's blend of modern Australia includes diverse food and shared community.
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smh:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Adam Liaw Pia Miranda ABC Cooking Show Ellice Schrader
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Adam Liaw and Pia Miranda host ABC's Recipe of the Year cooking showAdam Liaw and Pia Miranda host Recipe of the Year on the ABC, a new cooking competition featuring 10 home cooks, CWA judge Ellice Schrader and a focus on real food.
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