Thursday 25 / April / 2024
I was sitting at home chilling one weekend, when I overheard a discussion between my mom and her friends coming from the other room. They were talking excitedly about an upcoming cooking competition, describing what they’d prepare if they had the chance to cook for Sanjeev Kapoor, the popular Indian celebrity chef who would be judging the competition. I assumed they were talking about one of the competitions they were so fond of watching on TV, until one of them suggested they actually try out for the competition, as it was being held right here in Muscat. A flurry of excited chatter ensued, until one of the ladies led the rest off-track as she started gossiping about her husband. That was my cue to plug in my earphones and get as far away as I could from the “kitty party conversations”.
However, the phrase “cooking competition” kept replaying in my mind. I’ve never been much of a cook, so I wondered what it was about a kitchen battle that filled my mother, her friends, and so many others with such excitement. I decided to do some research to find out.
Food is a basic necessity that man hasn’t found an alternative for since time began. However, ways of consuming it certainly have evolved drastically over the years, from flint-edged wooden sickles being used to collect wild grains in 11000BC to the scientific forms of culinary experimentation so popular today in the form of molecular gastronomy. While everybody understands the significance of eating food to survive, and the importance of cooking it before consuming it, off late, people seem to be more interested in the art of cooking, than in its utility. People don’t necessarily want ‘fast and easy’ recipes, they often want a challenge, a dish that will allow them to express themselves.
Since the beginning of the millennium, one thing that I’ve noticed is that my generation is one that craves an audience. We are looking for an opportunity to express ourselves, an opportunity to showcase our talent, an opportunity to perform. Thus the rise of reality TV and the global obsession with competition shows. So it stands to reason that among the various ways the art of cooking has been celebrated over the last decade, the most wide reaching and successful has been through cookery competitions.
Although cooking competitions might have been happening on a smaller scale even earlier, with village women trying to win hearts with pies, it was in 1900 that the first major cooking competition, the IKA, took place in Frankfurt, Germany. The competition is still known today as the “Olympics of the culinary world,” with milestone events peppering its history, like when a group of American chefs participated on the world culinary stage for the first time there in 1956.
In 1987 Bocused’Or introduced the first ever cooking competition in which contestants had to cook live in an open kitchen in front of a crowd of spectators, setting the stage for modern competitions and televised shows that are so popular today. Nowadays there are numerous international and national competitions and championships such as the American Culinary Classic, Culinary World Cup, and many more that are held at regular intervals and are sponsored by top brands willing to offer big cash prizes, drawing cooking hopefuls from all over the world for a chance to prove their abilities.
With the dawn of the televised cooking competition, we have entered an era in which young cooking enthusiasts are referred to as the “Masterchef generation” in a reference to the popular cooking competition show. But Masterchef wasn’t the first TV cooking competition, the trend really took off in East Asia in 1993 with the Japanese show Iron Chef, which was a cook-off between guest chefs and resident “Iron” chefs. Prior to Iron Chef, the only TV cooking programmes were narrative shows in which a chef would explain how to cook a particular dish, like Sanjeev Kapoor’s Khana Khazana, but the drama and oomph of a competition-based show appealed to cooks and non-cooks alike, making Iron Chef a massive hit, not just in Japan, but also in the US and other parts of the world. The format was soon adopted by different channels globally.
Iron Chef was adapted by the channel Food Network which now does an average of 10 cooking competition-based reality shows every year. And a number of other popular cooking competition series, like Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, Chopped, and Masterchef, now appear on non-cooking-exclusive networks. And the televised cooking competition culture is slowly seeping in to the Middle-East too. A couple of years back, the Middle-East version of The Taste was aired on Egypt’s Al Nahar channel. The participants and judges were all from the Middle East and North Africa region which brought this part of the world to the culinary forefront.
These shows have gone a long way in helping to familiarise the world with different cultures and their cuisines, and the high level of competitiveness has, according to me, brought a greater awareness of technical expertise that goes into cooking, and thus a greater appreciation of a task once seen merely as a drudgery.
As we have all become slaves of internet and online media, it should come as no surprise that cooking competitions have found a home online now as well, with a number of portals dedicated to cooking competitions. For instance, Cooking Contest Online is a website and online community where culinary competitions are held between recipe contesters. The website has set a number of milestones including that of hosting over 500 contests and giving out prizes worth five million dollars, and exclusive features in national magazines. Such websites are also a great platform to connect with people, share recipes, and learn about new cuisines.
Since online media is incomplete without social media, this phenomenon has spilled over, with a number of pages across social media platforms dedicated solely to cooking competitions. In fact, Oman has its own Facebook group “What’s Cooking, Oman?” founded by Oneza Tabish that now has a total of 6,200 members. They’ve conducted two major cooking competitions that were sponsored by food products and restaurants in which the contestants had to post pictures of their recipe and the finished dish on the group’s page where members voted by means of likes on the post to decide, along with the judges, who should win.
Oman has witnessed its own surge of live cooking competitions over the last few years as well, with people, predominantly women, from different backgrounds and nationalities becoming increasingly willing to participate and showcase their cooking skills in front of a judge and an audience. Competitions have ranged from the small events organised by social clubs, to professional events like the Al Bustan-sponsored National Hospitality Institute competition for culinary students to impromptu competitions like the Lulu challenge, which was open to the public.
The upcoming competition that my mother and her friends were buzzing about may be the biggest one yet. The Yellow Chilli Kitchen Master cooking competition, which is due to take place in August, will be judged by the beloved celebrity chef, Master Chef Sanjeev Kapoor, which significantly ups the ante.
When I spoke to the organisers, they said that the contest was being organised based on public demand for such an event after receiving requests from a number of ladies asking for a chance to showcase their talents and abilities in front of the man who taught them the basics of cooking via his television programme.
Registration for the event is open until August 15th, with a pre-screening general elimination round on the 19th and 20th of August, followed by the finale on August 24th, where the final dishes will be tasted and judged by Sanjeev Kapoor himself.
So, when exactly did cooking become a competition? Even after all my research, I don’t really know. Perhaps it always has been in some way, but now we’ve just created bigger stages than our dinnertables. —[email protected]
Compete in the Yellow Chilli Kitchen Master Cooking Competition
Sign Up
Register this weekend at the Yellow Chilli restaurant in Panorama Mall or The Wave (entries close August 15th)
Get through the Screening Session
19th and 20th August
Watch or Compete in the Finale
24th August, 4-6pm
Yellow Chilli, Panorama Mall
More Details
+968 2454 1717
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