Announcer: “Chefs, you will see in your baskets … marachino cherries, instant lime gelatin, kippers, and .. a camel liver. Your task is to make a savory main dish using all of these ingredients. You have twenty minutes. Begin.”

Chef 1: “I saw those ingredients and immediately thought: stir fry.”

Chef 2: “I saw those ingredients and immediately thought: salad.”

Chef 3: “In my country we always cook camel liver with cherries, but I don’t know what is theese lime gelatin.“

… twenty minutes elapse …

Judge 1: “I like the way you prepared each individual ingredient, but the whole thing just really didn’t really come together. The preparation of the camel liver was good, but I would have hoped for more creativity.”

Judge 2: “The sauce was both smudged and dribbled on my plate. Not just smudged or just dribbled, but both smudged and dribbled. The sight of it nearly made me pass out. You are a disgrace to the entire profession. It is disgusting and unforgivable. I’d like to shoot you dead right now, but I can’t do that. It did taste good, however.”

Judge 3: “I’m amazed you could make anything remotely edible out of that pile of crap, particularly with barely time enough to get a pan hot.” [Judge 3’s comments were edited out of the final show, and he was not asked to judge again.]

The Food Network’s Chopped has a reasonable premise. Great Chefs do not need recipes to work with good ingredients. We amateurs in the audience can learn from how the pros handle the ingredients. That’s the premise of the successful “Iron Chef America” program, and it works in that show.

The problem with Chopped is that it artificially overconstrained in a way that diminishes the culinary craft in favor of unrelated skills. Competitors don’t know what’s in the common pantry, so a edge goes to whoever can memorize the layout quickly. It’s pure chance as to who has worked with some of the weird ingredients before. The time is too short to both make a reasonable plan of what to do, then do it.

Yes, there is some relationship between culinary skill and what the show tests. Chefs must be inventive and work quickly, for example. But Chopped is too much a pointless game. The fascinating part of the show is akin to that of surviving a train wreck, not with great cooking. How about adding a hungry dog to the kitchen or having only two burners on the stove? That might be fun, but it would have nothing to do with good cooking.