Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man walks you through the wide world of food from the safety of your computer screen, so it’s almost impossible he infects you. (But only ALMOST impossible. His powers are Dark and Unknowable.) I’m your Eldritch Entertainer, Jon O’Guin. And I’ve been stating that I ‘ve been trying to watch Food Shows for a couple weeks now, and you’ll be happy to know that I did! You may be less happy to know that, rather than watch the immediately relevant return of previously reviewed show Ugly Delicious, I decided to review a series on a Youtube channel.

Why? Because Nate refused to watch Ugly Delicious with me, and since we watched the first season together, I’d feel bad if I watched it without him. This same issue is why we haven’t finished:

• Letterkenny

• Game of Thrones

• Camp Camp

• The Flash? I don’t know, I remember there’s a Superhero one mixed in there. .. THE NETFLIX shows. I was like, 3 episodes into Defenders, and said “oh, it wouldn’t be hard to catch Nate up, he’s just gotta finish Jessica Jones (season 1), we’ll watch the 3-4 good Iron Fist episodes, and Boom, up to speed…That was almost THREE YEARS AGO.)

I’ve heard Bushmaster is fun in Luke Cage season 2, but so far, that is only rumor to me.

• Brooklyn Nine Nine

• Mandalorian*

• Westworld**

In short, Nate’s utter hatred for watching any kind of media except Youtube is why I know nothing about the modern Golden Age of television.

(* – Nate actually hasn’t seen ANY of this show to my knowledge, I watched the first 7 episodes while in Leavenworth, and I assume the others watched the finale without me, and now I have to bully him into seeing it so I can watch the finale with someone.

** - Neither Nate NOR I have seen this one. We just joked about watching it to hurt Site Alcohol Editor JJ’s feelings, and then didn’t, so now I can’t. )

However, I will now reward his bad behavior by reviewing/discussing a Youtube show he brought to my attention: Sorted.

Sort it Out, Will Ya?

SORTEDFood, or “Sorted” as they tend to call themselves, is a company that you might not have heard of if you’re not from the UK, but they’re something of a big deal. Not an enormous deal, but they’ve got a list of awards that’s nothing to sneeze at. (Especially not now. Cover your MOUTH you madman.) Like, Google called them “one of the largest food and cooking communities” last January.

Basically, a couple of schoolmates from London consisting of 3 blokes and their chef buddy Ben, wrote a student cookbook in 2008. To Advertise it, they made some Youtube videos. The videos got popular, and the group created the SORTEDFood Youtube channel in 2010.  Now, 10 years later, they’ve got like, 6 or 7 cookbooks, another Chef, a staff of over 14 people, and have done segments for USA Today, a show in a country they do NOT LIVE IN.

In case you’re rusty on your geography: this is not USA.

I’ve talked before about how Nate and I have strangely…Well, I was going to say “Anglo-centric” viewing habits, but while Nate loves English Youtubers, I prefer Irish one, and conflating them with England or the UK would get me in a kettle right quick. But, at some juncture, Nate started watching them, and, about a month or two ago, I ended up watching part of one of their episodes while in his room harassing him to do something.  (IF I want to talk to Nate, I almost always end up sitting on his bed due to a kind of inevitable domino chain of effects:  His doorway is too ‘noisy’ for me to hear him properly, just inside his door is crowded, so step to a clearer spot, ending up standing about a foot or two away from him, looming over him as he sits. Politeness then says “well, if you’re this close, don’t just stand there looming, sit at his level.”)

They upload a new Youtube video every Wednesday and Sunday, and I’ve been kind of binge-watching them over the last couple weeks. It’s just a fun process, and one that’s also calibrated directly to appeal to the kind of mentality that we want to foster here at Kitchen Catastrophes: while two of the group are trained chefs, the other three are not, and they cook just as often as their more trained counter-parts, and their offerings are analyzed and explained to the same degree. Just as I state that I’m coming out here to explore, explain, and explode recipes to make you more comfortable cooking, these guys are willing to show one of their friends completely failing a Lava Cake challenge while his buddies laugh at him, to entertain and enlighten: it’s not the end of the world when you screw up, just have a laugh or two, and try again.

Stunning Presentation. Incredibly moist.

I haven’t checked their full catalog yet (there’s, mathematically, over 1,000 videos assuming they’ve uploaded twice a week for their entire channel’s life. It would take something like 4-5 months of watching 10 hours a week to do that.) but I’ve watched a couple different series. They have the Ultimate X Battle, where the 3 “Normals” will work out a recipe for a take on X food with the help of the chefs (usually), and try and beat the others with their version. The Ultimate Chef Battles, where the two chefs go head-to-head in a similar idea. There’s the “3 versions” series, where they take a food such as Chicken Nuggets, and make 3 versions of it, often a “quick, normal, long”, but sometimes something like “easy, vegan, Ultimate” etc. They review weird Kitchen gadgets and pretentious ingedients, etc etc.  

Don’t Give it A Pass

But the series I want to highlight today is their Recipe Relay series, “Pass it On”. As the name, and “Recipe Relay” descriptor hopefully hinted to you, the idea of this series is to cook a recipe by relay: every 10 minutes, the person currently cooking has to walk away, and a new ‘chef’ takes over. To complicate matters: the “recipe” is decided by the first participant, during their cook time…and the guys not cooking can’t see or hear what’s going on in the kitchen. So no one knows what the plan is until they walk into the kitchen, and have to figure it out based on the clues left by the rest of the group.

Some clues are more blatant than others. Though the runes he’s carved to spell “pizza” might be some kind of magic spell.

And it’s kind of amazing, because I feel it’s an idea for a show that really only works for them. Like, an ongoing “problem” the guys run into is that only two of the five are trained chefs, so a lot of the time is one of the “normals” as they call the other three walking into the kitchen, looking at the two different sizzling pots, and a cutting board loaded with diced fruit and saying “…I have no idea what’s happening.”  So in the middle of the recipe, they’ll just go “Okay, I have no idea what THEY were doing. So if I just start a NEW thing, it’s someone else’s job to make it all work together!” And then the chefs come in, and go “Oh boy, this is a mess. Okay…clearly this was SUPPOSED to be X, but someone’s completely screwed it up. THIS…is probably supposed to be Y?” And then they have to pull all the pieces that have been dropped in their lap together as best they can, or throw half the stuff away, and focus on what’s viable.

But that takes a weirdly specific skill level: Like, I don’t know if the show would be as good if, say, Bon Appetit did a version of it. I feel like they’re too competent for it to be good entertainment. They’d question specific ingredients, or confuse say, someone’s plan for a vinaigrette for a hollandaise, but there wouldn’t be the same degree of “This could be anything, because the person who tried to make this didn’t know what they were doing.” Similarly, a show of pure amateurs probably wouldn’t be as fun either, because the failure rate would be too high. THIS show, with 2 professionals and 3 long-trained amateurs (As Ben notes several  in newer episodes, by this point, the “normal” members have been cooking food and writing cookbooks professionally (or at least quasi-professionally) for over 10 years: they left the rank of “normal” a while back.) has just enough cocksure bad choices and professional integrity to make it interesting. (As a small spoiler, I just started watching the first episode of season 2, and after the first chef started a pretty direct and simple idea, the first normal decided to make something completely different, leaving the second chef completely flummoxed: “Are these two components supposed to be integrated? Is one a topping for the other? I…don’t know what they wanted to achieve with this. Is this supposed to be a cheesecake filling? We don’t have time to bake a cheesecake! Oh no, I don’t want to just DECIDE which one to use, throwing away someone’s hard work...”)

An impulse the normals do not share. Don’t like it? Hide it.

The first season is 14 episodes, each about 14-16 minutes long, so you can hammer out the whole season in under 4 hours. There’s a bit of “wobble”, as the guys might say in the first couple episodes as they figure the format out (For instance, it takes them a couple episodes before they find the fun process of having the person grade their contribution to the dish before they leave, so the audience can enjoy the dramatic irony of “That guy thinks he’s done pretty well, but he missed three important things.”)

All in all, I think they’re a channel you should check out, and this series in particular is a pretty nice entry point for their personalities. There are a couple references to their other episodes you might miss, but overall it’s pretty simple. As an example, the NEWEST episode, uploaded yesterday, references how one of the team, Jamie, got DRAGGED by a bunch of Spanish Twitter users in 2017, to the point that it was covered in newspapers because of his actions in another series.

(Quick summary: he made a Paella burrito, which might have been fine on its own…if he had made the paella he PUT in the burrito “correctly”. There’s too much to unpack quickly, but imagine if someone told you they’d made you a “quesadilla Pizza”…and then explained that they quesadilla they used as the base was filled with Bleu Cheese, sliced apple, and oysters. That may or may not be terrible, (the New York Times has a recipe for “Oyster and Bleu Cheese Pie” that includes sliced apples, so it’s not an impossible flavor combo) but it sure as shit isn’t what’s expected in a Quesadilla, so we need to take this train back a couple stations. (Also, literally the year before, Jamie Oliver, a DIFFERENT English chef named Jamie, also “screw up” a paella in a similar way, so Spanish twitter was already a little testy about it.) )

The top right headline is openly complaining that they had JUST had the Jamie oliver business.

But overall, a fun series on a fun channel that I think you should check out. From all of us here at Kitchen Catastrophe: Stay safe, be well, and maybe use your increased at-home time to try some food dish you wouldn’t normally. Or binge watch some cooking shows and read our posts. Whatever floats your boat.

MONDAY: EITHER A VEGETARIAN CORN MEAL, OR WATERY STEAK SCIENCE. DEPENDS HOW MY INGREDIENT CHECK GOES.

THURSDAY: MAN, IF I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M COOKING, WHY WOULD I KNOW WHAT I’M WRITING?