9 Most Ridiculous Cooking Competitions Ever

With a truly unpalatable title, this competition series has bakers entering “crime scenes,” using their culinary detective skills to deduce what was baked there, and then recreating those dishes. Does it sound like a concept created by ChatGPT? Yes. Would ChatGPT tell us if it were? Probably not.

If you’re familiar with Restaurant: Impossible and Kitchen Nightmares, you know that American TV audiences have a certain degree of schadenfreude when it comes to cooking shows. So why not have people with zero kitchen skills compete against each other, right?

Derek Zoolander voice: What is this, an entrée for ants? In this series, contestants had to use tiny utensils and tiny appliances in a tiny kitchen to create tiny dishes. It’s amusing for maybe five minutes, and then our brains demand a tiny bit more entertainment value.

This show is exactly what it says on the tin: Every episode has two cooking novices facing off in a culinary competition, guided only by the verbal instructions of professional chefs who can’t taste, smell, or touch the food their teammate is creating. Fun?

In this show, contestants could auction on ways to sabotage each other by forcing them to, for example, cook only with only utensils made from aluminum foil or to transport water with only drinking straws. It’s like a cooking competition with a dash of The Traitors!

Apparently some TV execs believed viewers were craving a cross between Top Chef and Survivor. And so here we have chefs trying to whip up tasty dishes while trying to stay alive amid unbearable conditions like dust storms and monsoons. (We would not eat those dishes.)

Consider episode titles like “Sinking Cruise Ship,” “Dining With Dinosaurs” and “Bad Dog Park,” and you have a sense of the chaos that cooking teams had to endure on this show. Fortunately for the viewing public, it didn’t last long… because the real disasters were the show’s ratings!

One of the weirdest shows from one of the weirdest streaming platforms, Dishmantled had blindfolded chefs getting blasted in the face by ingredients shot from a cannon. And after they recover from that bombardment, they have to recreate the mystery dish.

And finally, we have a TV show that’s so ridiculous that it’s actually good! Is It Cake? is exactly that: a competition show in which bakers try to fool celebrity judges by making cake look like familiar (and usually inedible) objects. If you’ve never seen it, you’ll be surprised by the number of times the judges get it wrong!