Standing the heat

Oh, how to explain Iron Chef to the uninitiated. Julia Child meets World Wrestling Entertainment. Godzilla vs. Nigella. “Monday Night Football” for cooking fanatics.

Produced by Fuji Television, the popular show first aired in Japan from 1993 to 1999. It was picked up by the Food Network four years ago and became a cult hit that still airs at least once a day on the channel. The program pits one master chef against a weekly challenger in a fierce cook-off. The slightly nutty premise is that an eccentric gourmet named Kaga (played by Kaga Takeshi) has summoned the challenger to battle one of his staff of Iron Chefs.

The battle takes place in Kitchen Stadium, an arena in the far outskirts of Tokyo in the form of two open kitchens. The chefs have to prepare a five-course meal for a panel of judges within one hour. In a twist, Kaga gives them a theme ingredient at the beginning of the hour, which they must use in each dish. The ingredient could be anything from yogurt to carp. Dramatic lights and music, and for U.S. viewers the dubbing and subtitling from Japanese to English, add more camp to the proceedings. But as entertaining as the show is, the cooking is serious business, featuring world-renowned chefs creating works of culinary art.

So when the Food Network decided to film a series of specials, “Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters,” a visit to the set was in order.

“Iron Chef America” filmed in early March on a soundstage near downtown L.A. The battle this particular day was between Iron Chef veteran Masaharu Morimoto and local hero Wolfgang Puck. (Other battles in the three-day extravaganza that kicks off at 10 p.m. Friday on the Food Network include Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai and a tag team -- Morimoto and Flay against Sakai and Batali.)

The production was running behind schedule, so after a few minutes of staring at rows of ingredients on the counters and thinking, ‘Hey, I have the same olive oil Wolfgang Puck uses!’ thoughts quickly turned to food, and further, that it was lunchtime. Alas, food, food everywhere but nary a bite to eat. Bruce Seidel, vice president of program planning for the Food Network, who oversees “Iron Chef,” admitted that during the long workdays, he lived on stale Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Seidel said that while the show was very similar to “Iron Chef,” the network wasn’t trying to recreate the campiness of the original. Instead of Kaga, the supervisory role was assumed by a new character called the Chairman, played by Mark Decascos. Instead of an eccentric gourmet, he is (as in real life) a martial arts expert. So “the analogy is that just as [martial artists are] disciplined, they’re focused, they have to be practiced, they have to be strong, those same qualities apply to the art of cuisine,” Seidel said. Alton Brown, chef and host of the Food Network’s “Good Eats,” played the role of “professor of cuisine,” while Fine Living’s “Thirsty Traveler,” Kevin Brauch, served as sideline reporter.

Suddenly, “action” was called, and the room sprang to life. The Chairman stood before the two chefs and began quoting Dickens. And here’s a spoiler: The secret ingredient was -- cue lights, cue table rising out of the floor in a cloud of dry ice -- eggs. Eggs? Big deal. Anyone could make five courses with eggs. The day before, the secret ingredient had been trout. Try making a dessert out of that one.

Here’s a spoiler for the spoiler -- the chefs were informed of a few ‘secret ingredient’ possibilities a few days before the show. So Puck and Morimoto knew it would be either eggs or potatoes and were able to plan accordingly the day before.

After the Chairman uncovered the table laden with eggs of all kinds -- duck, chicken, quail, fish and ostrich -- the chefs and their crews got cracking. And then things suddenly went from boring to absorbing. The lighting grew Cirque du Soleil dramatic, while cameras swooped in from all angles.

Sweet smell of competition

In this corner, wearing baby blue chef’s clothing and accompanied by sous chef Lee Hefter and dessert chef Sherry Yard (both borrowed from his Spago Beverly Hills), Puck began making pasta from scratch. In that corner, wearing a silvery jacket with red, white and blue embroidery on the back, Morimoto took a hacksaw -- that’s what my kitchen needs, a hacksaw! -- and started sawing away at an ostrich egg. It was hard, slow work. He was wasting time. What was he thinking? Would he catch up?

Word was that Morimoto’s team (which included sous chefs Ariki Omae and Takao Iinuma) was working on spaetzle, an Austrian dish. Brauch wondered if this was a move to psych out Puck, who was born and raised in Austria. Puck heard this and smiled broadly. (It turns out Morimoto’s team did indeed make spaetzle ... for his dessert: ostrich egg vanilla ice cream with crispy-fried spaetzle.)

To watch Puck create ravioli or Morimoto turn raw fish into an edible floral arrangement was to watch artists working with intensely palatable palettes. Yard mesmerized the crowd when, with deft hand movements, she began turning a sugar concoction into gossamer threads. The room started to smell very good.

The Chairman sat back on an elaborately carved wooden chair, above the fray. He had a regal quality not unlike a friendlier Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I.” A digital clock read the time, and an unseen woman announced when every 10 or 15 minutes had passed. Her voice sounded more urgent with every announcement.

Puck looked calm, joking as he worked. Morimoto kept quiet for the most part, but every time he heard the woman, he would yell something in Japanese. After one such yell, Brauch asked Morimoto if he would finish on time. He replied, “Yes, I hope so.” Was he really worried, or was this the act of a seasoned showman? After all, Morimoto is a veteran of the original show, where he won 16 of 23 battles (six losses, one tie).

Clearly, cooking shows have come a long way since Julia Child’s day. No recipes are given out here, no explanations of culinary sleight of hand, and no nipping at the sherry (though Puck regretted not bringing a bottle of wine along). But watching the placement of food on the plates did bring to mind one of her most famous quotes regarding nouvelle cuisine: “It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate -- you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.”

Ten minutes left. Puck made a good crack about how it’s like basketball -- the last five minutes are the most interesting. Dishes started appearing as if from the ether. Then the time was called, and the hour was up.

Morimoto went before the judges first. He faced judges Paige Davis from “Trading Spaces,” Vogue magazine food critic Jeffrey Steingarten and Vincent Pastore, dearly departed from “The Sopranos.” Morimoto stood by while the judges oohed and ahhed over their warm soups and egg noodles. Meanwhile, Puck was free to talk. He enjoyed the event, saying it reminded him of cooking competitions back when he was a kid starting out in Vienna. “The challenge is really the timing, and not to be too nervous, because when you get too nervous you can’t even cut anymore,” he said. He first learned about the show from his son, a longtime fan, and thought the new version would do well “because America loves competition. We love a winner.”

That winner won’t be revealed until the show airs on Sunday. The judges were still taking their own sweet time through Morimoto’s courses, and so it was time to go.

“This is a sporting event but it’s cooking,” Seidel said. “That’s the concept that we’re trying to sell, that cooking can be a spectacle a la the Super Bowl.” He pointed out that when the Japanese show first came out, there were articles about it in Sports Illustrated. “That was the power of this program.” Work in a halftime show, maybe with that Naked Chef fellow, and the Super Bowl could meet its match. Just don’t watch it when you’re hungry.