MasterChef Australia just wrapped up its 2021 season earlier this week after 61 episodes, and I was quite surprised to find another cooking competition last night unexpectedly. CooKing 料理之王 is a new cooking competition TV show from Taiwan. The first season premiered late last year in October and ran until January earlier this year with a total of 13 episodes. The second season just started airing from June 25, 2021. I did not know the show existed until I found it by chance after a random YouTube channel I was watching last night recommended it.
The show is a pleasant surprise because it is another feel-good competition, no rude judges, no fierce competitors, but nice contestants and judges give good constructive critiques! I binge-watched the first two episodes of the second season and really enjoyed them. It is different from the MasterChef franchise in that there are both home cooks and young professional culinary students/cooks competing against each others, and it is more a pride of winning in CooKing since most of the contestants are already in the food industry, in contrast to MasterChef Australia where the ultimate aim of the contestants is to try to get into the food industry through the competition.
I am not too sure what the challenges are in subsequent episodes since the first two episodes are just cooking using a main ingredient and eliminations. However it is refreshing to see different sorts of ingredient being used such as bamboo shoots which I don’t remember being featured in MasterChef kitchen at all, and also woks being used for stir-frying and Chinese cleavers in addition to chef’s knifes!
All official episodes are also free to watch on YouTube, but the only problem for international viewers is that there is no English subtitles at all! Since I am starting to watch season 2 right now, I think I will watch season 1 later, and after reading comments from viewers there were things in season 1 not to viewers satisfaction but that’s understandable and it looks like they have ironed out most of the problems from the first season in season 2. However if anyone is interested, all season 1 episodes are available to watch here.
Update July 17, 2021: Caught up to episode 4, the latest episode available for season 2 and love the show! Also just found out one of the permanent judges, Jason Wang 王凱傑, was the runner-up in season 8 of the US MasterChef in 2017. However no recipes available which is a shame.
Corner Café 
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