Asian Day on Food Network

Posted on February 29, 2008 by Gary McCarty

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I doubt any of you had as much time on his or her hands as I did yesterday to catch both Boy Meets Grill at 11 a.m. and Emeril Live at 7 p.m.

Both chefs tackled Asian cuisine, one professionally and one faking it. Guess who did which?

Flashback to 11 a.m. Bobby Flay had Korean-American home chef Jen Lee on to share with him her family’s recipe for Bibimbap, which is a sticky rice dish that can feature any number of veggies and proteins in it. She showed Bobby how to prepare it, and they prepared it together. It looked scrumptious and just like the Bibimbaps I’ve had in Koreatown Los Angeles.

Ms. Lee’s version featured Bulgogi, marinated and grilled ribeye steak, which I consider about the tastiest protein dish in existence.

Here’s the recipe, which I found by using my site’s recipe search function.

Now, Emeril had one of his assistants go shopping in Chinatown to bring back Asian ingredients–everything except protein.

How did he do?

First off, he took a whole side of Ahi tuna from the fridge and marinated it with soy sauce, sesame oil and what else, then covered it with black and white sesame seeds and grilled it whole. The thing must’ve weighed two or more pounds, so why not cut it up?

Anyway, after he grilled it, Emeril then sliced it up and put the slices in a cabbage-and-carrot salad with fried wontons. Not satisfied with that, he then covered the salad with a huge mound of cilantro followed by a huger portion of noodles. (The official recipe doesn’t mention the noodles, so hopefully he had second thoughts.) It looked completely ridiculous and inedible. Indeed, I don’t recall that he even shared it with the audience.

And so it went as Emeril winged his way through some Asian concoctions that nobody in his or her right mind would ever pay for.

Emeril is going a long way to proving that mixing live entertainment and cooking is a failed enterprise.

I guess the audience gets off on cheering everytime he dumps in more garlic than any dish should ever have to suffer, or alternately, a whole bottle of booze that would obviously ruin any dish.

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