Five Must-Watch Tips For Food Lovers

Confession. I’m a sucker for watching cooking shows and competitions. When I lived alone, I would continuously have the Dutch food channel 24 Kitchen on in the background. And in the previous months of being furloughed and at home I had plenty of time to kill. Not only do I find it an easy way to relax, it also gives me inspiration. So whether it’s a cooking competition, a movie about food or an interesting documentary, I’m in!

See below my five must-view suggestions for my fellow foodies.

Chef's Table

This series doesn’t just showcase amazing restaurants, it digs deeper into the backgrounds, lifestyles and creative processes of its chefs. Most of them have taken an amazing journey to get to where they are today. For example the episode featuring Alinea with chef Grant Achatz. Grant Achatz temporarily lost his sense of taste due to side effects of cancer treatment but fought through and did not give up on cooking. Such an inspiring story. Chef’s Table stimulates me to travel and explore more cultures and cuisines. The series actually motivated my husband and I to go to Slovenia to visit restaurant Hiša Franko, featured in the first series. This still is my favourite restaurant experience to date and it hopefully won’t be the last of restaurants we’ll visit from this series.

Zumbo’s Just Desserts

Being a real sweet tooth this show is both a pleasure and a pain. The pleasure comes from getting inspired by all the beautiful desserts and patisserie that is created. The pain... I need to get my sugar fix pretty much every time I watch an episode. Especially the Zumbo tests I find incredible to watch. The inventiveness behind Adriano Zumbo’s desserts are unbelievable. And to my surprise the candidates usually do quite a good job of replicating it.

Julie & Julia

This movie blends the true stories of culinary legend Julia Child and (food) blogger Julie Powell. It tells the story of two women who chase their goals and pursue it with heaps of passion and perseverance. I could watch Julia Child videos for hours and in this movie I think she is brilliantly played by Meryl Streep. Julie & Julia is an easy, relaxing movie to watch and as a passionate home cook and blogger myself, an inspiring one too.

The Final Table

Did I mention that I love watching cooking competitions? The bigger the competition, the better. In The Final Table top chefs compete in challenges themed around different nation’s dishes and flavours. They have to improvise, be quick on their feet and show incredible creativity to deserve a seat at “the final table” alongside worldwide’s most renowned chefs. What I like about this series is that they are all professional chefs competing against each other. This means the level of cookery is very high right from the first episode.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

Based on her book, chef Samin Nosrat goes through the elements of salt, fat, acid and heat in cooking. According to her: “the four basic elements that can make or break a dish”. The docu-series consists of four episodes each taking place in a different country and highlighting different products and dishes. The episodes showcase some of the fundamental ideas and concepts behind cooking. It gave me more insight in how to balance and create more flavour in cooking. Simply interesting and entertaining to watch.

All of the above recommendations are available to watch on Netflix at the moment of writing my blog post.

Enjoy!