The first episode brings the culinary competitors to the Salton Sea, which rests 200 feet below sea level, in what is known as the Colorado Desert. (Dig down far enough and you come to the San Andreas Fault.) In this remote, scorched location, where temperatures routinely exceed 100°, they begin the series scavenging for foods you won’t find in the grocery store.
The challenge? To prepare a restaurant-quality meal that will pass muster with the show’s finicky judges. You know the drill: One chef gets booted in each episode. At stake: A $50,000 grand prize.
“We had to build our own stoves and our own heat sources,” says Knowling, chef/owner of Montclair’s Indigo Kitchen, which serves Kansas City barbeque and soul food.
PHOTO: Lance Knowling on location in the California desert, where all contestants had to wear their chefs’ jackets, never mind the heat. But perhaps it was no worse than slaving over a high-output commercial stove.
“It’s really wild. I built a grill out of things that were just in the desert. We were scavenging for ingredients, and there’s dead fish all over the place. This is real. It’s not like any environment I’ve ever prepared food in, and it’s certainly not anything I’ve ever cooked before.”
Other episodes find the dwindling group at sea in the shoebox-sized galley of a Coast Guard cutter, fetching ingredients from a capsized boat, or employing Native American cooking techniques while battling a raging desert dust storm, or trying to rustle up dinner in the jungles of Thailand.
Despite being parched, sunburned and generally uncomfortable, Knowling found it exhilarating that “we were given the opportunity, unscripted, to just go out and cook.”
The experience was so challenging and engrossing, “you completely forget that the cameras are there,” he says. “This show is unlike any cooking show that has ever been on TV.”
Asked if he would ever do it again, he replies, without hesitation, “Absolutely.”
Knowling promises that, as the series advances, armchair adventurers who visit Indigo Kitchen will be able to sample some of his extreme dishes.
SUZANNE ZIMMER LOWERY is a food writer, pastry chef and culinary instructor at a number of New Jersey cooking schools. Find out more about her at suzannelowery.com.