This is where Christopher Kimball went when he ditched America's Test Kitchen.
I like the show. Cookingwise, in format it's not a huge departure from ATK--they got rid of the product tests and appliance segments--but the nature of the food they do is radical by comparison. Bolder flavors, more esoteric ingredients, international vs. midwest.
In some episodes, Chris travels somewhere and after showing a short film they do a version of that dish in the CS kitchen (in Boston). One of that type of episode we saw yesterday was to my eye a miserable failure of the type I used to knock ATK for. In Oaxaca, a street vendor with Frida Kalho eyebrows made Chris a cheese-stuffed 'enchilada', a tortilla folded in half and then half again to form a fat triangle lowered into a very pale silky and creamy-ish green sauce made mostly of pureed tomatillos. It was then scooped out of the sauce along with plenty of sauce and plated with a topping of raw onions and more cotija cheese. Chris takes a few bites and does the obligatory swooning.
Cut to Boston. Now one of the rotating cast of in-house chefs then demonstrated green enchiladas. She briefly sauteed pasilla chiles, tomatillos, onions and cilantro then ground same in a food processor. No liquid was added, the texture was large sand, and it was thick like stiff mashed potatoes. She scooped about half of this down the center of a baking dish and topped it with rolled corn tortillas brushed with oil and filled with shredded chicken and cheese. She scooped the remaining 'salsa' on top, again down the center of the enchiladas which left 2/3 of each one bare. After a brief re-heat, she served them just like that. It probably tasted fine, but what the heck was the point of the footage from Oaxaca if you're going to throw all that authenticity out the window and make something no Mexican would recognize?
Jeesh.