In case you missed it in THE BA FOODIST, or don’t stay up to the wee hours, ABC’s Nightline did a story last week on the behind the scenes”secrets” of Iron Chef America. Click here to read and see the story, and read further to discover a couple of “secrets” from the episode judged by ELV.

The story quotes Andrew Knowlton (aka THE BA FOODIST), with whom we judged the episode that was taped in July (air date: 10-5-08 on the Food Network – set your Tivos!) on the seriousness and difficulty faced by the chefs during the competition (yes, they really do only get 60 minutes to prepare 5 dishes for judging, but the overall production takes about 6+ hours to get “in the can” as they say.) And lucky for Andrew and me (and fellow judge Steve Olsen) we didn’t have any turkey ice cream to contend with.

Two secret items that may or may or may not make it into the final show:

-During the taping, our challenger (David Adjey from Toronto) cut his hand, and needed to put it inside a surgical glove (where the blood was most visible) for most of the cooking. Just as the Nightline article mentions, the star chefs and challengers aren’t always as skilled with the cutlery as their sous chefs are, probably because (many of them) are out making appearances and running businesses instead of actually honing and practicing their knife skills.

-I don’t know if they’ll edit it out of the final program, but half way through the contest, an explosion occurred in the challenger’s kitchen that sounded like a 12 gauge shotgun going off. Everything and everyone stopped what they were doing and suspected something very serious had happened. You’ll have to watch to see what it was. ;-}