Review: "World Chocolate Championship" 2009

Sisters and Brothers, I do not know if you had a chance to watch this interesting chocolate show tonight on TLC but your Chocolate Priestess watched it and so I want to review it for you.

The show was called "World Chocolate Championship" for the title of World Chocolate Master and was held in Paris in 2009 though the program did not say exactly when it was held  It's been on TLC in the past so check out their website to find it if you haven't seen it yet.

I have a few criticisms of the show then I want to move on to praising it.  In this new year, I want to do more reviews of TV shows and movies in this fashion so please give me feedback and let me know if this format works for you.

My first critic is that the show is really far too short, only 60 minutes long.  19 chocolate masters from 19 different nations competed and not all of them were give time on air.   This time problem was compounded by the fact that they had to create fives chocolate pieces in two days of the competition so a total of 95 different cocoa masterpieces of which we saw only a small portion.  That was very disappointing.

My second concern is that while the show made a big deal of the fact that only three women were competing and no woman had ever one, they didn't really go beyond this initial hype.  The cameras only spent time with one of these women, letting her speak on camera several times and showing her working.  Another woman we saw a few minutes as she was working while the last woman appeared only in line ups of the contestants. 

Finally while the show repeated what event it was after every commercial break it never took the time to explain more about the competition.  How long has it been held?  Who are the judges?  What criteria did they use?  How are this competitions in the individual countries held?   How was the final tally and winner determined because that seemed to come out of the blue from the records I was keeping.

The show did have some wonderful moments as well.

The chocolatiers interviewed were all very interesting people with their own stories and goals to share. 

The creations were very beautiful to look at and the judge comments while they were being made was interesting.

Overall these positives only made me feel my first criticism is spot on.  If they had doubled the time allowed we could have gotten more interviews and more of the wonderful creations.  That would be worth seeing over and over again.

Sisters and Brothers, may you too take the time to slowly appreciate what the Divine and human ingenuity have offered you in chocolate.

Comments

mavido79 said…
Sorry I missed that but I'll keep my eyes open to see when TLC re-runs it. Your gripes are the same that I have about a lot of competitive cooking shows. Too much content and not enough time given to really do it justice.
Caroline said…
Thank you for linking to it. I had trouble finding it. You would thing they wold take a note from looking at other competitions and how they are presented (after all Food Network is their competition).
You are welcomed, Caroline. As mavido79 points out and I'm starting to see, limited time seems to be a big issue for a lot of these "cooking competition" shows. It wasn't chocolate specific but we watched a cupcake challenge last week that had almost identical problems but at least only six competitors.