I find the celebrity chef obsession with San Marzano tomatoes to be extremely bizarre. As part of the ridiculous over-representation for Italian food on the Food Network, we are told regularly that we cannot use any canned tomatoes other than those that are truly from San Marzano (and certainly not any tomatoes that are pretending to be from San Marzano). It doesn’t seemed to occur to anyone that many cultures have canned tomatoes and they get along just fine without using San Marzano canned tomatoes. Ahem.

I suspect that, until they started appearing on some of the weirder cooking shows, most celebrity chefs have not had their palettes tested as much as they think. I’ve always wanted someone to present canned tomatoes as San Marzano (or, even better, to present fresh as canned or canned as fresh) to see how many chefs would actually be able to tell. Some would, some wouldn’t I supsect.

So I’ve been mulling over this concept for quite some time. This is its current form:

• We gather every celebrity chef that doesn’t have some kind of exclusivity clause preventing them from working with the Food Network (so that should be most of them?)
• Before the series starts, we poll them on quality ingredients. They have to rate 3 versions of each product, such as canned tomatoes, or pasta, or what have you. We’d probably have to exclude much protein, especially steak, but we might be able to work with fish and other seafood and maybe certain parts of the chicken.
• In each episode, some of the chefs would form a typical judging panel for a show. (This one could be bigger than the usual 3 of course.)
• Among the remaining chefs, 1-2 would be selected to compete against 1-2 non-celebrity chefs.
• In each round the challenge would be to make the best meal with the theme ingredient. However, in the first round, one competitor would be randomly assigned the theme ingredient deemed best by the chefs at the beginning of the series, one the worst, and one the mid, as the kids say.
• The judges would not only be required to pick a best dish but figure out which dish had the premium ingredient and which had the bad one. At no point would they be let on what the theme ingredient was. It could be tomatoes. It could be salt.
• The competitor who has the best dish would win some amount of points in each round but the competitor(s) who fooled the judges with the not-premium theme ingredient would also get points. (And perhaps an advantage in the second or third round.)

Years ago, winetasters were fooled when someone dyed white wine red. I am convinced, most of us, even experts, can be fooled when it comes to our senses, especially our palettes. I would watch the hell out of this show or a similar show because I want people to see how hard it really is. (I also really want to see celebrity chefs be incapable of identifying San Marzano tomatoes in a finished dish by a great chef.)

Somebody make this please.