Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen recommends a show for the upcoming week.
Fans of Chris Fennimore’s “QED Cooks” programs announces a new national cooking talk show arriving at WQED-TV at 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays from April 6.
Chef Joel Gamoran hosts “Homemade Live!,” a weekly series distributed by PBS station WGBH-TV in Boston.
“We’re a brand-new cooking talk show,” Gamoran said. “It’s a mix of ‘Emeril’ and ‘Ellen.’ We will get to know some of the most famous people in a unique way through their cooking.”
“Homemade Live!” was created after Gamoran’s pandemic project: a free online cooking school homemadecooking.com.
“Everyone wanted me to teach cooking classes on something called Zoom and I had no idea what that was,” Gamoran said. “I started to see this was a scalable … concept. Instead of having 16 people in a class, I could have 160,000 people in a class.”
Gamoran built a small studio in his West Seattle, Wash., garage and signed up sponsors to help cover the show’s production cost.
“We’ve had 4 million people take classes with us,” he said. “We’re definitely one of the largest livestream cooking schools in America.”
Gamoran still teaches cooking classes online but now he works out of a bigger studio. It’s no longer in his garage but in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. He taped the first season of “Homemade Live!” in that Pioneer Square studio over a week in September 2023.
“We want people squished up against the glass, seeing a celebrity that flew into Seattle and how they make their meatballs,” he said. “That’s the ethos of the show.”
Kathie Lee Gifford guests on the first episode that starts with Gamoran cooking on his own. Then he cooks with Gifford. Each episode ends with Gamoran and his celebrity guest offering a toast.
Previous episodes and recipes for dishes prepared on the series can be found at www.homemade.live.
Other guests include Crystal Kung Minkoff (“Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”), FitMenCook.com founder Kevin Curry and former NFL star Reggie Bush and his wife, Lilit Bush.
“Reggie is just unbelievably accomplished and his wife, she doesn’t get as much of the limelight because she’s married to Reggie,” Gamoran said. “But when you watch the episode, she steals the show — from Reggie, from me. The whole audience took to her.”
Gamoran got a toehold in TV in pre-pandemic times. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and the Culinary Institute of Florence in Italy, Gamoran was a national chef for the Sur La Table kitchen chain and ran their cooking program in New York for a decade. That led him to appear on “Good Morning America,” “Today” and other New York-based daytime TV shows.
In 2017 he had a two-season A&E series, “Scraps,” and in 2018 he published the cookbook, “Eating Scrappy: 100 Recipes to Help You Stop Wasting Food, Save Money, and Love What You Eat.”
“The idea [for the ‘Scraps’ TV series] was all about not wasting your food,” Gamoran said. “I traveled around the country with a little VW bus inspiring people to cook garbage basically.”
Gamoran moved back to his native Seattle in 2018 when he and his wife started their family.
“One thing about cooking in general that has really changed with social media and the popularity of Food Network is that everything appears flawless,” Gamoran stated. “I am strongly against the idea of perfection. I aim to make food more accessible. … That’s what sets us apart: We might overcook something because honestly, this is not perfect. We have 80 people here [in the studio audience], we’re applauding, we’re having fun, and you can feel the excitement when you watch the episode.”
