By Charlene Gatt
IT’S a daily struggle. Every breakfast, lunch and dinner, people open up their fridges and pantries and have a personal battle between their sweet tooth and their pledge to be healthier.
Now, your inner good chef and bad chef have names – Janella Purcell and Gary Mehigan.
The pair has just wrapped up filming season two of pay TV show Good Chef Bad Chef at Footscray’s Raw Materials studio.
The show pits two opposing food philosophies against each other through celebrity chef Gary Mehigan, who cooks indulgently and uses a lot of butter, fat, chocolate and sugar in his recipes, and naturopath/nutritionist Janella Purcell, who is into natural, healthy food as medicine.
Each episode the pair cook within a similar theme and use similar ingredients.
“We saw that there weren’t a lot of cooking shows that touched on the issue of health and healthy eating,” producer Leigh Redlich said.
“There’s a lot of banter and fun that they have in the kitchen. Gary might make fun of Janella because she keeps using tofu and he keeps telling her it doesn’t have any taste, and Janella keeps telling him that everything he does has too much fat in it and too much refined wheat and sugar.”
The show, which also screens on UK TV, first aired in 2006 on Channel Seven as a daytime show.
Mr Redlich anticipates season two will have a wider appeal following the success of Masterchef and Gary and Janella’s increasing TV profiles.
“They’re probably both more well-renowned now than they were back then but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, they don’t take themselves too seriously, it’s all about the food and they don’t mind having a bit of fun with it.”
And Footscray distribution company Raw Materials also gets its 15 minutes of fame on the show, with owner Andrew Gray introducing lots of product to the cast and crew.
“He would source balsamic vinegars from monasteries in Spain or that sort of thing and they’d sometimes filter their way onto the show,” Mr Redlich laughed.
Series two of Good Chef Bad Chef will go to air on Foxtel’s Lifestyle Food Channel on 12 October at 6.30pm.
