The American Barbecue Showdown is back! Sort of. Season three of the “ultimate test of pit-fire mastery” has been renamed plain old Barbecue Showdown (Netflix, available now).
If the idea is to open the show up to more global cuisines, it’s not immediately obvious. Nine cooks – with names like Shaticka Robinson, Kent Rollins and Staci Jett – are dropped off at a “barbecue compound” in “the heart of America”, where an impromptu hoedown breaks out.
Likeable host Michelle Buteau introduces the contestants to sour-faced judges Melissa Cookston and Kevin Bludso – who unnervingly tells them he needs “to taste your heart and soul” – and shows them around. There are a startling variety of barbecues, which look to the uninitiated like a series of hot bins.
Challenge one sees them asked to prepare a bone-in protein, plus a sauce or rub and two sides. They get five-and-a-half hours and the finished dish must, they are told, “represent your story”.
This is perhaps where the show’s broader outlook comes in. “Egyptian cowboy” Kareem readies oxtail with rice from north Africa; Luis, originally from Venezuela, shares the secrets of a good chimichurri; while Tung prepares Vietnamese-style bò lúc lac, or “shaken beef”. For her part, Shaticka whacks a Caribbean rub on her dino ribs. “I’m not Jamaican, I feel like I’m Jamaican,” she clarifies.
Despite this, we seem to see an awful lot of variations on the ‘salt on beef’ theme, with the side dishes almost completely overlooked. Hopefully there’s more variety to come in the remaining seven episodes before the $50,000 prize is handed out.
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