The secret to a good cooking show is that at least one person can cook. Usually this is the host. In fact. Because rules were not invented for Jan Böhmermann, he can cook fairly well and still invites guests to do it with him. Sounds unconventional at least. Boehmi sizzles is the name of the program that runs on ZDF neo for the first time this Saturday evening, with five more shows to follow. One is to run on a late Friday in the ZDF main program in August, presumably a test balloon, as it goes there.
Who that ZDF Magazine Royale knows, hears the water simmering softly: Böhmermann sporadically cooked with guests beforehand as part of the show, briefly on TV, in a longer version on the Internet. In a Christmas episode, the doctor’s drummer Bela B. is standing in the kitchen with a Norwegian sweater (inscription: “Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal”). It is announced that he will bake cookies. Böhmermann (in a reindeer sweater) asks: “So you are a baker, do you really bake?” Bela B. looks at him aghast: “No, zero, absolutely not, no.” Then they both laugh at the crazy editorial staff that invites a non-baker to bake and form awkward cookies in the shape of half swastikas and revolvers and garnish the baked cookies with raw eggs and grit. When the passionate hobby cook Jürgen von der Lippe is a guest, Böhmermann hands him his Hollandaise to taste and asks: “What is missing?” Jürgen von der Lippe says: “Everything.”
You exchange ideas about life – there are no gag writers with synapse burn
It won’t be that funny now. Maybe because it has its own cooking format with main program ambitions, maybe because the guests aren’t the greatest joke-knickers, maybe because they don’t have to be. When Böhmermann is on it, you wait for the upscale or uncouth joke, but it is largely removed from the list of ingredients here. He did not announce anything else beforehand. It should be a “show for the stomach and heart instead of the head”, in which you bring people together who exchange ideas about their lives and cultures, not one in which the gag authors get synapse burn. Guests in the first season are: musician Xatar, dancer Motsi Mabuse, influencer Riccardo Simonetti, TV journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, presenter Aminata Belli, pianist Igor Levit.
The gangster rapper and hip-hop producer Xatar (“Baba of all Babas”) will start. He leads such a dazzling life that the director Fatih Akin wants to make a film. Xatar is successful in the music business, owns Köfte snack bars in Bonn and Dubai and spent five years in jail for robbing a gold truck. So there the bad boy Xatar and the policeman Böhmermann stand in a very tidy TV kitchen with Japanese maple in the bucket and Japanese Fusuma elements under the ceiling and chat about what it is like when the SEK repeatedly blasts the apartment door. They also work with meat. Xatar prepares kofte. How it works, he asked his mother to explain to him on the phone. Böhmermann makes beef rolls with ground beef. There is also an alcohol-free juice accompaniment. After the first fake Zweigelt sip, Xatar makes a very sour face.
The master prepares a light summer dish from home: kale with pee
For the fact that both of them are declared not to be able to cook particularly well, the studio looks pretty much accident-free. Maybe because they heat more than they boil. Every ingredient is pre-chopped and is already in the right pot. The focus is clear: cooking is always just a ramp to talk about the guest’s biography and their view of the world. As with the great Alfred Biolek, there are who passed away this Friday, no pepper mill illuminated from the inside and just dosed the offensive “Mmmmh” as a comment on the other person’s meal, but otherwise a lot reminds of the model Alfredissimo!, which has always been more of an upscale stove top talk show than a cooking show. There is no audience, and there wasn’t at Biolek either, the conversation without immediate reactions serves a lot.
Could be a little more spice Boehmi sizzles nevertheless tolerated. In the two episodes that have been released for preview so far, there are two people in the kitchen who agree very much. The moderator is extremely polite, as is the guest, nothing to object to, but it is not consistently exciting. But sometimes chance helps. In the second episode, the Let’s dance-Juror Motsi Mabuse serves South African Chakalaka with chicken, instead of salt she accidentally dumps sugar into all pots. Böhmermann prepares a light summer dish from his home in Bremen: kale with pee. It looks like a cow dung. Both cost, both politely grimacing. Do you need another cooking show? Necessarily. Quite simply because it isn’t.
ZDFneo, six episodes, ZDF media library, the show will be available on Friday at 10 a.m.