New cookbook
“Kitchen Impossible” now for cooking: Tim Mälzer opens his culinary diary
In his latest cookbook, Tim Mälzer looks back on seven years of “Kitchen Impossible”.
© RTL / friese.tv / Andreas Friese
If you’ve always wanted to recreate the dishes from the cooking show “Kitchen Impossible”, you don’t have to wait any longer. Tim Mälzer has published the first cookbook for the show. This arouses nostalgia and makes you want to cook.
It only took seven years: The first cookbook for the show “Kitchen Impossible” is here. And die-hard fans think, “Finally!”. It all started on December 23, 2014 in a test episode, Vox wanted to find out if the audience was ready for some kind of cooking show. It wasn’t ready. Why was that? Maybe because the episode aired the day before Christmas. But the producers believed in their show. They tried again. And boom: “Kitchen Impossible” hit and Mälzer’s duels are probably among the best cooking entertainment on German television today.
So now a cookbook that is more like a humorous diary of Mälzer’s distant travels than a great culinary work. But that’s not bad at all. Tim Mälzer himself is the author, his voice is omnipresent when reading: “This show is killing me” is written on the cover and sums up the fascination of the show. In “Kitchen Impossible” the best of the best come to their limits. With his cookbook, Tim Mälzer takes the reader back to the many challenges of the past seven years. For example, to Murska Sobota in Slovenia, where Tim Mälzer has to cook a puff pastry dish and receives 9.7 points, the highest average in a challenge so far. The youngest original chef on the show will not be forgotten: Luka Lukic from Bosnia is only nine years old, Klaus Erfort has to cook his famous suckling pig in 2018. Just like Mälzer’s eternal mantra that he is “the best Italian chef outside of Italy”.
“Bolognese is my mother’s milk”
More recipes in “Kitchen Impossible” by Tim Mälzer. Mosaic Publisher. 176 pages. 24 euros.
The 45 included recipes are divided by continents. There is a double page for each continent with “Fun facts”, including how often challenges took place there: 164 in Europe, 14 times in Asia, 11 times in America, 4 times in Africa. If you whet your appetite while watching the cooking show, you can now cook the dishes yourself. For each recipe there is an anecdote from Tim Mälzer, who set the challenge, who cooked it and how it succeeded. For example, tagliatelle al ragù, no task that Mälzer set, came as deeply from his innermost being as he himself writes. “Bolognese is my mother’s milk”. The recipe has little to do with what we know here: with minced meat “drowned in a lake of tomatoes”. For the Bolognese from original chef Franco Cimini, a mixture of parts of chicken, pork and beef is cooked for hours. In addition, an egg that is taken from the slaughtered chicken before it has been laid. Mälzer and his team left that out in the recipe, unless someone knows a good source. Important: Use tagliatelle for the ragù, not spaghetti.
The idea for “Kitchen Impossible” came about in the development forge of the production company Endemol Shine Germany. Vox commissioned the implementation and broadcast it, but only under the condition of having a decent cast. Tim Mälzer was the first to be asked and was more than happy. He had been waiting for such a format.
No success without Tim Mälzer
It wouldn’t have worked without Tim Mälzer either. “Of course it’s great fun for the opponents to give the loudmouth from Hamburg a snout. In the best case, it’s not about winning against Tim Mälzer, but about selling your own failure positively,” said producer Sven Steffensmeier in a conversation with the star. Maltster polarized.
“Kitchen Impossible” is Tim Mälzer’s (symbolic) finger, which is aimed at all those who underestimated him in the past, who doubted his cooking skills. For a long time he was not taken seriously by the cooking guild and was only ever seen as the TV chef maltster who can market himself well. With “Kitchen Impossible” that changed significantly.