Four months ago Jenny and I attended the filming of Food Poker. Ever since we have been wondering if, and when, our episode would be screened and finallly yesterday it was. Gary was kind enough to record it for us and it is because of him that I have little video clip of our highlights – our first sighting is at about 1:45 minutes:

I’ve described how it works before:

… a group of four chefs “play a hand” of poker which would decide which ingredients they would be allowed to cook with for the relevant rounds – Savoury and Sweet. For each round, the four chefs have a few minutes to convince the panel that their dish was the best and the two chefs with the most chips would then go into the round cook-off. The winner of each round, as voted by us the panel via poker chips and counted by Charlie the Chip Machine, would then cook-off in a finale – the results of which would be judged the chefs who didn’t make the cook-off – leaving Food Poker with a Food Poker Champion for the day.

I can tell you now that the day of filming was once again very long. We got there for around lunch time and didn’t leave until around 9.30pm that evening! I guess it didn’t help that the day we went to was only the second day of filming so there was still quite a bit of feeling out. By the end of the series I’m sure they had the filming down to a few hours only.

As for the tasting though we did get to sample each of the chef’s cooking the portions were so tiny it was lucky that before filming had started we were treated to the crew lunch – basically lasagne, salads, quiches, etc. It was very yummy and for me the highlight of the day nearly! Ha ha.

Here were the four dishes we got to sample:

Round	Chef	Pic	Dish Title	Our Call
SAVOURY	Theo Randall		Pan-Fried Tofu & Roquefort	Did really well to incorporate a cheese and tofu. Who would have thought he could get through on those ingredients.
	Peter Gordon		Sea Bass Sushi with Dill & Watercress Dressing	Not bad but was too messy for eating on TV. Sushi fell apart and was difficult to manage.
SWEET	Martin Blunos		Caramelised Bananas with Strawberry Sauce	Hardly an adventurous dish but did the best he could with his ingredients.
	Clodagh McKenna		Coffee & Chocolate Trifle	Felt truly sorry for Clodagh as she was so happy to be cooking but she just mis-managed her time and her whole dish fell apart.

At the end of the day, Theo went up against Martin and their main ingredient was rump steak. They both produced a very yummy dish each but we didn’t get to taste it. Food Poker Champion for the day ended up being Martin. A good come from behind win.