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'American Masters' salutes our greatest chefs

Robert Bianco
USA TODAY
Alice Waters and  Jacques Pepin of 'American Masters: Chefs Flight.'

PASADENA, Calif. — American Masters is about to make you very, very hungry.

This May, the PBS series is offering a Chefs Flight of four films, all about famous chefs. The Flight will combine two new shows, Jacques Pepin: The Art of Craft and James Beard: America's First Foodie with two repeats, Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution and Julia! America's Favorite Chef.

Waters and Pepin are no strangers to TV, from cooking shows to documentaries. But there is one kind of TV food show they will not do or watch: Cooking competition shows like Top Chef.

"It's a disservice," Pepin told television critics. "This is not what cooking is all about. Cooking is about loving and sharing. That kind of confrontation is not what cooking is about."

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"We're teaching the fast food values of our country," adds Waters. "Cooking really is something that can be very meditative. It's never about competition. It's about the pleasure of dealing with real food, and having a competence for your own self about chopping and learning how to do this. It's empowering. To put that in a competition place really takes away from the essence of cooking."

Most of us, of course, don't compete with anyone in our own kitchens. But we do make other mistakes — and chef Naomi Pomeroy, who appears in the James Beard film, says one of the biggest is we don't taste the food enough when we're cooking.

Chef Naomi Pomeroy says a common mistake cooks make is not tasting their food enough during preparation.

"If you've finished cooking a full meal and you're still hungry and ready to sit down and eat," says Pomeroy, "maybe you haven't tasted enough."

Pepin says the worst mistake is assuming a recipe will come out the same way every time; it won't because ingredients change — which is why you have to taste. "Food I taste a lot," Pepin says. "Wine I taste even more."

For Waters, the worst mistake is to begin with a recipe and then try to find the ingredients. "I go to the market first, the farmer's market, and begin to gather the ingredients. And then I look at the book to see how others have used those ingredients."

"The other big mistake is to think you can make something out of an ingredient that isn't right or good. To think that somehow we'll make this good. You have to taste that tomato, and once you taste it, you figure out how to use it."

If they have one other piece of advice, Pepin says, it would be "stay simple." When he was young, Pepin says, he used to add a lot of ingredients to his dishes; now he takes things away. If you find a good, fresh tomato, put on a little olive oil and salt, he says, and "that's it. I don't want a lot on top of it...Get simpler and simpler and simpler."

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