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Issue Date: November 11, 2001
What's for dinner?
You think you have it bad, cooking every night. The Food Network's Sara Moulton does it, too, with the added pressure of millions of viewers. Here's the recipe for her successful show.
By Michele Hatty
Five nights a week, Sara Moulton hosts "Cooking Live" on the Food Network. In addition, her new Saturday morning show on entertaining, "Sara's Secrets", debuts next weekend.
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For five years, Sara Moulton has cooked dinner for America. And she's never, ever done the dishes.
Moulton, a tiny, energetic fireball of a woman, is host of "Cooking Live", a one-hour show on the Food Network, the fastest growing cable outlet. From 7 to 8 p.m. ET, she's unflappable. And no wonder: Unlike her millions of viewers, she has a staff to shop, chop and mop.
Still, surprises abound. Like one night in September, when technical difficulties and a potentially devastated upside-down apple cake lurked behind the scenes of the New York City studio.
It takes more than 20 people to put together a single broadcast of "Cooking Live". A staff of five heads up production, choosing menus and guests, researching recipes and writing the scripts that Moulton reads off the teleprompter each evening. Together, they set the tone for each broadcast: chatty, comfortable and down to earth.
Moulton, to her viewers, is an everywoman: a working mother who cooks real food, a skilled teacher who doesn't condescend to novice cooks and the type of gal who asks viewers to help her when she's stumped.
Executive producer Georgia Downard, a no-nonsense gatekeeper whose office overflows with cookbooks, looks out for Moulton -- stopping staffers from locking in a location shoot in the middle of a family vacation and watching from the production booth to ensure the director catches Moulton's vision for each show. "Sara knows what she wants the show to be," Downard says. "She's very hands-on."
The Food Network kitchen, downstairs from the more artsy, loftlike production offices, gleams with importance and activity. Here, all food for shows shot in-house is prepared -- usually in several stages of completion.
By noon on this autumn day, the kitchen bustles even though the show won't go live until 7 p.m. At one of the three cooking stations -- complete with industrial-size gas stove, a fully stocked baker's rack and a butcher block that looks large enough to seat 14 people -- one of the cooks, Krista Ruane, busily sautés butternut squash, sending the rich aroma of fall wafting through the room. Ruane is one of three cooks who work solely on Moulton's show. Each night the role of head cook rotates, and today is Ruane's turn to "run the show."
It's a big responsibility. Today's episode showcases five vegetarian recipes -- a rarity for a host who loves meat -- and Ruane must prepare at least three versions, or "swaps," of each so Moulton and her guest can get through a recipe in just a few minutes. Plus, Ruane prepares each dish to fully cooked perfection for the "beauty shot" -- that final look at a dish that screams, "I'm luscious!"
As the cooks prepare tonight's recipes, another set of kitchen staffers toils in the more modest test facility, a replica of a regular home's kitchen. There, the network makes sure home cooks can make the dishes that Moulton and other hosts, such as chef Emeril Lagasse, appear to craft effortlessly.
But even in this "reality kitchen," the cooks don't do their own shopping. All ingredients are wrangled by two buyers who scour New York City for the best produce, fish and meats.
By the time Moulton arrives at 5 p.m. from her full-time day job as executive chef of the Cooking Arts Center at Gourmet magazine, the cooks have loaded five pushcarts with those individually labeled bowls of spices, herbs and chopped onion seen on practically every cooking show.
Immediately, Moulton, the cooks, a few production staffers, the director and that night's guest all crowd around the carts to go over the script and make sure everyone knows what to expect. Then Moulton, fresh-faced in real life, is off to get 30 minutes of heavy makeup for the cameras before she slips into her chef's coat and a pair of Converse All Stars, her signature cooking footwear.
Meanwhile, cooks swarm the set, placing bowls of ingredients in exactly the right place for each scene. Just before the show goes live, Moulton scurries into the production booth and learns that Knoxville, Tenn., can't get its usual live feed. For the first time since "Cooking Live"'s inception five years before, it goes "live to tape," an oddity for a show that relies on calls from viewers to liven the action.
Unfazed, Moulton and her guest cruise through the show, chatting with each other about beets and kale and the best way to pick a squash. "Look for firm, weighty squash," Moulton says. "Avoid the cracked ones."
Toward the end of the hour, the backstage cooks tense up as Moulton starts to unveil the upside-down cake. Will it stick to its pan or come out in one piece? They lean, they stare, and the verdict is in: perfection. Silently, the cooks jump up and down in their small victory.
To end, Moulton and her guest sit down and take bites of the finished dishes.
At 7:58 p.m., the cameras stop, and Moulton, ever sunny, thanks the cooks and crew, then heads home to face yet another kitchen -- her own.
There, she won't even have to pick up a pot. "When we started the show," she says with a laugh, "I gave in and got a housekeeper."
But "Cooking Live" recipes are often on the dinner table as her husband and two children sit down each night to share life over food -- just as she hopes her viewers do.
Photo courtesy of FOOD NETWORK
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