The Food Network’s Chopped has a reasonable premise. Great chefs do not need recipes to work with good ingredients. We amateurs in the audience can learn from how the pros handle the ingredients. That’s the premise of the successful “Iron Chef America” program, and it works in that show. … The problem with Chopped is that it artificially overconstrained in a way that diminishes the culinary craft in favor of unrelated skills. How about adding a hungry dog to the kitchen or having only two burners on the stove? That might be fun, but it would have nothing to do with good cooking.