Chopping and changing: TV’s new reality cooking series.

Ted Allen (right), from the original Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, hosts Chopped, a reality cooking competition show. Sarah Nealon reports.

He was once a part of one of the biggest reality makeover shows in the US and has since carved out a successful TV career.

But Ted Allen, the former food and wine expert from the original Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, who now hosts reality cooking show Chopped, thought his career might lie in a completely different field.

“When I initially started (university) I wanted to be an actual psychologist but I quickly learned I didn’t want to go to graduate school for five additional years on top of the four that I would have experienced as an undergrad so I got a job at a newspaper, as a copy editor,” he says.

“I needed money. And I immediately fell in love with journalism and journalists.”

Allen, who plays the piano and writes songs, ended up as a restaurant critic for a Chicago magazine, a job which sparked a passion for all things food-related.

Allen, who has a huge bookshelf wall lined with cookbooks at his New York home, says he can “talk about food till the cows come home”. Just don’t call him a chef. “I’m not a trained chef,” he says. “I haven’t worked as a chef in a restaurant. The title is kind of honorary but you have to earn it working long days in hot kitchens banging it out.

“So I have too much respect for chefs to claim that title myself. I am a journalist but I haven’t been doing it lately. So I guess now I’m basically a game-show host.”

Allen has been fronting Chopped, in which four chefs face off against each other in a time-pressured situation, since 2009. Every episode usually has three rounds where the contestant chefs must create dishes using pre-selected ingredients.

“In each round they get a mystery basket of usually four ingredients that might be truly horrible or that might be less horrible but still perplexing as to how to put them together,” says Allen. “And in that first round you get only 20 minutes.

“You’ve got to make four plates of food, full-cooked food preferably in 20 minutes. It’s extremely challenging. I think what really makes it psychologically interesting is that chefs are extraordinary control freaks. They are very picky about what ingredients they are working with – they have to be, they should be, that’s their craft.

“On Chopped, we take away all of that control and throw them into the deep end of a boiling pool of difficulty.”