This is the first edition of our Iron Chef Collection Exclusives Episodes of the Month. Of course, this is where we present to you Iron Chef episodes that did not air on Food Network. Today, we present our Episodes of the Month for July. (Yeah. I know it’s already August. Sue me. 🙂 ) Thank you to everyone who voted in our poll this month. A new poll will go up near the middle of the month. And without further ado, we present the winners.
- Iron Chef Tag Match (530) – Watermelon Battle – Chairman Kaga divides the Iron Chefs into two teams for this special battle: Team Asia (Chen and Nakamura) and Team Europe (Sakai and Kobe). (Make sure you watch the commercial right after the tasting. There is rather entertaining Iron Chef themed Nissan commercial.)
- Ostrich Battle (518) – Iron Chef Nakamura vs. Gillian Hirst – Even though it comes from 1997, this episode is well known by most non-Japanese fans for a variety of reasons. The distinctly non-Japanese name sticks out in a challenger list, and let’s face it, most of us English speaking fans are interested in seeing the few English speaking challengers. This episode was mentioned by name as a desired episode on Nylon.net’s Iron Chef Episode Exchange page. And probably most importantly, the challenger’s entrance to Kitchen Stadium from this battle was a part of Food Network’s Iron Chef introduction. (A special note about this battle: Mark at Nylon contacted Chef Hirst about her appearance on the show. It turns out that she hadn’t even seen it. We are glad to have contributed to her finally being able to see her appearance on Iron Chef.)
Both of these episodes were recorded directly from the original Japanese broadcast in 1997, including all breaks and commercials. The episodes are in Japanese with no subtitles.
The following episodes may be found by searching our video database:
518OA,
530OA