I come from a family in which cooking is something of a calling, albeit not necessarily a very loud one. My father pulled a hitch in the Air Force reserves as a cook for a MASH unit. (The fact that the unit apparently consisted of 99 obstetricians and a gynecologist in no way diminishes the enormity of their service or, if my father's stories can be believed, their appetites.) More recently my sister made our entire family proud by graduating from the Culinary Institute of America with a degree in pastries and desserts. As for myself, I'm a writer. My culinary obsessions tend to come more on the receiving end of others' efforts in the kitchen (though I can sling a mean matzahball soup when the mood takes me and the smoke alarm has been disabled). However, just because I can't produce the quantity or quality of food my family members can doesn't mean that I don't have flights of fancy about someday producing astonishing six- course meals, baking monumental cakes or otherwise leaving guests in a drooling frenzy awaiting the fruits of my labors. But that's got nothing at all to do with why I watch Iron Chef.

What is Iron Chef, you ask? Well, the show can best be described as a cross between professional wrestling, Julia Child and the anime series Dragonball Z. If that sounds surreal to you, well, there's a reason: This show is screwier than a three-legged giraffe playing kickball. Imagine Mortal Kombat with the Two Fat Ladies, or Emeril on Celebrity Deathmatch and you begin to get the idea of precisely how crunchy this nutbar of a show is -- and why it exerts such a fascination. The basic premise of Iron Chef is deceptively simple. A man with a dream (which may or not have been induced by some leftover fungus from "the magic mushroom battle" episode), Elvis' hair and Liberace's wardrobe has constructed something called "Kitchen Stadium." Kitchen Stadium consists of what appears to be an old Star Trek set surmounting a remarkably well-equipped set of matched kitchens, as well as an audience area and what can best be described as luxury boxes. There's also a dining room for the celebrity judges, whom we'll get to in a minute. Our hero has also hired four culinary gunslingers, called his Iron Chefs, to take on all comers in battles of kitchen derring-do. The four chefs, who specialize in Chinese, Japanese, Italian and French cooking (the Italian one is a latecomer, if I remember correctly), get levitated onto the set during the opening credits by means of elevators that seem to be lifted from the old Jacksons' video Torture. Iron Chef Japanese comes up flexing and Iron Chef Chinese arrives with a cleaver; Iron Chefs Italian and French get to hold a tomato and a pear, respectively. Clearly there's an established pecking order. (In case you're wondering, the opening credits used to be even weirder. One version featured a statue of our host, Kaga, that looked like it was the Lincoln Memorial by way of the cover of Michael Jackson's HIStory CD. Be afraid, be very afraid.)

When all of the smoke and high dudgeon ends, one of the chefs is then chosen to face a challenger, presumably one of the world's great chefs, in a duel of cooking skill lasting precisely one hour. The results of the two chefs' work are to be judged by the celebrities seated off to the side, who in theory have some sense of what the hell good food tastes like. Here's where it gets interesting. The whole point of the competition is that our mysterious host selects a single ingredient (or in one episode I saw, a theme) that serves as the basis for the night's challenge. Each of the competing chefs must take the "challenge ingredient" and prepare an entire meal that best exemplifies the spirit of that ingredient. The problems with this scenario should become readily apparent with a little thought. After all, while it's OK to encourage versatility with a particular ingredient, being forced to use it throughout a meal resurrects echoes of Monty Python's old Church Police routine -- rat sorbet, rat tart, rat cake... And that does lead us to the troublesome question of dessert as well. It's all well and good when your challenge ingredient is, say, mangoes, but when you're talking about fish suddenly your dessert options get kind of limited. (For the record, I believe one of the solutions that was tried was candied fish fins as a decoration. Seeya later, kids. If I see that on my plate, I'm going to Carvel -- and I'm not getting Fudgie the Whale Cake.) Even better is the fact that the challenge ingredient emerges from a subterranean vat, surrounded by clouds of billowing steam and swells of ponderous music. One expects the various chefs' assistants gathered to aid the masters in their trials to caper around the pillar housing the delicacy, cavorting and possibly tossing a well-trimmed bone to the heavens in hopes of having it turn into a spaceship. Still, the whole thing is rather anticlimactic when, from the caldera of this makeshift volcano, emerges two slabs of tofu the size of ocean liners or something equally nondescript. No matter how loud the music or how frenzied the camera angles, there's just no way to make a pile of pork bellies look impressive.

On the other hand, once the "pork belly battle" or the equivalent begins, things get amusing. Hordes of assistant chefs descend upon the pile of core ingredient, hauling off double handfuls of edible loot (and occasionally stealing from one another.) These get carried off to the respective work areas of the Iron Chef and his challenger (both of whom have previously been interviewed, and both of whom have professed tremendous respect for their opponent and a rueful "I'll do my best" as regards their own chances. Myself, I'm waiting for the day when Iron Chef Japanese just loses it and goes off on how he's going to kick the challenger's roody-poo candy ass -- can you smell what Iron Chef Japanese is cooking? -- but I don't think the Food Network will allow that to happen.) What follows is frankly, disturbing. The show is blessed with a play-by-play man and a color commentator, plus a hyperactive squirrel in a tuxedo who fulfills the role of sideline reporter. As the two chefs prepare the meals, we get treated to all of the trappings of American sports reporting -- insipid commentary, hurried interviews, and slow-motion replay. Whoever thought the world needed multiple slow-mo replays of a bag of rice being dumped into a rice cooker clearly spent their formative years inside a sensory deprivation chamber but every episode has at least one Kodak moment of this sort. The hour chugs along as the chefs and their hordes of nameless assistants (the opening credits show approximately four thousand of these guys, all looking very stoic as they resign themselves to an hour of making stuff that clearly comes from the Kitchen of Dr. Moreau) throw together lavish meals. Why do they do this? Well, there's a panel of celebrity judges waiting to pass judgment on the finished product, and these "celebrities" add their comments to the play-by-play as the hour goes along. On any given episode the celebrity panel includes one actual food critic, one member of the lower house of parliament, one extremely Americanized actor (though during my first episode, I was treated to the culinary stylings of a rapper who calls himself Korn) and one waifish actress. The latter is important, as it seems that these specimens of the thespian profession have been added for their aesthetic, not culinary virtues, and their translated commentary ranges from the risible to the appalling. Comments like "All of the flavors are dancing around in my mouth" and suchlike come across as escapees from a badly dubbed porn flick, but they do add to the general hilarity of the viewing experience. On rare occasions the food critic is replaced by a professional psychic, and then things get weird indeed, though thankfully the psychic generally refrains from making comments like "I knew he was going to add cayenne pepper" or "The spirits told me he was going to steam that." The chefs have an hour (edited for commercial breaks), and then the celebrity panel sits down to chow down on the prepared delicacies. The challenger goes first, the Iron Chef second, and each chef provides commentary as he ladles out the shark fin soup laced with yogurt or whatever. Essentially, the commentary can be boiled down to "God dammit, this food is too good for the likes of you," but the celebrity panel never seems to get it. Instead, the various judges content themselves with chowing down and making at least three comments each about the "subtle sweetness" or "subtle sourness" of each dish.

Well, that's not strictly the case: The actress generally restricts herself to things like "This doesn't taste like pork at all!" or "I hate it!" Her culinary expertise may be lacking (one had to be reminded that she'd apparently authored a cookbook) but her honesty is at least refreshing. Eventually we get to the moment of judging, when the scores each of the celebrities have assigned the two chefs get weighted and the winner is announced. If there is a tie, the next episode is a cook-off. If not, well, the winner bows to the loser and the loser bows to the winner, and they both give post-cooking interviews. What does the winner get? Nothing. What does the loser get? Nothing. Correction: The loser generally gets a ton of exposure for his restaurant, because nine times out of ten the Iron Chef gets to lay down the smack on his opponent like some spatula- wielding equivalent of the 1986 Chicago Bears defense. Part of that comes from the Iron Chefs' familiarity with certain fixture members of the celebrity panel and the kitchen setup, part of that comes from their admittedly immense skill, and part seems to be a subtle predisposition on the part of the judges to give the benefit of the doubt to the home team. After all, if the Iron Chefs play .500 ball, there's no big thrill in beating one, is there? So most of the time the Iron Chef pulls it out, and the challenger goes home wondering how the hell he was supposed to put together a decent meal with yogurt or mangoes or whatever was on the menu that day. So with all that in mind, Iron Chef is awful, right? Oddly enough, it's not. Though you're not likely to learn much cooking-wise from the show (anyone who takes Iron Chef Italian's lead and shoves a mango up a pan-fried duck's fundament needs seriously help and a Happy Meal), there's something entrancing about watching two cooks go at it like drag racers in funny hats. The amount of skill on display is remarkable, but it's the combination of that skill and the insane, hysterical setup and commentary that makes Iron Chef transcendent. So tune in. Give it a shot. And remember, when in doubt, it seems like that he's going to steam it.