Okay, step out on the limb with me here. Do you watch Iron Chef? I’m not asking if you admit that you watch it. I’m asking if you actually watch it. I don’t watch it consistently, but I did find myself oddly fascinated when they came up with this Battle of the Masters thing where Food Network subsidiaries like Bobby Flay and Mario Batali go up against a couple of the original Iron Chefs from the Japanese show.

The greatest loss, of course, is Chairman Kaga, who manages to look both psychotic and orgasmic whenever he bites that yellow pepper at the beginning of the show. Instead, we have some new guy, who has the unenviable task of trying to fill the shoes of a genuinely weird television personality. You knew he was in over his head when he introduced the “secret ingredient” in the Morimoto/Batali battle. He took a deep breath, revealed a giant water tank, and hollered, “SPINY LOBSTERS!” Watching a guy do that in English, as opposed to subtitled Japanese, really makes for an unsettling experience. You don’t have to hear Kaga scream, “GIANT CUCUMBERS!” or whatever, which insulates the viewer somewhat from the underlying creepiness of the ingredient being unveiled.

But what was especially charming about the first installment was that Sakai did exactly what my mother and I always laugh the hardest about in every episode — he made the theme ingredient into ice cream, come hell or high water. The ingredient that night was trout. So Sakai made fish ice cream, which he served with berries and trout skin cookies, basically. One of the judges said something along the lines of, “The trout in the ice cream is very subtle.” Yum. I don’t like it when ice cream is too, you know, fishy. I think that displaced the asparagus ice cream as the most appalling ice cream I’ve ever seen an Iron Chef throw down the gullets of the unsuspecting judges.

Of course, it was slightly disappointing that Bobby Flay wasn’t electrocuted like he was last time they did this. (Who knew you shouldn’t waddle around in puddles of water that have heavy electrical cords running through them?) When the celebrity chefs aren’t injured, there’s something missing, I would say. Bring on the amputated thumbs!

Quite honestly, compared to other shows, Iron Chef has a remarkable tendency to turn out food I wouldn’t eat even if they paid me, which I guess in the case of the judges, they actually do. Most of the TV chefs make stuff that at least seems edible, but Iron Chef always has a lot of crunchy fish bones and fried banana peels and boiled potato eyes and that sort of thing. I am well aware that this is largely cultural with respect to the Japanese show — it’s just a lot of food I’m not used to. But even with the American version, Flay threw a whole battered fish in to be deep-fried, and . . . no, I do not want to eat an entire fish with the skin on. Maybe I don’t like theatrical food.