South Texas continues to be a hotbed for TV cooking competitions to recruit culinary talent — although the latest San Antonio native to get scooped up isn't even a trained chef.
Alamo City native Amber Rebold has landed on the new Gordon Ramsay cooking show Next Level Chef, which sets out to prove that kitchen badasses need not be executive chefs at Michelin star restaurants.
The Fox TV series will pit 15 contestants against each other in hopes of winning a $250,000 grand prize and the title of Next Level Chef. To choose his contestants, Ramsay opened the competition to line cooks, home chefs, social media stars, food truck owners and everything in between.
Rebold was one of only three contestants who had no culinary-school training, news site MySA reports. The SA native works as a senior forest advisor for Better Place Forests, which maintains memorial forests across the U.S.
Though Rebold’s Instagram account notes that she now resides in “Austin, Texas, y’all,” the contestant told MySA she “hopes her hometown will cheer her on” when the new show airs on FOX on Jan. 2 at 8 p.m. After the premiere, the show will move to its regular slot time on Wednesday, Jan. 5, at 8 p.m.
Those with an appetite for spectacle take note: Next Level Chef will feature a new kind of culinary gauntlet boasting three separate kitchens stacked on top of one another — a stage the likes of which FOX has never before constructed, a release from the network states.
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