Former Shreveporter follows clues to winning recipe

Growing up in the Brookwood and Southern Hills neighborhoods, Shreveport’s Jason Burcham didn’t spend much time in the kitchen.

“My mom taught me how to cook a little bit, but I did not have any culinary desires at all.”

Then Jason went to college in Dallas. He met Lorie — his future wife — who did have an interest in cooking.

Soon, Jason found himself spending quite a bit of time in the kitchen.

“We’ve always done things together,” said the 1993 Caddo Magnet High graduate. “Even back in our college days, as soon as we met, our first jobs were waiting tables together.”

Thursday, May 26, at 8 p.m., you would have seen Jason and Lorie in the kitchen — “Crime Scene Kitchen.” That’s the name of a nine-week show on FOX. The Burchams, who live in Nashville, Tenn., spent all of April taping in Los Angeles.

“Teams of bakers have to go into a kitchen that is labeled the Crime Scene Kitchen,” Jason said. “It’s a kitchen that is set up with items, ingredients and design elements that were used to bake either a dessert, a showpiece — like a big cake — or something. You’ve got two-three minutes to walk through that kitchen and find as many clues as possible to help decipher what was baked and how it was decorated. You have to go to your kitchen and, as quickly as possible, come up with what you think was baked, bake it, decorate it, and whoever gets the closest to exactly what was made and how it was decorated, wins that round. Whoever was furthest away gets eliminated.”

First prize is $100,000. While Jason can’t say if he and his wife won the competition, he can say it was work — fun work.

“It’s a cool spin on a show because we’re not told what to make and how to make it. We had to figure out what in the world was made, with ingredients and baking goods being almost the same. It was not easy; I will just tell you that. But it was fun. It was a ton of fun. We had the time of our life.”

To learn more about the show, you may visit www.fox.com/crime-scene-kitchen/.