This article originally appeared on Complex.com
About halfway through the premiere episode of Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, the multi-hyphenate chef, host, and food personality teams with San Antonio Chef Rico Torres to make some food. It’s pretty standard for these types of food travelogues—you’ll get a moment in which the host joins with a local chef to indulge in some of the area’s specific flavors. Yet what immediately struck me about the scene was the execution of it; each individual ingredient of the larger dish was broken out and specifically highlighted in order to provide a chance for it to shine. It’s a quick, yet extremely insightful, microcosm of what Taste the Nation does so well: A focused look at all the disparate elements that make up what we all know as “American food.”