Ten-year-old Elan Satchit of Brooklyn will channel his inner Bobby Flay Tuesday night when he competes on “Chopped Junior.”
On the Food Network reality show, four young chefs (ages 9 to 15) vie to see who can make a basket of strange ingredients into the tastiest dish for a $10,000 prize. That much cash could buy a lot of baseball cards.
However, Satchit, a fifth-grader at PS-107 in Park Slope, isn’t appearing for the love of haute cuisine — he’s doing it for the love of the game.
“I’m a really competitive person,” Satchit told The Post. “I do triathlons and stuff. I like the adrenaline.”
For a kid who runs a six-minute mile on the school track team, the food came second.
“I only started cooking six months before [this episode] got filmed,” he says. “So I didn’t have a lot of practice.”
He first put on his chef’s hat one night when “my dad said I should try cooking his dinner,” he says. So, Satchit whipped up some delicious meatballs for his pop, and soon discovered a TV show that blended two of his passions.
The young gourmand filmed his “Chopped” episode from morning till night on a Monday. Trading in his pencil for a chef’s knife, he even got to cut class.
Satchit says his TV debut was “nerve-racking.”
“For the first round, I didn’t really know what was going on. But after 10 hours of filming I got used to it.”
The pizza-loving preteen doesn’t cook every single night these days, but he says that his mom and dad have newfound faith in his kitchen skills.
“Now that I was on the show, they can trust me,” he says. “They know that I won’t cut myself or burn myself.”