Food Network Star Season 11 Runner-Up Jay Ducote Gets Show....On Travel Channel

Photo - Food Network

Food Network Star Season 11 runner-up Jay Ducote announced that he will star in a show called Deep Fried America which is a pilot that will air on Travel Channel rather than Food Network.  You may recall that Deep Fried America was his concept on Food Network Star and the episode is scheduled to air on Saturday, June 25th at 1:30pm ET on Travel Channel.

The description of the show states:

Chef Jay Ducote has a huge passion for all things fried -- deep fried, to be exact. He's headed to Austin to dive into a delicately deep-fried tempura-battered burger, a deep-fried lamb meatloaf sandwich, Thanksgiving dinner fried into a ball and even a deep-fried donut topped with a healthy pile of fried chicken.

Jay has a detailed blog post on how the show came about and here is the brief version:

• A few weeks after the finale of Food Network Star, Food Network called him and asked if he was still interested in doing Deep Fried America and he said yes.
• He was assigned a production company and filmed a pilot in November 2015. 
• The production company did the editing for the pilot and sent it to Food Network, and Jay kept waiting and waiting without hearing anything.
• He finally got an email sometime after April that said he had an air date for the pilot and it was on Travel Channel.
• This is only a pilot and Travel Channel will evaluate ratings to decide if they want to film more episodes.

Scripps Networks owns channels such as Food Network, HGTV, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel and DIY, so it is still the same company that Jay will be working for.  I wonder why the decision was made to put Deep Fried America on Travel Channel as Food Network and Cooking Channel both have shows where hosts travel around trying foods.

I will update this post with the ratings (if they are available) after the show airs.