Fourteen cooks join culinary boot camp with hopes of putting their kitchen nightmares behind them. Chefs Anne Burrell and Robert Irvine want to see what they are dealing with, so they ask the recruits to make their signature dishes. The recruits split into teams and learn to make a surf-and-turf dish.

Boot camp transforms into the game show Family Food and the teams go head to head in trivia rounds and culinary tasks testing their knowledge; a Teppanyaki chef performs dazzling tricks over a grill; the recruits learn to make a hibachi-style meal.

For the skill drill, the recruits must work in teams to identify the ingredients of five mother sauces and then create their own chicken with pan sauce dishes for their chef; the recruits make fried chicken and cornbread for the main dish.

The kitchen can be a scary place, but the recruits must learn to face their fears in boot camp; first, they're forced to expand their palates with some unusual ingredients in a Cake Walk-inspired game that proves to be anything but a cakewalk.

Chefs Robert Irvine and Anne Burrell leave the recruits to their own devices, asking them to work in teams to recreate a dish by taste alone. Unbeknownst to the recruits, the chefs secretly watch their every move and are shocked by what they see. For the main dish challenge, the recruits have to bake a tiered cake to suit two special guest judges, Food Network’s Gesine Prado and Jason Smith. In the end, Anne and Robert decide which recruits satisfy their sweet tooth and which ones leave them with a toothache.

The final four recruits start thinking about life after boot camp and learn to navigate a grocery store when boot camp transforms into Worst Cooks General Market; recruits reunite with their loved ones and must make them a dish.

The remaining recruits face off in one last skill drill to determine who will compete in the finale; to see how far they've come, the recruits re-create their baseline dishes using all the techniques they learned in boot camp.