Celebrate The Bear’s Final Season With These Meal Kits

The fifth, and final, Italian-beefy serving of FX’s melancholic The Bear premieres on June 25th. And while you can choose to binge-watch, that’d kind of be like asking Carmy to chuck all 15 courses of a carefully curated tasting menu into a doggie bag so you can wolf it on the bus home. 

Videos by Sporked

If you love the show like we do (as in a bit too much), we recommend you savor its final season. Ingest it thoughtfully, with respect, as if it were an Italian beef sandwich dripping with achingly delicious slow-roasted jus. An even better way to savor it: in between episodes, cook like the show with this unreasonably affordable, limited edition Bear-inspired Chef’s Edit Kit from Just Bare Chicken. (Because we all get hungry while we’re watching The Bear.)

The Realest TV Dinner Of All Time

Last week, in advance of its final season, FX’s The Bear and Just Bare Chicken hosted a sold-out, Bear-themed Chef’s Edit dinner in New York City. The menu featured five character-inspired dishes, and as of June 25th, one of those dishes will be (briefly, affordably) available to the rest of us. 

Yes, it’s a literal TV dinner―and priced like one at $12.99―but this isn’t some rhombus of wet meat surrounded by bright yellow nibblets and a puddle of dying apple sludge. For The Bear fans, it’s about as close as it gets to eating the show. The dish in question is Just Bare’s crispy chicken with spring pea crème fraîche and like all the dishes served at the Chef’s Edit event, it was developed by Courtney Storer―chef and culinary producer of The Bear. Her brother Christopher is the show’s creator (seriously, the only thing with more The Bear street cred would be an actual bear).

What’s In The Kit?

Alas, the kit does not come with a pair of searingly Caribbean blue Carmy contact lenses. There is, however, some nice Bear-themed culinary gear: a custom bamboo cutting board, an exclusive Just Bare/FX The Bear kitchen towel, and a limited-edition canvas tote (which we’ll be using to carry our market-fresh ramps and persimmons from now on until forever). 

Most importantly, the kit includes a recipe card developed by Storer, featuring Just Bare’s antibiotic-free, preservative-free, and additive-free lightly breaded chicken bites as its main protein. You can probably guess a bit about the flavor profile based on the dish title: crisp, juicy chicken and prim, fresh spring peas layered into unctuous, buttery-tart crème fraîche. But since we’re super-fans, we’re slightly focused on one other factor: Chef T.

Like all five dishes at the FX-Just Bare dining event, Storer based this one on a character, none other than the tough, lovable, salty, stoic, vulnerable, insanely relatable, insanely indomitable Chef “T,” aka Tina, aka Bettina Marrero (played by the inimitable Liza Colón-Zayas). And while it’s hard to guess like, salty/sweet/sour/bitter vibes from a character’s story arc (don’t they all seem to apply?), Tina feels like the best character to be inspired by as you cook, and probably laugh and maybe swear and weep, over the final season of The Bear. She’s kind of the heart and soul (and grit and guts) of the show. Yeah, it’d be hard for anything coming from Chef T not to satisfy.