For Seattle resident Joel Gamoran, there was never any question where his new daytime series, “Homemade Live!,” would be produced. It was always going to be in his hometown.

“This is a Seattle show. I’m a Seattle chef,” says Gamoran, who grew up on Mercer Island and now lives in West Seattle. “There’s something kind of cool and renegade to me that we’re not in L.A., we’re not in New York.”

“Homemade Live!,” premiering locally at 12:30 p.m. Feb. 7 on KCTS-TV, is distributed by PBS powerhouse station WGBH-TV in Boston to public TV stations nationwide.

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“We’re a brand-new cooking talk show,” Gamoran says. “It’s ‘Emeril’ meets ‘Ellen.’ We’re gonna get to know some of the most well-known people in a completely different way through their cooking.”

The TV series grew out of Gamoran’s pandemic project, free online cooking school homemadecooking.com.

“Everyone wanted me to teach cooking classes on something called Zoom and I had no idea what that was,” Gamoran says. “I started to see this was a scalable … concept, where instead of having 16 people in a class, I could have 160,000 people in a class.”

Gamoran set up a small studio in his garage and signed up sponsors.

“We’ve had 4 million people take classes with us,” he says. “We’re definitely one of the largest livestream cooking schools in America. And it all started out of a garage in West Seattle.”

Some of those tuning in for his cooking class knew of Gamoran from media appearances he’d made over the prior decade. His beginnings were humbler.

Gamoran, a graduate of The Culinary Institute of America and the Florence Culinary Arts School in Italy, started his career as a chef in restaurants. He hated it.

“I’m not a night owl and what I was missing was the people aspect of it,” Gamoran recalls. “I had to find a job that had culinary and people.”

He wound up becoming national chef for Seattle-based Sur La Table and ran its cooking program for a decade.

During that period, Gamoran was based in New York and got media exposure. Celebrities would take his cooking classes, and opportunities to cook on “Today,” “Good Morning America” and other New York-based daytime TV shows followed.

“That’s what broke me through,” he says.

A two-season A&E series, “Scraps,” followed in 2017 and a cookbook in 2018, “Cooking Scrappy: 100 Recipes to Help You Stop Wasting Food, Save Money, and Love What You Eat.”

“The idea [for the ‘Scraps’ TV series] was all about not wasting your food,” Gamoran says. “I traveled around the country with a little VW bus inspiring people to cook garbage basically and it was awesome.”

But also exhausting with a travel schedule that had Gamoran shoot each episode in a different city. Once he moved back to Seattle in 2018 and started a family with his wife, Gamoran says he knew he wanted his next series to be in one spot. He also wanted his next show to be in a studio and not subject to the whims of the weather.

“I also really missed the live interaction of a co-host and people, so I wanted to make sure that we had other people besides me,” he says. “I think I’m great solo. I think I’m better when I have either a regular everyday person cooking next to me or a giant celebrity.”

As homemadecooking.com grew, Gamoran moved out of his garage and into a studio in Pioneer Square. He still teaches cooking classes online and Gamoran used the same studio to film the first season of “Homemade Live!” over a week in September.

“We want people squished up against the glass, seeing a celebrity that flew into Seattle and how they make their meatballs,” he says. “That’s the ethos of the show.”

For Season 1, Gamoran lined up a roster of celebrities of both national and regional prominence. Kathie Lee Gifford is the guest on the first episode that reveals the show’s format.

Each episode begins with Gamoran cooking solo, followed by a viewer video. Then he cooks with the episode’s guest and they end each episode with a toast. Recipes for dishes prepared on the series can be found at parade.com/homemade along with on-demand past episodes.

Other first-season guests include former Seahawks wide receiver Sidney Rice, Crystal Kung Minkoff (“Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”), FitMenCook.com founder Kevin Curry, Seattle culinary wizard J. Kenji López-Alt, podcast hosts Carla Marie and Anthony, and former NFL star Reggie Bush and his wife, Lilit Bush.

Because “Homemade Live!” filmed its first season during the writers and actors strikes last year, Gamoran was able to get his friend Brett Harris, a segment producer on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” to come aboard as the “Homemade Live!” director. Harris will return to direct Season 2, which will shoot during a week in June when “The Tonight Show” is not airing new episodes.

In addition to airing on PBS stations, “Homemade Live!” episodes will join the Homemade cooking classes as part of the free in-flight entertainment offerings on Alaska Airlines flights.

“We have gotten so much incredible audience growth through that,” Gamoran says. “And it ties in with the Pacific Northwest connection, and they’ve been just awesome.”

Seattleites interested in attending a taping of a Season 2 episode can sign up to receive details when they’re available at bit.ly/HomemadeLiveAudience.

“The studio audience part for me is so important,” Gamoran says. “One thing about cooking in general that has really happened with social media and the blowup of Food Network is it all looks so perfect. And I really am anti-perfect. I want to make food approachable. I loved all those reps at Sur La Table for 10 years in front of a live audience. That’s where I’m most comfortable. That’s really what differentiates us: We might burn the thing because honestly, this is not perfect. We’ve got 80 people here, we’re cheering, we’re having fun and you feel the energy when you watch the episode. And again, another way to bring Seattle through is this awesome studio audience.”

“Homemade Live!”

Seattle chef Joel Gamoran’s show will premiere locally at 12:30 p.m. Feb. 7 on KCTS-TV.

Rob Owen: robowentv@gmail.com;