Everybody at work was shocked because I don’t have a good diet in the office they joked that I’d cook a crisp sandwich. The first thing I remember cooking was five or six years ago – a pasta dish for a girl I was trying to impress. I didn’t tell my parents or friends that I was a contestant until a week before I was on TV. I don’t know! I don’t really like people watching me cook or the idea of being on television. Luke Owen, 31 (robotics company sales engineer) Ping’s flavours (especially East Asian) and incredible skill are right up there! She is definitely not a one-trick pony. I have always dreamt of having a Malaysian café where I could serve street food and noodles, and teach Malaysian cooking. And then John snapped me out of it: “Have you got more noodles?” And, being my mum’s daughter, I had.īoth, because they are really funny together! I find their presence quite comforting. I could see everybody spinning round and gasping. At times I wanted to throw in the towel, but then reminded myself that I was doing it because I wanted her to be proud of her mum.ĭropping the bowl of laksa in the quarter-final! For one second I just stood there. I was stressing that I would miss her first steps and I wasn’t sleeping because she was teething. I’d never been away from my daughter Alexa for more than an hour since she was born, so that was really hard. Everyone back home was so surprised when I told them about MasterChef – “We didn’t know you could cook!”
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I moved here for university when I was 20 and didn’t know how to boil an egg! I craved my mum’s cooking and the only way to get it was to learn how to cook it myself. My friend sent me the form and I thought, “I’ve got nothing to lose.” I never had the guts until I was made redundant while I was on maternity leave from the private hospital where I was an assistant hotel manager. Ping Coombes, 33 (a full-time mum from Bath) But he doesn’t always have the technical ability to pull dishes off, and he can have under- and over-seasoning issues. Jack has produced impressive dishes and flavours from the beginning and has great skill for his age. And at some point I’d love to own a restaurant… but being a chef is such a tough career – it’s gruelling. Hopefully I’ll be involved with getting products made, bringing them to market, that sort of thing. I’ve got a job lined up next year in buying and marketing for Sainsbury’s.
So I’d have Gregg sat at one seat, Rob at the other. I would choose Gregg, purely on the basis that he looks remarkably like my girlfriend’s dad, Rob. Who would you rather have round for dinner – John or Gregg? It really was a case of go in on the day and hope for the best. On YouTube I’d seen chefs using waterbaths and pressure cookers, so I thought, “I’ve gotta try it.” The trouble is, waterbaths set you back about £300, so it’s not something that I have at home. You have to cook four plates and two courses in an hour and
My housemates would always be trying to steal my leftovers.Ĭooking for the finalists and the past winners. When I got to uni, YouTube was probably the biggest bank of learning material I’d sit and watch cooking videos for hours.
My mum would always have me helping out at home. Theo cooked oxtail ravioli and secured his place as a MasterChef quarter-finalist.I’d just graduated from university with a degree in geography and because I’m on my year off, I thought, “You know what, I’ve got the time to do it, I may as well give it a go!” And as if that wasn’t enough pressure, throw in a seasoned food critic as well in the form of Jay Rayner. Then they had to recreate john’s dish without a recipe in just one hour and fifteen minutes, selecting from ingredients that may or may not belong in the dish.Īfter this was the ‘show stopper’ dish the dish of dishes, the dish to blow the judges away and secure your place in MasterChef history as a quarter-finalist and head into the next round. Without seeing John prepare it, the amateurs were given just a few minutes to taste this dish being asked to write down exactly what is in it, using their sense of smell, and palate. In the fourth quarter-final episode, contestants had to copy a palate test created by John Torode (crispy-skinned chicken, herbed gnocchi and mushroom sauce) – a dish with three different types of mushrooms to identify and which required a high level of technical skill. Our own Theo Michaels, a 37-year-old UK Cypriot IT company director is currently a quarter-finalist on the show. Out of the hundreds that auditioned, sixty amateur cooks got through to battle it out over five weeks of heats, producing some of the most exceptional as well as some of the most disastrous food ever seen on the series.Īll of them have just one goal – to lift the coveted MasterChef Champion title.
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MasterChef is back for its tenth year with the most inspirational series yet.