“Pressure Cookers” |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2011 09:08 AM PST Over the past twenty years Masterchef has proved a real survivor in the world of tv cookery shows and it's all down to two very greedy men. A new series begins tonight on BBC One. Alan Corr previews the latest search for Britain's best amateur cook In a TV world overfed on cookery shows, could MasterChef be the best of the lovely lot? The series has been on air in various forms since Loyd Grossman first ooooooooohed and ahhhhhed over sautéed onions in his famously elongated vowels but it really came to full fruition five years ago with the arrival of two greedy men who just love food. They are judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace, the mouthy, blue collar double act who have managed to make posh nosh accessible to the masses without forgetting that MasterChef is also a cut throat competition. It is their onerous task to taste the meals served up by aspiring chefs and then pronounce on their relative merits. They don't mince their words; they flambé them. 45-year-old Torode is an Australian who came to London in 1985 to work his way up in the food trade and now owns several eateries in the capital where he specialises in Australasian food and Wallace (46) is an ex-Covent Garden fruit and veg stall holder who now runs a multi-million pound supply business. They met fifteen years ago when Wallace's company was working with a restaurant where Torode was chef. The rest, as they say, is pastry. This week they're back, thicker of waist and sharper of tongue, for their seventh series as judges on the long-running MasterChef. As Wallace and Torode never tire of shouting, "cooking doesn't get much tougher than this." This is a show which takes food very seriously indeed. Just listen to the ominous voiceover as those very nervous amateur chefs prepare to do gladiatorial battle in an arena of stainless steel and high pressure. This show is an obstacle course of culinary challenges. The heats follow a three-round format: The Invention Test: the contestants must invent a dish from scratch in 50 minutes, The Pressure Test: Working a lunchtime shift at a busy restaurant under the supervision of a professional chef who comments on their performance. The Final Test: Cooking a two-course meal, with the contestants designing their own menus and choosing their own ingredients, in one hour. There's also a range of other challenges including the self explanatory Ingredients test and the more intriguing Passion test in which (taste) budding chefs have to convince Wallace and Torode of their passion for food in less than one minute and no, gorging manically on fois gras doesn't cut it. It's rigorous stuff all carried out in the hothouse of the MasterChef twenty-oven kitchen under the judges' beady eyes and, let's face it, salivating mouths. In fact, Wallace and Torode have recently been decrying the impact of all the rich food on their ever-expanding waistlines. While filming the new series, they both consumed more than 4,000 calories each, that's twice as much as an average man needs. "I scoff rather than taste," is Torode's exuberant explanation. "I've actually lost weight," claims Wallace. "My wife looks after me and sends me to the gym. Before we got married she said to me, I really like you. Do you mind not dying? I've always loved food and you can't diet on MasterChef but I realised I'd given myself over to complete gluttony. It was horrible watching myself getting bigger. The doctor said he'd never seen cholesterol levels like mine." Torode has also cut back. "There was a stage where Gregg turned to me and said to me are you eating or scoffing? And I was just scoffing," he says. "I also got a bit of a tummy so I started cycling to work. I hate being fat. But I'll just miss dinner of an extra glass of wine - there's no way in the world I'd give up the fantastic good on MasterChef." As well as a move from a BBC Two evening slot to the even bigger ratings pool of BBC One, producers have tweaked the show's format this year and in the tradition of X Factor we'll see Torode and Wallace from the very start auditioning the hopefuls who have been trimmed down from the 20,000 applicants to decide the on the final twenty who will enter into the fifteen week run. That meant our brave judges had to taste up to twenty dishes a day. "We taste everything, so we want good cooks from the start rather than strange unpleasant dishes," says Torode. "I once had a mushroom floating in a tomato scum with blue cheese vomit on the top. That was the only time I've ever gagged. There was also a cheesecake made with salt rather than sugar. But mostly it's a case of dishes not setting or being undercooked." Both Torode and Wallace are now primetime fixtures (eight million viewers an episode) and fame means that Wallace, who calls himself the "far, bald bloke from MasterChef" has become somewhat of a tabloid star. Last year, it was reported that he married for the third time after meeting his new wife through that 21st dating agency, Twitter. The chef was said to have "secretly" wed Heidi Brown, a teacher 17 years his junior, after she wrote a flirty message on his Twitter page asking if he knew he had been labelled a "weird crush" in a magazine. He didn't hang about and replied: "Ever visit London? Give me a call, I'll buy you lunch." They married last year and he sold the pictures in a £60,000 magazine deal. Back in the kitchen, Torode and Wallace both know that too many cooks can spoil the broth and given how loud and opinionated these lads can get, there have of course been clashes. "I couldn't live with John," says Wallace. "We can both be bloody-minded about what chef we want to go through," says Torode. "When we disagree I'll refuse to speak to Gregg for a day or so and then we'll go for a beer and it's all right. Now we listen to each other more. But if we both truly believe something, we're both big-headed enough to say, you're wrong!" However, TV's best culinary act know full well that it's the contestants who matter on MasterChef. "Doing this show is the most emotional experience we have ever had because just so much was riding on it for these cooks," says Torode. "And because they were cooking in their own right in front of us it was extremely nerve wracking for them. There were some contestants that we found so heart breaking to send home, you could see in their eyes how much they wanted it but we just knew they could never make the standard and survive what was to come later. It was very difficult telling them that to their face." Well you know what they say about heat and kitchens . . . 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