“How to be … a cookery show judge”

Posted: 01 Mar 2011 06:34 PM PST

Gregg Wallace can expertly critique a dish on sight ... if it's a pudding cooked by a pretty girl. Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer

So you want to be a TV cookery show judge. That makes sense; few things are as fun as trying a mouthful of food and then breaking the heart of whoever cooked it. The good news is that you're already perfectly qualified for the job – television has been secretly teaching you the necessary skills all along. Here's a quick refresher course.

Intimidate

To be a respected cookery show judge, it's important to be feared. How you make this happen is down to you. One method could be to build up decades of expertise and become one of the most authoritative voices in your field, such as The Great British Menu's Prue Leith. Another would be to just tie a manky old scarf around your head, eyeball people furiously, eat everything from the end of a needlessly large knife and speak in a series of faux-profound Yodaesque riddles that only succeed in making you sound like a badly concussed Jimmy Savile impersonator. It never did Marco Pierre White any harm, anyway.

Remember The Wizard Of Oz

A surprising number of cookery show judges have achieved greatness by pretending that there's an even harsher judge just around the corner. MasterChef's Monica Galetti is perfectly capable of terrifying contestants on her own, what with her constant air of barely contained outrage, but her secret weapon is her boss. Galetti constantly implies that Michel Roux Jr is a furious, fire-breathing monster with a palette so uniquely perfect that even one errant grain of salt would kill him. And then, when the contestants finally meet him and discover that he's actually quite a nice chap, Roux repeats exactly the same trick by using restaurant critics and other chefs as the unseen Big Bad. The moral here is to exploit the fear of the unknown whenever possible. And also that people are quite stupid.

Exaggerate wildly

A good cookery show judge never thinks that a dish is simply OK - it's either so amazing that they want to impregnate it behind their wife's back, or it's literally inedible. There's no inbetween. If one of Gordon Ramsay's American contestants serves up something slightly less than perfect, Ramsay spits it out in front of them like an awful wrinkly toddler. So why not invent a similar insulting reaction of your own? Perhaps nondescript food could make you burst into tears, or cause you to throw down your cutlery in disgust. Maybe you could even wish violent death upon the contestant's entire family. It's up to you.

Use all of your senses

Remember: eating isn't just restricted to the tastebuds. You can judge a dish just as well by looking at it, smelling it and touching it. Give Paul Hollywood from The Great British Bake Off a loaf of bread and he can run a full diagnostic on it – how much salt it contains, how long the dough was left to prove, the temperature of the water used – before it goes anywhere near his mouth. He's not alone, of course: Gregg Wallace can also expertly critique a dish on sight: a dish has what it takes if it's a) a pudding of some sort and b) has been cooked by a pretty girl in a low-cut top.

Enjoy your work

In theory, being a cookery show judge should be hellish. You spend all day shut in a room, being fed a never-ending stream of soggy dross served up by a procession of idiots who are there only to be on telly. In fact the judges are actually having a ball. When I dropped in on a Great British Bake Off audition in London last week, Hollywood seemed honestly overjoyed by the quality of food on offer, and Mary Berry kept insisting that she always wakes up in a good mood on audition day. Perhaps that's the most important quality when it comes to being a cookery show judge: you must love eating as much cake as you possibly can. Who knew? Life sometimes is really tough.

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Cookery

Wednesday, March 2, 2011