Tara Ward talks to Ben Macdonald about the highs and lows of competing on Masterchef Australia: Back to Win.
Anyone who watches Masterchef Australia will know about the Masterchef pantry. It’s a feast for the eyes, a room filled with endless shelves of colourful produce and huge fridges stuffed full of delicious delicacies. Few of us will ever experience its culinary wonders in person – apart from New Zealander Ben Macdonald, who has experienced the delights of that luxurious larder not once, but twice, and reckons there’s no other kitchen cupboard like it.
“Oh my god, the pantry is amazing,” MacDonald gasps down the phone. “You go in and there’s all these crazy things you dream of cooking with: truffles, pigeons, salt cod.”
Macdonald is back among the truffles and salt cod for the new season of Masterchef Australia: Back to Win, which began this week on TVNZ. Back to Win features 24 former contestants from across the show’s 16 seasons, who are returning for a second – and in some cases, third – chance to win the esteemed title of Masterchef and $250,000 in prize money. Macdonald is the season’s only international competitor, having first appeared on the show in 2014, and he believes the contents of the pantry have only gotten more impressive since then.
Back in 2014, Macdonald was a keen amateur chef living in Brisbane and working as a software consultant when he applied for season six of Masterchef Australia. He came sixth, cooking for guest judges like Heston Blumenthal and Marco Pierre White, and describes his original Masterchef experience as “an absolute rollercoaster”. “You go from winning something and being elated, to a few episodes later doing something wrong and you’re one step away from being out the door,” he says.
By the time Masterchef came calling again a decade later, Macdonald had spent several years working in restaurants in Australia and Aotearoa. He was back working in software in his hometown of Auckland and showing his season of Masterchef to his two young daughters, when the offer to return to the show came through. He’d always considered his stint on the culinary series to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and says he couldn’t resist from donning the famous Masterchef apron once again.
While he knew going back to Masterchef wouldn’t be easy, Macdonald was surprised at how challenging the series had become. “I thought I’d just step back in, but then you can’t find a peeler and you can’t find the panko crumbs in the pantry, and it’s like, ‘oh my god’.” Those early nerves were magnified by the intense competition and a far higher standard of cooking than in 2014 (one contestant is even a judge on Masterchef Singapore). “There are no bad chefs,” says Macdonald of his fellow competitors. “It was super competitive, right from day one.”
Macdonald prepared by memorising recipes and practicing certain techniques, but quickly realised that the knowledge he’d gained over the past decade was his most valuable asset of all. Masterchef demands quick thinking and steady focus, and he found that being creative – choosing an unusual ingredient from the pantry, for example – was the best way to stand out from the competition. “You’ve got to put a lot of thought into it, because if you choose wrong from the beginning, it’s very hard to change halfway through.”
It’s only the first week of the Back to Win season, but Macdonald has already proved he’s the chef to watch. In the show’s second challenge, he cooked for Gordon Ramsay and won the coveted immunity pin, impressing the hot-headed celebrity judge with his calmness under pressure and attention to detail. Ramsay called Macdonald’s meal of roasted duck breast “exceptional” (despite Macdonald mixing up his sauces), while Macdonald described cooking for Ramsay a “money can’t buy” experience.
“When things go well, it’s an unbelievable feeling,” Macdonald says of the show’s intense, fast-paced challenges. “As long as you can stay cool in those situations, there’s a massive opportunity to flourish.”
No matter how stressful those frenetic pantry raids get, Macdonald has no regrets about returning to what he thinks is the best reality show on television. “Masterchef Australia isn’t there to make heroes and villains,” he says. “It’s there to showcase people’s true personalities and the food they make.” What you see is what you get on Masterchef, he believes, and while cooking on the telly was hard work, Macdonald was determined to make his second time in the Masterchef kitchen his most enjoyable yet.
“It’s really, really hard, but it’s also really, really fun. Sometimes you have a disaster, but you just have to laugh about it.” As for anyone who wants to follow him into the Masterchef pantry, Macdonald reckons they should just give it a go.
‘It’s just cooking,” he says. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
