Our MasterChef Recipes expert, Sophia Young is Food Director of MasterChef Magazine. Sophia trained in New York as a chef and worked on Women’s Weekly cookbooks and the magazines Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel before joining the MasterChef Magazine team. We talked to Sophia about her love of food and creating recipes anyone can master. Have you always had a passion for food? My parents were pretty good cooks and quite experimental, and cooked from scratch. They were also my taste testers. How did you get your start in the industry? Are there any food ‘trends’ that you can see emerging soon? Within Australia, chefs will continue to source food from their doorstep, rather than having it flown halfway across the country. What’s one of the best meals you have ever had? What is always your biggest challenge when you’re cooking in your own kitchen? For example, I’ve struggled on occasion to get a large fish or ham into my oven, so I know readers are going to have the same problem and I’ll need to come up with a solution. I wish I had a larger fridge for storing more food. However, I’ve learnt to deal with this by reducing the bulk of things like vegetable and herbs after shopping. For herbs, I immediately wash, pick the leaves and store on damp paper towel in plastic takeaway containers. And I’ll trim things like beetroot and other bulky vegetables. What can readers expect from MasterChef Magazine, food and recipe-wise? Recipes are selected to be relevant to the way we live. Most of us are in a hurry Monday to Friday with our lives, so with this in mind, a good half of the magazine’s recipes are everyday ones, with ingredients you could pick up on the way home. We also have a great Junior MasterChef section in each issue, where parents can cook with their children, to instil in them what an important life-skill cooking is. Although the recipe in this section is aimed at children, it will appeal to everyone. In fact, the recipe in our first issue is one of the most delicious simple pumpkin soups I’ve tasted. I plan to rely on it through winter. For entertaining and cooking at the weekend, we’ve taken some of the best chef’s recipes from the show and simplified and streamlined them for ease of preparation in a domestic kitchen. We’ve made the ingredients accessible and always offer substitutes for slightly more exotic ingredients.
Yes. As a toddler apparently I was found alone in the pantry with a spoon in a jar on quite a few occasions! From when I was about eight or nine, I liked to make versions of things you could buy, because I thought I could always make them taste so much better. I’d make my own cordial from limes that I’d picked, marmalades and jams, bread, and I loved to roast meats. I didn’t often follow recipes, just made things up and somehow they seemed to work most of the time.
I trained as a chef and worked in restaurants locally and overseas. In New York I met a food stylist and did work experience with them. Before that, I wasn’t even aware that such a job existed. The job appealed, as it combined both of my interests – food and art. It wasn’t until a few years later after arriving in Australia that a chance encounter with a chef led to a job in a magazine’s test kitchen. From cooking spontaneously without measuring things, I quickly adapted to learn how to quantify and define all the components of my cooking in order to write recipes that others could follow.
Regionality - not so much a new trend but an expansion of it. In Australia we’ve explored most major cuisines over the years; however, what I see more of is a great appreciation of the regional differences within a particular country. Italian chefs in Australia have been telling us for years that there is no such thing as ‘Italian cooking’, as each region has a unique cooking style governed by the local produce. Similarly, we’re learning this with Chinese food and that of other countries. So I’d expect to see more restaurants with a very specific regional style of cuisine emerging and cookbooks written on the subject.
I’ve been fortunate to have so many over the years! What makes a good meal can depend on so many things; location and company often play a part in one’s memories. For elaborate meals, Mugaritz in Spain was a highlight last year. So, too, on the same holiday was buying perfectly ripe unpasteurised cheeses, bread that had been made slowly and a few simple salads, and eating them in a park. I’ve also had some incredibly good home-cooked meals made by friends. I’m spoilt.
I’d like to say my kitchen was state-of-the art, but that’s simply not true. It’s quite average – average-size oven and fridge and a four-burner stove. My kitchen is fairly representative of most people’s kitchens. For this reason, when I’m testing recipes I feel that I’m aware of some of the challenges that our readers might have in their own kitchen and can adapt recipes accordingly.
A great variety of unique fabulous tasting recipes that have all been written with clarity and thoroughly tested to work in a domestic kitchen. Great attention is paid to seasonality, as not only does food taste better when it’s in season, it’s cheaper. 
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