On air six nights a week from Sunday through to Friday, the contestants will be led through various cooking challenges by the three judges Matt Preston, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan. The contestants will be competing against each other in challenges designed to test not only their cooking skills but also their discipline, strategy, time management skills, emotion and dedication to cooking.
The format of MasterChef has had some minor tweaks to improve season two, mainly that the contestants are no longer voting each other out. Also changed a little is the Masterclass episodes which have been expanded. And any winner of a Celebrity Chef Challenge will no longer be fast-tracked to the finale, effectively disappearing from screens until the final episodes, but instead will be awarded with an immunity pin which they can use if they find themselves in an elimination round. Each week there will be two eliminations – one by a cooking pressure test with results determined by the judges, another by a basic skills, taste, or knowledge test and sometimes even a cooking challenge. Their weekly challenges include: Sunday: Mystery Box and Invention Test Monday: Pressure Test and Elimination Tuesday: Celebrity Chef Challenge Wednesday: Off-site challenge Thursday: Elimination 2 Friday: Masterclass The challenges put to our MasterChef hopefuls are designed to not only test their skills but to encourage and allow them to grow so they walk away from the competition with one thing stronger than when they walked into the MasterChef Kitchen – their love of food.
All the contestants will receive the same ingredients and will be required to cook a dish of their own choice. Cooking a meal with an often strange group of ingredients is a challenge familiar to most home cooks, with many scratching their heads on a weekly basis on what they can create from the leftovers in the fridge. The winner of the Mystery Box challenge then goes on to choose the core ingredient for the Invention Test.
The three contestants facing elimination compete against one another in the pressure test challenge. One must leave the competition for good. They might be armed with the recipe, and given the same amount of time, but this test is by no means simple. In season one, the legendary croquembouche dish was a pressure test challenge, pushing the competitors to their cooking limits. Keeping calm, controlling stress, and following the recipe to the letter is the key to success in this game.
The winner of the invention test then goes head to head with a renowned chef for immunity. Both contestant and celebrity chef will cook a dish of the chef’s choosing, which will then be blind tasted by our judges and a guest judge. If the contestant wins, their prize could alter the course of the competition.
All contestants will be taken to a location away from the MasterChef kitchen for a cooking challenge on a major scale. This could be anything from a backyard party to serving a new menu at a Chef’s Hat-winning restaurant. They are told of their eye-watering tasks on the day of their challenge, and with no forward planning, the contestants have to think quickly on their feet and rely on their knowledge of food and time management skills.
One contestant from the losing team of the offsite challenge will leave the competition in a challenge. Sometimes, there will be two rounds of competition in this elimination; perhaps a quick cooking challenge involving the whole losing team, followed by a taste test which pits three contestants whose dishes haven’t cut the mustard in round one against each other. This elimination round is notoriously difficult, with their place in the competition resting on the skills of their palate.
Each week, MasterChef Australia’s top chefs George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan will teach the contestants – and viewers – how to cook a dish from their repertoire. A guest chef will also offer a Masterclass to some of the contestants.
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