Stepping up as a guest on MasterChef Australia dishes up "all the thrills of being involved with none of the responsibility", says Nigella Lawson, who is joining the show for a week.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It's the second foray for the TV presenter and cookery writer into the MasterChef Australia fold, after appearing on one episode in season three in 2011. Now she says she's back to get properly stuck in.
"I enjoyed it last time, but I actually felt I didn't get a chance to feel that connected with the contestants," she says. "I'm quite a nosey person and I'm quite interested in people, and I felt I could enjoy it more if I could spend a bit of time getting to know the contestants, seeing them cook, talking to them, and I was right. I did enjoy that, because there's always something very rewarding about feeling properly involved."
Working with Matt Preston, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan, Lawson also shares the honour of having a dedicated week along with her fellow countrymen Marco Pierre White and Heston Blumenthal. She might be lacking the Michelin stars that the two chefs do, but as a pillar of television and domestic goddess-ness over almost two decades, does she feel she could be an intimidating force to the contestants she is aiming to nurture?
"No, I always felt a bit embarrassed when one of the boys, Gary, George or Matt, would say 'it's such an honour to have her here', and I kept saying, 'oh no, please don't say that'. Because, of course, you never feel that way about yourself, and the thing is you only need to talk to them for a few minutes and that sense of being intimidated goes."
She says she found the show a friendly, supportive environment and, while she may not bring the most elite of culinary skills to the mix, she contributes in other ways.
"Sometimes my help is really more in terms of encouragement and not as a teacher because, to be honest, all the contestants seemed to be far more technically adept than I am," she says, laughing. "I can cook and I like flavour, but I don't have those sorts of skills. I mean I've never pretended to aspire to be a professional chef.
"These contestants, they are home cooks but they've really studied everything and they want to learn and technique is important to them ... technique certainly helps you make something well and deliver flavour but in the end it is about the flavour, it's about texture and taste."
The mystery-box challenge threw up lots of surprises for her, she says, as the contestants completely defied her expectations about the dishes that would be made, with "brilliant" results. Likewise, the pressure test rendered memorable moments.
"The most memorable, in the sense that it is etched in a few more frown lines, [were] the last few moments of the pressure test," she says. "I just thought no, I don't know if I can bear this, I don't know how they're coping. When there's so much resting on it and it's those last few moments on the clock, I understand how people shout at the television now."
Despite the pressure of the competitive field, MasterChef is not a divisive program, she says.
"I do think it's a very evolved, civilised food program and competition. They're not cruel to one another, it isn't about having cameras on people to make them bad-mouth other contestants. It's not about making people feeling pilloried or ridiculous, but there is a lot of that on TV and it's so reductive.
"A competition where you're trying to bring out the best in people and then, when they do well, they do go on to get jobs doing what they love doing, that's amazing really."
After a hectic 2015 in which she wrote her latest book Simply Nigella, filmed a TV series off the back of it and did a book tour of Britain and the US, she says she has absolutely no plans for the rest of this year.
"It's those moments of downtime when I'm at home cooking or going around looking at food in the greengrocers, it's that time which enables me to write my books.
"I like to be left alone to cook. I have no idea [about this year], I'm glad to say. That's what makes everything so interesting."
She says she hopes she represents the true home cook on MasterChef.
"Enthusiasm, you could say I bring enthusiasm," she says. "Enthusiasm and greed."
WHAT MasterChef Australia; Nigella Lawson Week
WHEN Ten, Sunday, 7.30pm
