There is only one thing more stressful than cooking with a raging deep-fat fryer: cooking with a raging deep-fat fryer while being watched by Gregg Wallace, John Torode and three TV cameras. I attempt to look nonchalant as I shake the basket filled with crispy spare ribs, while reminding myself that this extremely testing situation is all my own stupid fault. A year ago, I came across my neighbour David Ambler, the executive producer of the MasterChef franchise, in our local park. What viewers would really love to see, I said casually, is the critics cooking off against each other.
And now here we are, some months later, doing exactly that. To my right is my Guardian colleague Grace Dent, hair up, head down, prepping her favourite high street curry house dish. Behind her is William Sitwell of the Telegraph making chicken kyiv. Further down the room is Leyla Kazim, of BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, constructing a Turkish Cypriot dish of pasta and labneh, and next to her is Jimi Famurewa of the London Evening Standard, knocking up his homemade fish finger sandwiches.
And me? It’s braised then deep-fried spare ribs with cumin, salt and chilli. Our first challenge is to cook our “guilty pleasure”. I’d rejected the premise. If I start feeling guilty about food, where do I bloody stop? But I don’t get the deep fat fryer out often, so this qualifies. In the second round, we are to cook our top two dishes to be served to a special panel of judges; in short, to a version of us. No idea who. I’m trying not to think about that.
Earlier, as we awaited our appointment with destiny, or John and Gregg as they’re known, we all agreed this had been an offer we could not refuse. We’d played the role of critic on the various MasterChef shows for years, in my case for 18 of them. It was surely reasonable for us now to prove whether we could cook?
In my pre-contest interview I tried to sound relaxed. “Some people cook some stuff and nobody dies,” I said airily, before adding, “although our careers might be ruined.” After all, how would it look if someone like me, who has spent years rolling his eyes at the best efforts of some very skilled chefs – professional, amateur and celebrity – turned out to be a total klutz in the kitchen?
Hence the wired mood in that green room. No one is being laid-back about this. We share our anxieties; bond over our vivid nightmares about dishes going wrong. William has been consulting chef friends of his. I’m using recipes I have been working on meticulously for another project. Many of us have brought kit from home, in my case a pressure cooker for those ribs and an electric whisk. I won’t sacrifice cooking time staring dumbly at an unfamiliar gadget. This is going to be death or glory. And possibly lunch.
To add to the swivel-eyed mood I have packed my unruly hair underneath a piratical bandana. I am doing this both for environmental health reasons, and in the hope of getting cast in a pantomime next Christmas. It’s not only Grace who can accessorise.
Happily, we do have some advantages over previous contestants. For a start, we all know this kitchen intimately, an impressive semi-permanent set built inside a TV and film production lot close to the Olympic Park in east London. In recent years we’ve set challenges for contestants – make me a pie, cook us something involving rice – and have swanned about this kitchen questioning the poor startled souls as they try to complete their dish. Now we are the poor startled souls. We’re also familiar with the nuts and bolts of TV production and, in this case, know everyone operating the cameras. Plus, of course, John and Gregg are not exactly strangers off the telly to us.
Ah yes, John and Gregg, less colleagues today than tormentors. I mean judges. Two decades ago, when they were partnered up, Torode was cast as experienced chef while Wallace played man in the street. Except that after 20 years, Wallace seriously knows his stuff too. As we come to the end of the first round, it becomes blindingly obvious that we all crave their approval. I have two rules where TV is concerned: never be drunk on camera and never cry on camera. The first is easy. It’s not like we’re hitting the bottle, however much we might wish to steady our nerves. As to the second, faced by John and Gregg’s comments, some of my fellow critics prove unequal to the task.
Then it’s my turn. I stand before them as they start to strip the meat from one cumin-crusted rib each. And then another. And then a third. They are silent. I think I know what’s going on here. Sometimes when we judge dishes on MasterChef in the critic’s room we simply taste. Then we say smartarse things. And sometimes, when it’s good, we just eat and purr. John and Gregg appear to be eating, but I need to hear what they have to say. As they give me their feedback I nod, desperate not to say too much unless I accidentally break my no crying rule.
In any case there will be more than enough time for that. We have the much more challenging round two to come. No spoilers; to see what happened, you’ll just have to watch. It seems that cooking really does not get tougher than this.
MasterChef: Battle of the Critics 2023, is on BBC One at 8pm on Thursday 28 Dec
