Heston Blumenthal's executive chef Ashley Palmer-Watts has described this year's MasterChef grand finale dessert as the toughest three-Michelin-star dish ever served up to amateur cooks.
The 91-step dessert Verjus in Egg was conceived for the television series Historic Heston, as well as serving at Melbourne's Dinner by Heston Blumenthal restaurant.
More Entertainment Videos
- Video duration
- 02:25
Elena Duggan wins MasterChef 2016
- Video duration
- 01:15
Tony Delroy leaves ABC Nightlife
- Video duration
- 01:12
Sesame Street axes human characters
- Video duration
- 01:59
Karl Stefanovic uses transphobic slurs
- Video duration
- 01:12
Demi Lovato backs Hillary Clinton
- Video duration
- 00:52
Fireman Sam caught in Koran row
- Video duration
- 01:56
The Bachelor and his search for love
- Video duration
- 01:28
Paralympics: Where is Australia's clever campaign?
Elena Duggan wins MasterChef 2016
Elena Duggan conquered an epic Heston Blumenthal dessert to take the prestigious Masterchef crown for 2016.
MasterChef amateur cooks Elena Duggan, 32, and Matt Sinclair, 27, were given five and a half hours to complete the dessert in the final round of the competition.
"It is insanely difficult to prepare everything all in one go," Palmer-Watts told Fairfax Media, speaking from Britain. "Normally in the restaurant you've got multiple parties working on different stuff – there's really technical work in there, so we actually prepared the bits and bobs for the dish to present to the contestants over a couple of days.
"Obviously we're taking time to get it right, we didn't have to put ourselves in that five-and-a-half-hour pressure ourselves to do everything from scratch. It really does take a long time."
Dark horse Duggan took out the title of MasterChef after narrowly beating season favourite Sinclair by two points when he wasn't able to match the quality of her dessert.
"I would say this year is much harder than last year," Palmer-Watts said, referring to Blumenthal's Botrytis Cinerea, which was successfully completed by 2015 MasterChef winner Billie McKay.
"Last year the dessert was incredibly complex and intricate and has many parts but each part is really singular, if that makes sense, and it comes together at the end.
"Whereas this year you had really, really technical work with chocolate tempering at least twice in terms of making the shell and you had the secondary panna cotta, you had making a fluid gel with Gellan gum that was for the runny yolk.
"If you don't get any of those parts exactly right, you might not know until it's either too late or you're putting the dish together. So each part really was so much more challenging, in terms of if something starts to go wrong in the beginning the knock-on effect is massive.
"I honestly thought they didn't really stand a great chance of getting through this but they did incredibly well."
Sinclair was helped to complete his dessert at the very end by Duggan, who said she wanted to see her friend get over the finish line, but his egg split apart after he missed a vital step.
Our heart just breaks. #MasterChefAU pic.twitter.com/1IjfBpmKD9
— #MasterChefAU (@masterchefau) July 26, 2016
"That's indicative of what a chef is about. It's about helping people, it's about supporting them, it's about urging them on and offering them support where they need it. And it was a great show of sportsmanship that two contestants going head-to-head, with probably the hardest challenge in probably the world's biggest cooking show, got together and supported each other when they needed it," said Palmer-Watts. "That's pretty amazing."
The finale began for Palmer-Watts at 6.30am, with Duggan and Sinclair arriving about 7am to start filming and no one leaving until almost 2am the next day.
Duggan said the whole day was like living in a bubble, getting through each challenge minute by minute.
"In terms of me not sleeping well because of nerves it probably started a lot earlier for me but it was a big day, it was a massive day," Duggan said. "I didn't wear a watch at all, the final dish – the dessert – that was five and a half hours alone, it was a mammoth task.
"That's why it sounds a little weird me not knowing how long the day was but I actually don't [know], it was sort of a bit of a blur. I really did focus on one minute at a time during those cooks and when you are timing each element everything else just melts away."
Palmer-Watts agreed that he had never seen pressure like it.
"Pressure in the kitchen is one thing but this was so insane, it was such a test. If we had someone start in our kitchen even as head pastry chef we wouldn't put upon them a pressure test like this with this many elements.
"Forget the TV's even there but that adds pressure in itself and so much is riding on it.
"There's so much to get right the first time. You don't really have a chance a second time with this one."
Duggan said she prepared for the finale by practising in the MasterChef house.
"It's definitely full on. I tried to get a good balance of reading books, of looking at pictures in terms of plating, talking to other contestants and practising as much as possible, so sometimes you'd practise a whole dish and give yourself a time limit, other times you'd practise a bunch of techniques in a row.
"And having fellow foodies around you meant you had people to taste test and give you feedback."
Duggan also did a lot in the lead up to being selected for this season, after missing out last year.
"My sister set quite a few Mystery Box challenges for me at home in the lead up to it, which was awesome.
"She always tried to put in a few ingredients in there if I was tired after a long day that might be the easier option. But I always tried to challenge myself, I would try to never take the easy route out.
"We hosted a bunch of dinner parties, where I would ask the guests either for key ingredients or a cuisine of choice and I would rise to the challenge."
A total of 2.52 million Australians tuned in to watch Duggan get crowned, with the show's 'winner announced' segment easily winning top spot in the national ratings – even across the five metro cities with 1.89 million viewers.
The earlier part of the show attracted 2.28 million viewers from the cities and regions, with 1.71 in the cities.
The series, not including the finale, has averaged 1.43 million viewers nationally, down marginally compared with the same point in the 2015 series.
But Network Ten is experiencing something of a resurgence among viewers, boasting "the only primary free-to-air TV channel that has increased its prime time audience so far in 2016".
5 comments
New User? Sign up