Grace Dent grew up with MasterChef. She and her dad would watch it collectively at residence in Carlisle. “We used to laugh our heads off at the critics,” she says. “Just utterly ridiculous people, with their overblown egos, thinking their opinions on food matter. Who are these people? And then lo and behold …” She smiles. Dent, who can also be the Guardian’s restaurant critic, is the present’s new co-host with the Irish chef Anna Haugh; each have been visitor judges throughout numerous MasterChef collection for a number of years. Watching the programme as a baby did alter the course of Dent’s life. “There was also a little thing in my head, thinking that looks like an amazing job. You get to go to restaurants and talk about it?”
The two hosts knew of one another, says Dent, sitting subsequent to Haugh, “because the restaurant and hospitality world, especially in London, is minuscule”. But in working alongside one another, “our relationship definitely took a much closer turn because we were together,” Haugh steps in, “all the time. Finishing each other’s sentences.” Dent hadn’t reviewed Haugh’s London restaurant Myrtle. “And I wouldn’t review it now. For a start, it would be quite difficult to sneak in. I might arrive in a wig and glasses.” Haugh laughs. “I would love that. If you come, you have to wear a wig and glasses.”
After a day’s filming and tasting plates of meals, concocted with various talent ranges, they WhatsApp one another again at their respective flats to see what’s for dinner. “We always plan that we’ll eat something proper,” says Dent. “But what actually happens is Anna sits in her pyjamas and eats a giant burrata. I was going to cook something, but what I’ve actually had is seven olives, a tablespoon of peanut butter and some Weetabix. I stand like a Tyrannosaurus rex with my false eyelashes going at different angles, and I just eat out the fridge.”
They make a beautiful pair – Dent, humorous and heat, and as glamorous as a trifle; Haugh, pristine in her chef’s whites and demanding of excellence. “I think people expect Grace to be strict and intimidating, and me to be soft and cuddly,” says Haugh. The first episode, through which one contestant provides flour to his hollandaise, reveals that to be a mistake. “I am not looking forward to tasting that,” Haugh says, witheringly.
MasterChef is a TV establishment, first broadcast in 1990. In latest occasions, it has curdled amid allegations involving its long-time presenters. First, Gregg Wallace left in 2024, and a later unbiased report substantiated 45 allegations towards him, together with inappropriate sexual language and one incident of unwelcome bodily contact. Dent changed Wallace for a collection of Celebrity MasterChef reverse John Torode, however then Torode was let go after the identical investigation substantiated an allegation he had used racist language.
Did Dent and Haugh really feel strain to save lots of the present? “No,” says Haugh immediately. “The team that work behind the show are absolutely superb. Grace and I are on camera, but there is a whole brigade of people lifting us up, taking care of us, encouraging us to be the best version of ourselves. Nobody wanted us to be anything but authentic and focusing on the different … I want to say customers. What do we call them?” “Contestants,” says Dent. It felt like a “real team effort,” provides Haugh. “It didn’t feel that we were being thrown into the wilderness.”
Both are reluctant to select over the bones of the MasterChef chaos, nevertheless it has been a unprecedented and troublesome time for the present. Last 12 months’s beginner collection, already filmed with Wallace and Torode, was nonetheless screened with as little of the sacked hosts proven as doable. Some contestants requested to be edited out, not eager to be related to the collection, and many individuals, together with those that had made allegations towards Wallace, questioned why it was being proven at all. Even the tradition secretary, Lisa Nandy, weighed in, saying she wouldn’t be watching.
“All I can think about is the future,” says Dent. “I can’t look back. I haven’t got time. It might seem like I’m just pointing at scallops [but] it’s full-on and difficult, and I’m working with an enormous team. So no, I don’t think about the past.”
In a world the place bizarre 45-second TikTok recipes get outsize consideration, MasterChef celebrates culinary ambition. “It is about using good ingredients and turning it into something spectacular,” says Haugh. “Some of the stuff you see on social media, it breaks my heart as a chef, where I’m like: that’s not true, that can’t be done.” Dent says her emotions on social media recipes “have become much more nuanced recently. On one level, I’m absolutely aware that a lot of those recipes don’t work, because I’ve been foolish enough to try them. Like, this cake only takes two and a half minutes, it only needs bicarbonate of soda, a frying pan and an egg.” She laughs. “But I also know that we have millions of kids [who] won’t pick up a recipe book. What they are learning from TikTok is, like, what beef bourguignon is, what confit potatoes are, and it’s given them that impetus to go, I’m going to try it.”
It is perhaps a actuality present, however the contestants are far out of your ordinary actuality TV stars. Not one, says Dent, “just wanted to be on television. We focus on the personality, but we also focus very much on their food.” Often, the dream is to open a restaurant – as many winners have gone on to do. “MasterChef opens that door,” says Haugh. “Tons of people, whether they win the show or not, enter into hospitality because they entered MasterChef. Our industry really needs that. It’s not just about cooks. It’s about front-of-house, it’s about food writers. There’s a whole wealth of opportunities.”
This hasn’t all the time been the case for both of their careers. Both are from working-class households who’ve succeeded in male-dominated (and within the case of journalism, middle-class dominated) fields. “There were definitely points where my accent probably didn’t help me,” says Dent. “I think there’s points where I thought that if I was better and sleeker and posher, then everything might be a bit easier, but no, I’m glad I’m still quite rough around the edges. In the loveliest way.” For Haugh, “when you’re working in an environment that’s highly stressful, you have to just fall into line. I worked in some kitchens where it was very much that I couldn’t really be myself, because [I can be] outspoken, I’m intimidating at times, and quirky, and that would confuse people. But the truth is, I was there to learn, I was there to work.”
One of Dent’s earliest jobs was as a TV author for the Guardian’s much-loved Guide earlier than she moved into meals writing and broadcasting. Early in Haugh’s profession, she labored in Paris for influential chef Gualtiero Marchesi, and was head chef at Gordon Ramsay’s London House earlier than opening her personal restaurant. What have they realized about success? “Tenacity, hard work,” says Dent. “Talent is one thing, then sometimes it’s just keeping on standing up every time something goes wrong, something bad happens.” She smiles. “You can’t really put a price on just never going away.” Haugh’s drive comes from being enthusiastic about her job and eager to constantly enhance. “We speak about success wrongly. We see success as somebody else telling us we are good. But I believe Grace and I, the similar thing we have is we know what we want. Success is authenticity. It’s being able to pay your bills, [but] it’s not about somebody else telling you that you’re great. You have to be able to acknowledge it yourself.”
In her personal restaurant, says Haugh, “I run a kitchen that celebrates people in every shape and form. I believe in the deliciousness of differences, that is where I think magic lies. It’s so different to some of the kitchens I trained in.” In the previous, Haugh has advised of being shouted at, intentionally burned, and of witnessing abuse in kitchens. “It’s unacceptable,” she says. Kitchens might be pressurised, however there are surgeons performing life-saving operations on daily basis. “I mean, that’s stress – not making somebody’s dinner. ‘Oh, the stress!’ I’ve no time for that. The worst thing that can happen in my restaurant is that the food might go out five minutes later than I wanted. That’s it.”
Stress is one thing the MasterChef contestants need to cope with. In the primary few episodes, numerous iterations of mashed potato appear to be the supply of many issues. Why is it so laborious? “In theory, it should be easy,” says Haugh. “But it’s the details that turn something OK into something delicious – control of temperature, salt, fat and liquid. When you chuck in a big load of stress and a film crew and two lunatics running around, all of a sudden the simplicity becomes very stressful, and there’s nowhere to hide once the mash is made. The silly things we do when we’re nervous, that’s just the human condition, isn’t it?”
Dent smiles. “I don’t belittle what we’re doing, but I do kind of say to them: ‘Look, it’s going to be OK. Have you cooked this before?’ And they say: ‘Yes, 17 times.’ ‘OK, you can do this.’ I don’t want anybody to have a bad time on the show.”
MasterChef begins Tuesday 21 April on BBC One at 9pm.
