After cooking their hearts out on screen earlier this year, the MasterChef finalists are showcasing their best recipes in a new book. Natalie Coleman, Dale Williams and Larkin Cen tell Andy Welch about realising their dreams and life after Gregg and John
IT'S known as the toughest cooking contest of all.
Ask any of the previous MasterChef winners, the likes of Thomasina Miers, who went on to found popular Mexican street food chain Wahaca, James nathan or dhruv Baker, who now fronts a range of cooking tutorials for Waitrose, and they'd likely agree, probably recalling with some terror the paces they were put through by judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace.
As MasterChef has seemingly turned out better amateur cooks with each passing year, there's also a celebrity version and MasterChef: The Professionals, currently showing on BBC Two, which pits some of Britain and the north's best jobbing kitchen talents against one another.
But it's the original series which remains most popular, with viewers drawn to the personal
stories of each contestant - their food journeys and proclamations that they "want this more than anything" - as much as the food and kitchen dramas.
Three such popular contestants were Londoner natalie Coleman, who won the most-recent series of the show, and dale Williams and Larkin Cen, both from Cardiff, who were in the final with her.
As a trio, they have released a new cookbook, MasterChef: The Finalists, which showcases some of their favourite recipes from the
show, plus a few they've added on top.
Williams and Cen have overcome the initial disappointment of not winning and become not just firm friends, but business partners - they'll launch an Asian street food venture next year.
Coleman, meanwhile, who quit her jobs as a part-time DJ and credit controller after the show, has at last accepted that she won.
She's been spending as much time as she can in the kitchens of some of Britain's top restaurants, learning from the likes of Marcus Wareing, Tom kitchin, Tom Kerridge, Theo Randall, Michel Roux jnr and Daniel Clifford. Eventually, Coleman wants her own restaurant and "in five or seven years" would like to be thinking about getting a Michelin star.
She knows she has a lot to learn, but has already come a long way from where she was just two years ago. "It's down to MasterChef, really," she says. "I always liked cooking for my friends but the series made me push myself and try new things. "Hopefully some people will try recipes from the book and do exactly the same."
And here are two for starters...