Gregg Wallace: ‘I wouldn't win MasterChef’

Gregg Wallace is back on tasting duties in a new series of MasterChef on BBC1 from Tuesday, March 12.

It’s a new, slimline Gregg Wallace who joins John Torode for the revamped ninth series of cookery competition MasterChef this week.

The 48-year-old restaurateur and former greengrocer has lost a stone in three months, but he isn’t about to let his new regime stop him from tucking into the dishes served up by the shows’ amateur chefs with his usual relish. TV&Satellite Week magazine caught up with him to chew the fat…

We’ve lost a lot of good cooks on MasterChef through nothing more than nerves… At the start, people are ever so nervous, so in this series we let them cook for us twice before anyone is dismissed.

We’ve introduced a new round called The Palate Test… John cooks a dish and the contestants have to identify the ingredients from how it looks and tastes. It might seem difficult, but if you can’t look at a plate of food and work out how it has been cooked, you shouldn’t be on MasterChef.

The people who win MasterChef have coulis running through their veins… They are completely in love with food and they are givers, as they want to feed people. If I were a contestant I think I would make it through to the final six, but I wouldn’t win.

I’m simply a spoon for hire… I don’t know anything about television; I just turn up, eat things and tell people what they taste like. But I think MasterChef is completely addictive and, if you tune in for five minutes, you’ll be there until the end.

People shout ‘Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this’ at me in the street… But often they’ll get it wrong, which irritates me because it’s a dumb mistake. It also annoys me how many people call James Martin’s show ‘Saturday Morning Kitchen’. Three quarters of the people who watch it don’t even know what it’s called.

John Torode can be a stubborn Aussie sometimes… But we have a trust, an affection and an understanding. We’d known each other for years before we appeared together on screen, so we already had a mutual respect and were comfortable in each other’s company.

Food has become far too artistic-looking… That might be the fault of television, because the emphasis is on the visual, but what’s important is the flavour. Food as entertainment mirrors the way we’ve changed in this country – we don’t cook so much in the week now, but we do cook for recreation.

People tell me I have OCD tendencies… But I lead a very busy and complicated life, and the only way it works is to have it very well structured, so I have a daily list of everything I need to do.