Food writer, cook and MasterChef Australia judge, Matt Preston sat down with GLAMOUR to talk MasterChef, his new book Matt Preston Cook Book and life as a foodie.
GLAMOUR:
Matt: We have this great saying on MasterChef: always trust in the food Gods – which is something that we really had to do with season one! We were there when everyone told us that the 20 contestants that were picked were a disaster and 19 of them should never have been on primetime TV. Because commercial TV always casts with a stereotype and we had loads of characters who were absolutely adversary to that. We were also told that three fat ugly judges wouldn’t work and the advertising world seemed to think that the show would be a disaster. But then suddenly it took off and everyone went ‘Oh!’ – including us! Myself, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan (Matt’s fellow MasterChef Australia judges) all thought we’d go to Sydney for three months, have a bit of a laugh, come home and everyone would forget about it. But it’s continued and the last series was an amazing success. No one in a million years would have thought it right at the beginning.
GLAMOUR: Season six aired in Australia this year – what’s different about this season compared to the previous five?
Matt: The first two seasons were very special, but season six is certainly of a higher standard in terms of the cooking. As a group, this new batch of contestants is probably the strongest we’ve ever had. Just wait until you see the food that they’re cooking – it’s incredible! In those first two years, we got so many applications coming in via email, whereas this season we went through applications by actually going to find people ourselves. So we went to farmers’ markets, for example, and if we saw someone buying quail or kale or other interesting stuff, we’d go and chat to them about what they like to cook and we’d give them an application form.We actively went to try and find them and I think people like that.
When we choose contestants, it’s all based on how good the cook is as well as the tangibility of their dream, which is the key thing. It helps you connect with them more quickly in terms of why they’re there – they’re not there to get a TV show or an endorsement deal with a supermarket. They’re there because they want to make their lives in food, and the great thing about the show is that 70% of them have done so. It doesn’t have to be massive and you don’t have to have a TV series, but you can do smaller stuff and actually do what you want to do, which is beautiful.
GLAMOUR: Tell us more about being a
Matt: MasterChef Australia is all about sitting and eating at the family table, and what makes our show unique is the camaraderie of the contestants. We, as the judges, come in wanting to be the rails on which their journey runs, rather than the shiny red engine pulling the train. What we really value is that it’s all about them – we want people to fall in love with them. We, as the judges, are there to translate to viewers at home the stuff that you can’t sense – when the contestants are going right, when they’re going wrong – and making you think about what you’d do in that situation, involving you in the whole process.
And of course, we’re there to maintain the reality of the show through ensuring that the decisions are made as we want them made, which is always based on the quality of the food. We don’t care about how many people you pull, whether you’re the most popular contestant ever or if you’re a supermodel who is guaranteed to get magazine covers – it’s not about that. It’s always about the dish.
GLAMOUR:
Matt: You always have time to cook. I reckon you can make a burger quicker than it’ll take you to go to the drive-through and buy it. If you’re on a budget with very little time, make a pot of something and use it in four different ways for the week. The rule is: let the stove do the work for you. Put things in to slow cook and make something you can customise, like a mince tomato base where you could add chilli to make a chilli con carne, or you can put it in a lasagne if you want to go carb based. But at the end of the day, ask yourself what’s important to you – the budget you’re spending on shoes you could be spending on food.
GLAMOUR:
Matt: I think it depends on who you want to impress. You need to think about the people and what they’re like, and you pick the pace. When I made MasterChef Professionals with celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, I foolishly invited Marco over for dinner and immediately after was like, “What the heck am I going to cook for him?!” Because people always stress about having chefs or critics around for dinner. But with Marco, I knew that he liked meat on the bone and cumin and dates, and I knew he loved lemon tart. In the third book, there’s a slow-roasted lamb shoulder rubbed with oil, cumin and salt, with a pomegranate salad. So I did that and added some cucumber and dates to that salad and made the lemon tart from my first book – easy! And it’s actually really embarrassing, but when Marco went home to Britain, he was asked what the best meal he’d had in Australia was and he goes, “When I had dinner at Matt Preston’s!” There I am going, “There are other proper restaurants with real chefs making these delicious things and you name me? Don’t do it Marco! It’s very charming, but please stop!” But it’s all about what you’re comfortable with and personalising a meal.
GLAMOUR:
Matt: It’s all about confidence and cooking as much as you can. When you’re entertaining, you want to obviously have a dish that works every single time. So minimise the stress and go with what you know. We have massive amounts of choice now and it’s all about making the right choices. My advice would be to definitely make some bread – something simple like the no-knead recipe in the third book. When your guests walk in and get that smell of bread and they break the bread at the table and the steam comes out, you will seem like a super domestic goddess, which is always impressive. And when your mother-in-law says that she doesn’t have time to make bread, you say “Well, I’m a busy career woman and this recipe took five minutes to prepare yesterday and five minutes to make today.” The recipes in the third book are those sorts of hacky cheats, perfect for inexperienced cooks. It’s not about how smart you are as a cook or showing off, it’s about the great food experiences. Fine, if you’re creative like Heston Blumenthal then go right ahead, but if you’re not creative, why try and be something that you’re not?
GLAMOUR: Tell us about the philosophy behind your cookbooks.
Matt: A cookbook is deemed a success if people make three recipes from it – that’s all. And so many cookbooks are bought, are given as gifts and don’t get used. When I set out with the first cookbook, the aim was to never be that sort of book. I wanted it to be the book that lives above your fridge and is used regularly because it’s simple and tasty, and has been sourced, tested and written properly. I wanted readers to know that when they made a dish from the book, that it would look like the picture, that it would taste like it said it would, and that the method was going to fly in the face of conventional wisdom in that it wasn’t going to be three steps and 12 words. It’s meant to take you by the hand so that you know exactly what you’re doing.
The idea of the third book, Matt Preston Cook Book, has always been to inject more personality into it. The first two were about showing people that they would trust in the recipes – they would know that if a bolognaise said it was going to be a pain in the ass to make, that it would be a pain in the ass to make, but it would be worthwhile. It’s all about setting up the idea that cooking isn’t about state-of-the-art chillers or trekking to some obscure high-end deli to get some odd ingredient. It’s about things you can get easily and meals you can make easily. The one thing I love is you write a recipe and people experiment and show you how they cooked it. And sometime people come back and say they did a dish a certain way, and you know what? It’s better! So that’s the sort of thing I included in the third book.
GLAMOUR: Your latest cookbook is packed to the brim with new and interesting recipes. Where do you get your inspiration from?
Matt: I get my inspiration from everywhere. When I was in Soweto in Joburg, I was talking to people and asking them what they like to eat, and an eight year old came up to me. I asked him what his favourite cupcake was, and he said a sweet-potato cupcake – and that sweet-potato cupcake will probably end up in the next book, acknowledging that little boy, which I love. So I have a lot of dishes that come from other people that I’ve reworked. The memory of the flavour is still there, but it’s probably got fewer ingredients and is somewhat fresher. A lot of recipes already exist, to be honest, so it’s more about rediscovery rather than reinventing.
I also travel a lot so I see a lot of stuff, I read a lot, I eat out a lot and sometimes I go through the book and see what flavours are missing, and I’ll brainstorm ideas. It’s a collaborative process and there are probably about eight people who I regularly go to for ideas. I like that it’s a way of shining a spotlight on other people and that if you find a recipe from somewhere, everyone knows where the recipe is from. It might be a rather boring trail, but you trace where the idea comes from, where the inspiration comes from, and if you make it better, you make it better. Everything’s got threads and it’s just about acknowledging what those threads are.
GLAMOUR: The latest craze in dieting at the moment is Tim Noakes’ eating plan. As a food lover, how do you feel about it?
Matt: Well, I don’t use a lot of fat in my cooking – maybe some yoghurt and a little mayo. But I’m not going to do a fad diet book. The 5:2 diet, Tim Noakes’ plan – all of these things are great if they work for you. But at the end of the day, there’s a principal rule: eat less and exercise more, and I can’t sell 100 000 copies of that book for R400 each. The first half of the new book is filled with salads, and I love the idea of making vegetables and pulses sexy, but people tend to want a magic bullet to lose weight. If there’s stuff right here right now that’s working for you, that’s brilliant, but this idea where one size fits all is just not true. We all know what our weaknesses are, what makes us put on weight, and now we’re seeing with new research that there are different ways for teaching people different things. For me, as an omnivore, I’m not going to limit myself. We live in a world where everything has to be black and white – you’re either a vegetarian or you’re not, for example – but sometimes pale grey is better than dark grey. It’s an element of each to his own. I’m never going to do a healthy cookbook, but I am certainly going to give people everyday solutions.
GLAMOUR:
Matt: Just do it. Start a blog, find something to write about, research and know. And don’t just do what everyone else does. Find your own speciality and cook and taste and take notes. Do it because you love it, not because you’re going to make money out of it. Because at the end of the day, there aint a lot of money in it as a food writer. Journalism around the world is a dying area, so it’s really a challenge, but there is so much knowledge out there and the best recipes come from the most unlikely of places. In fact, there’s a recipe for ice cream bread in the third book from a little old lady from the Country Women’s Association in Australia. It’s almost like delicious sweet soda bread, and although I do not believe it would be in Tim Noakes’ book, it’s a recipe that makes you go, “Who would’ve thunk it?” – it’s that good! Food is about pleasure and happiness. And if you can find that pleasure and happiness in a good place rather than a bad place, then so be it. But let’s not make food the enemy. That’s when we end up in that horrible world where personal trainers force people to drink 12 Diet Cokes a day, and that’s not good.
GLAMOUR: And finally, I’m sure all us GLAMOURzons would love to know more about your personal style!
Matt: Oh yes, I certainly have a personal style, and I always dress like this. I’ve been dressing from charity shops since I was 16 years old, very cheaply. And now that I’m on the show, I get a chance to fine-tune that somewhat better. Rather than searching around for a lovely bit of fabric jacket that will probably be too short and too big, now I actually get them made to fit. I love the flash dressing of 1870s Australia where blokes peacocked. I love the Ron Burgundy era with crazy fabrics – I love that kind of cowboy fashion, like the riverboat gambler on the Mississippi style of dressing. My great great great great great grandfather was what was called a macaroni, a flash dresser of his era. There were all these men who went to Italy and picked up Italian style and came back to England dressing in this Italian manner. And I’ve still got one of his old waistcoats which is white satin with delicate dragonflies hand stitched in gold thread on it. So, it’s safe to say that overdressing definitely runs in the family!
Don’t miss Matt Preston’s new book, Matt Preston C ook Book, out in November 2014.
