Family Master Chef Challenge

On Sunday our family held its first Master Chef challenge (based on the Australian reality TV show for amateur chefs). We don't have a professional kitchen, some of us are not great cooks (and I speak for myself here) and we wanted the meals to be served as our Sunday lunch. We had four couples making up the four teams. It was super fun and we actually ended up with a delicious four course meal.

The challenge was a mystery box - so we all received a box of the same ingredients but were making a different course. I have included the "rules" below in case you want to try a similar challenge as a dinner party or weekend lunch.

1. Teams to arrive at the kitchen at 11:15am SHARP as clock will start at 11:30am after briefing and box allocation.
2. Each team must have a team apron.
3. Optional items for each team to provide for themselves: 1 cookery book (NO, electronic devices such as iPads may NOT be used), 1 secret ingredient, any cooking equipment/utensils you may want that (a) are not available or (b) you don’t want to share/wait for.
4. Each team will be randomly allocated a mystery box and accordingly will prepare either an appetiser (2 teams), the main, or dessert as indicated in box. All or some of the mystery box ingredients may be used as well as a limited range of pantry items.
5. Each team will be allocated a work space and will be responsible for keeping it clean and for leaving it clean and tidy at the end of the challenge.
6. Each team will have 90 mins to prepare and cook their dishes. If you need time just before serving you may stop your clock that much earlier and restart prior to serving your dish – to a maximum of 20 mins.
7. Each team must prepare enough for 8 people.
8. Judging – each person will be given a judging sheet and will score each dish according to stipulated criteria (difficulty, presentation, taste, creativity) and without any discussion. Persons do not judge their team’s dishes. Winning team is team with most points and will win a grand prize (in our case it was a La Creuset pan!).
9. Should a team exceed the 90mins, 1 point will be deducted for every 5 minutes over. 
10. Should you be unhappy with your team partner you may negotiate with the rest of teams to swap – highly inadvisable.

Good luck to all, may the best chef win!

Pantry ingredients included olive oil, vegetable oil, soy sauce, eggs, milk, sugar, flour, chillies, vinegar, butter, salt, pepper

Pantry ingredients

Team apron

Ingredients from our mystery box and our chosen cook book for the challenge

Appetizer 1: puff pastry with a tomato and pistachio topping and a strawberry and bacon topping (team's secret ingredient: chili chocolate used in the balsamic-chocolate reduction)

Appetizer 2 (and the winning dish of the day!): Souffle with pistacio crust, porcini mushroooms, broccoli, peashoot, and rocket sauce (team's secret ingredient: porcini mushrooms)

Main course: fillet steak gourmet sandwich with chilli, garlic, lemon and ginger marinade, grilled tomatoes, rocket, pea shoots and soft boiled eggs with an accompaniment of broccoli stalks rolled in bacon (team's secret ingredient: freshly made bread)

Dessert: puff pastry with granadilla cream and pistachio, and frozen chocolate ganache and chili (team's secret ingredient: brandy, used in chocolate ganache)

I would love to hear if you have tried cooking competitions at home and how you did it.

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