INTERVIEW: Press Gang Grill MaterChef’s Andy Allen

Andy Allen is a chef, food critic and former MasterChef winner. He has been a MasterChef judge since 2020. He recently Zoomed with Press Gang reporters from Guildford West, Granville South and Orange Grove public schools. Here are some highlights from the interview. 

What is your favourite food to make?

Oh, that’s very hard. I love to cook a lot of seafood. I was very lucky that I grew up by the ocean and that was probably a reason why I started to cook because we’d go fishing and we’d go back to my family home and we’d start to cook the catch. So I don’t have a specific favourite thing, but seafood would be right up there.

When did you first know that you wanted to be a professional chef?

Strangely, it was never a big dream of mine to be a chef. When I went on MasterChef, I was only there to challenge myself. I really loved the team challenges, being around a team and having to work together, going through prep and then service.  So as soon as I was in a professional kitchen, I was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

What’s the best food you’ve ever made?

Very hard question. I made a pretty good toasted sandwich this morning, it had four types of cheese on it. Is that good enough? Let’s go with the toasted sandwich that I made this morning.

How do you go about inventing a new dish?

 It basically goes down to a few things. You always want to try and have a balanced dish through sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and spicy – umami. So you want to try and hit all of those flavor points. And then you think about textures, you don’t want everything to be mushy. You want a little bit of texture as well.

So I think it comes down to those two things, making sure you’ve got texture and making sure that you’re hitting the five tastes. 

How old were you when you started to cook?

I started cooking when I was about 16. It was through my parents not being that good at cooking. So my mum is a terrible cook. I love her very much, but cooking is not her thing. And my dad, he was an okay cook, but he had about five dishes that he was good at and he would cook them in massive big batches and then he would put them in the freezer and then we would eat them for about two weeks straight.

So I was like, there must be something better out there. And it was just through curiosity and that I started to look into cooking and look into food.

How important is it to follow a recipe?

Some people say it’s very important. I say there’s times for a recipe and there’s times to throw it out the window. I think once you get an understanding of cooking and how you like to cook, then you can take the bones of a recipe and put your touch on it. It’s a little different with say, brownies, that takes a lot of different measurements. So it’s important to follow those steps and those measurements.

But I find when cooking savory food, I just use the recipe as a bit of a guide and I freestyle a little bit of it and make it my own.

What is the weirdest ingredient you’ve cooked with?

So I’ve cooked with lamb’s testicles before. I’ve cooked with lamb’s tongue. I’ve cooked with pig’s ears, pig’s, trotters. I’ve cooked with all the weird stuff.