Originally appearing in Season 11 of the series, since leaving the competition, Steph De Sousa has become a social media sensation, boasting millions of followers online, her website Easy Recipe Gang, publishing two bestselling cookbooks – Air Fryer Queen and Easy Dinner Queen – and hosting her own TV series, Frugal Foodie.
“I had so much riding on being on MasterChef, and I was really disappointed when I didn’t go as far as I wanted to go,” Steph told 10 Play. “I felt like it was the end of the world at the time.
“It took me three times to apply to get on, I quit my job… all those kinds of things, and I really just wanted to make food part of my life forever. It was a big gamble for me,” she continued.
But following her stint on Season 11, Steph created her online empire and has been ten toes deep in the food industry ever since. Now, returning for Back to Win, she said the experience was completely different.
“It was nowhere near as stressful as the first time around,” Steph laughed. “I didn’t have anything to lose, so I didn’t go in with the idea to change my life or to improve myself. I feel like I had already done that.
“My whole thought process was that I wanted to go back and I wanted to have some fun…to meet people, cook food, and I wanted to enjoy the process.”
Steph’s ethos since leaving the kitchen has been showcasing food that is accessible, easy, affordable and still packed with flavour.
“I don’t cook like the MasterChef high-end expectations of dishes,” she said. “My focus is on quick, easy, fast, inexpensive, delicious, supermarket ingredients so it was pretty tricky to get my head back in the game.
“I did try to keep my dishes simple, but also with a little bit of pizazz,” she continued. During the challenge where the chefs were tasked with serving a dish that represented who they are now, Steph used a combination of two of her most viral recipes to create a ‘MasterChef-worthy’ dish.
“I think that worked really well, and I loved doing that in the MasterChef kitchen. One thing I really try to do on my website and Frugal Foodie show is to show it doesn’t have to be complicated and it doesn’t have to be expensive in order to taste good,” Steph explained.
With her social media following exploding years after her original stint in the MasterChef kitchen, Steph said a large portion of her audience didn’t even know she first began her food journey on the show, which was partly why she wanted to return for Back To Win.
“I wanted to share the experience with my followers, it was actually really fun to surprise them when I announced I was coming back. Taking them along for the ride, I wanted to share that with them and to show a different side of me,” she added.
But on Sunday night, the dreaded taste test returned, and as the chefs were split into three random groups, each group had to nominate just one person to taste cubes of ingredients. The first chef to incorrectly identify a cube would send their entire group into the second round.
Steph was thankful she didn’t get selected to do the Taste Test, with her group picking Jamie to tackle the task instead. “There’s no way in the world I was ever going to do that,” she laughed.
“I don’t think I would have been bad at it, but every single elimination Taste Test I was in during my first season, I went through to the next round, so it was never going to work out well for me,” she added. “The other thing was, it’s Legends Week this week and I was eliminated in Legends Week last time as well! Things were not looking good for me.”
Unfortunately, Steph’s group found themselves cooking in the second round, where they could only use the ingredients from the taste test in their dishes. Choosing to make pork belly with an Asian-style caramel and a celeriac, fennel and green apple slaw, Steph had to find substitutes for ingredients like fish sauce, using Balachan – a fermented shrimp paste – in its place.
While the judges warned Steph that her flavours may be overpowering, she forged ahead and was ultimately really happy with her final dish.
“I really love strong, funky flavours, I love fermented food and I really enjoyed my dish,” she said. “At one stage Andy came up to me and said, ‘Woah…’, then Poh tasted it and I asked if it was okay.
“She said, ‘Steph, the only thing you’ve got in this kitchen is your own instinct so you’ve just got to go with it.’ I thought, okay, I like it so I just went for it!”
With the flavours too punchy for the judges, Steph’s pork was also served in a large piece, and not cutting into it, she didn’t realise that the fat hadn’t rendered as much as it should have.
“It’s just the luck of the draw, isn’t it? A bad cook on the wrong day,” Steph said.
Looking ahead, Steph said she has a lot coming up in the future, with her second book still selling well, she revealed that she had just signed on to release two more. “There’ll be another book next year, so I’ll get busy writing some more recipes for that, which is fantastic.”
“Obviously it was a bit of a shock because I really liked my dish but I was happy just to be there for the short time that I was, and happy to go back and do what I love to do!”
MasterChef Australia: Back to Win continues Sundays at 7pm and Monday - Wednesday at 7.30pm on 10 and 10 Play
