During Sunday night’s all-in elimination, the judges challenged the chefs to a deceptively simple task: cook a dish that featured egg in an interesting way. The single-round elimination meant that even the slightest mistake could spell the end of any of the chefs.
Sadly, for Steve, his dish didn’t come together as he had hoped, and it was his time to hang up his apron. Speaking to 10 Play, he admitted that he had been feeling quite confident in the competition.
“I had a few up days and a few down days but I think everyone was having them,” the Queensland tour guide said, “Initially… I had a well-defined dish in mind and I was pretty confident with doing it.
“I’ve cooked with eggs a lot, so I was pretty confident that I was going to be fine,” he told 10 Play. “Going into the challenge I wasn’t worried at all, but as I went through I started having cracks come apart and I suddenly realised I wasn’t working as well as I normally do. I wasn’t as calm as I normally was.”
Even still, Steve said that when the clock ran down and everyone was standing at their benches with their dishes, there was a part of him that thought he could still have a shot at one of the top dishes.
Making tempura-battered soft boiled eggs on a bed of asparagus with a miso sauce, Steve’s plan was to have perfectly runny eggs ooze out onto the plate, mixing with the sauce and adding a richness to it, balancing the dish. Without the ooze, the dish wouldn’t come together as he had imagined.
“I still thought I would pull it off. I didn’t think it was the losing dish… the only thing that’s important is that the eggs work. I was confident the eggs would be good,” he said.
Unfortunately, when the judges sliced into the eggs, only one of them had that perfect soft-boiled ooze, throwing the dish’s balance out.
“If I had been thinking straight I probably wouldn’t have served three eggs,” Steve admitted. “I didn’t have to serve three, I could have served one, then I’d have a 30 percent chance it was going to be right!”
As soon as they cut into the first egg, Steve knew he was in trouble. “I needed the runny egg yolk to make the sauce balanced. I’m good at balancing flavours in sauces and I knew that, without the runny egg yolk, it wasn’t going to be successful.”
Out of the three eggs, just one was perfectly runny, and he hoped it would be enough to give the judges a sense of what he had aimed for. But unfortunately, it just didn’t come together.
“You just have to have one or two bad days and, if they’re the wrong days, it doesn’t matter. You can be the best cook and you can go home. It doesn’t take much to fall over,” he said.
Steve fell in love with cooking in his early 20s, when he was travelling for work and able to dine out as part of his work, he’d sample cuisines from all over the globe. But coming back to Sydney, he was forced to experiment in his own kitchen to replicate what he had experienced.
“I was trying to save up for my first house and I had a young family coming. I wanted to put money aside for that so I decided, if I wanted to enjoy those sorts of foods, I would have to learn to do it myself,” he explained.
And over the years, practicing and sampling different techniques, Steve also finessed his plating skills. “My wife often says to me, ‘You spend half a day cooking and the food is gone within a few minutes,’” he laughed.
“My mother was actually an artist, she painted all her life. I think that artistic streak, that’s where I show it. I love to have the food look beautiful before you eat it. I call my plates of food my ’30 seconds of art’. You get to look at it for a little while, but once it’s eaten you don’t get to see it again,” Steve said.
During his time in the competition, Steve wowed the judges with many of his dishes but none more than when he defied Jean-Christophe’s years of experience by creating a mussel-based sauce to go with his duck dish. The dish thrilled Jean-Christophe so thoroughly it brought both men to tears.
“That was definitely a highlight,” Steve said. “To have a chef of his standard that passionate about your dish was incredible. It’s a highlight of my whole time there.”
And while he had some standout dishes, Steve still felt like his time in the MasterChef kitchen wasn’t complete.
“I wanted to show [the judges] I’m capable of showing lots of different cuisines… I really wanted to show them the flexibility that I can achieve with my cooking,” he said.
“I often got the comment that the old people, the old blokes, are not flexible and they all end up doing BBQ meats and that sort of stuff. The old people never get very far in the competition,” Steve said. “I wanted to show that I can think outside the box, I can think modern as far as my dishes and flavours.
“There were a few dishes I had planned to cook which I never got to do.”
But that doesn’t mean we won’t get to see Steve’s take on modern Australian cuisine, which takes flavour and inspiration from the whole Asia Pacific region, combining the best of Aussie produce and native ingredients with the influences of neighbouring nations.
“Being a tour guide I get a lot of questions like, ‘What’s Australian cuisine?’ And people would say it’s roast lamb and baked potatoes. I don’t believe so. I want to introduce people to a different way. I want to do this modern Australian cuisine.
Before coming into the competition, Steve had his heart set on a particular, perfect location on Bribie Island, but when he left the MasterChef kitchen he was gutted to find out the council had pulled the building down.
“Where I go with that at this stage I’m not entirely sure. I have a few things coming up, where I take my food dream now I’m not sure, because part of that dream was that building, but I’ll find something. I’m sure you’ll see sooner or later.”
MasterChef Australia continues Sunday - Wednesday at 7.30 on 10 and 10 Play
