With over 40 years of cooking experience, and nearly as many cookbooks published, Rick first challenged the group to bring him and the judges their best raw seafood dish.
Having battled through multiple eliminations and pressure tests, David told 10 Play he was still very nervous heading into Sunday night’s challenge.
“I don’t have a repertoire of seafood dishes, let alone raw fish, and I've never done anything like that at home,” he said. “I was freaking out… I had this inspiration from a cookbook and was like, you know what? I’m going to send it super hard. It was the best idea I had.
“My philosophy was, do the best that you can. No regrets from there.”
With just 30 minutes on the clock, David plated up a dish of tuna with raspberries and an apple purée, covered with beets, but upon tasting the judges said the balance of flavours was just off, with the raspberries overpowering the tuna. With the competition tighter than ever, that was enough to send David into the second round.
“I was very worried!” He admitted with a laugh. “Going into the second round, I felt the fear of elimination the strongest. I wasn’t scared of going home in a pressure test… I think, because I wasn’t confident, it made me quite scared.
“I was neurologically spent,” the pharmacologist said. “I used all my creativity at the start and, by the time I hit that second round, my brain left the room.”
In the second round David, along with Mimi, Nat, and Sue, had 75 minutes to make a ‘fishy feast’ featuring a cooked seafood main and two side dishes. David chose to make a hot smoked salmon dish with couscous and fennel salads on the side.
“I went with what I used to cook for myself at home. Is it a fancy dish? No. Is it a dish I make at home? Yes. Is it my best work compared to other stuff? No, but it was the best I could do on the day with the level I was at,” he said adding, “No regrets”.
“For me, I always tried to keep a level head. The competition is 22 people, finals week is three so 19 are going home. It’s all about celebrating the wins… every chance to cook in the kitchen, the people I met and the opportunity of cooking with them and learning, that for me is a win,” David said.
“Whatever I get, I’m thankful for and where it ends, it ends. If I won that it’s awesome, if I didn’t? That’s still awesome as well, there are so many things to be thankful for.”
With a background in pharmacology and toxicology, David never expected to find himself in the MasterChef kitchen, having only really found a love for cooking five years ago when he stumbled on a ‘science experiment about food’.
“When I saw it, I instantly connected the dots with my chemistry background,” he said. “It was Fizzy Fruits, and it was just a law of partial pressures using carbon dioxide. That made the connection where I wanted to try and learn the science about food, which started to get me in the kitchen.
“I never thought about doing MasterChef because I wasn’t sure how I’d stack up,” he added. “A lot of the cooks I watched had a cultural background where they learned how to cook from a young age… I didn’t have much of a recipe base.”
But David’s unique blend of scientific curiosity and experimentation in the kitchen saw him plate up some amazing dishes for the judges. “I was really pushed out of my comfort zone, but also came up with some really cool dishes!”
After his time in the competition, David knocked on the door of a French bistro and explained that he wanted to continue his journey of learning. “I did a trial and got a full-time job, that’s been awesome. I’m also looking for clinical trial work at the same time so the plan is to just work really, really hard and find a work/life balance,” he explained.
“I am going to take this opportunity and incorporate cooking into my life for sure,” he continued. “I love learning, I hope I never stop learning and searching things out. When that happens is when I’ with people, they give me a problem or I have a question in my head — that’s when I start searching for these things.”
“In the future, if I do pop-ups with contestants, it’s a chance for this really cool process of back-and-forth, experimenting, coming up with ideas, and seeing what sticks. I would love to keep that going, it was so fun,” David said.
“People always ask if It’s the destination or the journey and to that I’d say it’s the company. This experience really highlighted it’s the people that I was with that made it all worth it. That was my highlight of the entire show.”
MasterChef Australia continues Tuesday - Thursday at 7.30 on 10 and 10 Play
