Bun mam is a complex and stupefying dish that hinges on a precarious balance of funk—the ultimate noodle soup for the brave souls who experiment with garum recipes from the copy of The Noma Guide to Fermentation otherwise collecting dust on their coffee tables. As a sort of cross-cultural transliteration, the dish is sometimes referred to as “Vietnamese gumbo.” And while it’s an imperfect comparison, I’ve always been taken by the implication: At each dish’s core, the foundational flavor is achieved by taking things too far. A gumbo is only as good as its roux, the classic French thickener of flour and fat, cooked until it resembles mud. Bun mam is only as good as the primary notes from its namesake, mam ca: a pungent, malodorous fermented fish paste—which, over the course of its long fermentation, can also come to resemble mud.
In those murky depths, aromatics (the Cajun and Louisiana Creole holy trinity of onion, celery, and green bell pepper for gumbo; lemongrass and fresh herbs for bun mam) are activated in a way that sheds light upon what might otherwise be seen as culinary black holes. In those murky depths, there lies a pure expression of love: anyone willing to cook their roux to the brink of black, anyone willing to balance a broth seasoned with the impossibly funky and salty flavors of fermented fish, is someone who truly cares. And anything worth caring about is also worth guarding fiercely.
Last year, in the first episode of Season 14 of MasterChef Australia, one of the most influential reality television shows of the millennium, Tommy Pham, a former kindergarten teacher turned stay-at-home dad, went against his mom’s better judgment. Pham, who returned as a fan favorite after originally appearing in Season 13, had spent his first MasterChef run finding his voice, refracting the competition’s endless procession of challenges and curveball ingredients through the lens of Vietnamese cuisine. In his return to the kitchen, he felt emboldened. As two of the judges walked up to his bench to ask about his dish, Pham smiled. He was making bun mam.
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“I told my mom once that if I ever get on MasterChef and I get to cook this, I’m going to do it,” Pham told the judges. “And she was like, ‘Don’t do it. They’re not going to like it. It’s too hectic. It’s too funky for them.’”
My own mom had whispered similar sentiments to me, just a few years prior, as she made the final seasoning adjustments on the bun mam she’d cooked for my partner, who had never tasted the dish before. Those words were an act of self-preservation, a barrier raised as a last defense. Because there is vulnerability in sharing something so interior to one’s culture with someone who might not have the context to receive it favorably. The remedy, of course, is trust. And the same was true for Pham—by that point, MasterChef had become a safe place to share what he’d long kept tucked away.
“I was like, look, guys, this dish here is literally my love letter to you,” Pham told The Ringer earlier this month, recalling the moment he served his dish to the judges. “This is me just being super proud of being Vietnamese. I just wanted to thank you guys for letting me—giving me this kind of voice and giving me this pride in Vietnamese food. Because I never had it before. This is Vietnam on a plate. Love it or hate it, I don’t care. I’m proud of it.”
The dish, which I’ve found occasionally comes with not-for-the-faint-of-heart disclaimers on restaurant menus, was met with joy (as was the case for my partner, who has since requested it every time we’ve visited my parents). One judge guzzled the remaining broth out of the serving jug, while another ran up to hug Pham. Vulnerability can lead to real, perspective-shifting breakthroughs. And in MasterChef Australia, it’s an essential ingredient to both the contestants’ success and the show as a whole.
I often think about a refrain echoed throughout the show’s past seasons, most recently by the late chef and MasterChef Australia judge Jock Zonfrillo, who died shortly after filming the 2023 season: “This is the hardest cooking competition in the world.” It’d be easy to dismiss such a bold proclamation if the show’s format weren’t so brutal in comparison to other cooking competitions: For roughly three months, a group of at least 18 amateur cooks enter a televised boot camp of sorts, insulating them from their day-to-day reality to solely focus on improving their cooking skills. There, they spend 12 to 14 hours per day, five days a week, competing in timed culinary challenges that test not only their ability to compose a dish, but their ability to adapt on the fly, and their ability to handle the anxiety and pressure born of physical and mental exhaustion. There might not be another show that better prepares amateurs for the realities of professional life, in any realm.
In the current season, in just the third week of competition, the remaining 15 contestants were sent to Grazeland, an outdoor food hall in Melbourne, to execute and scale a surf-and-turf menu that would serve 1,600 paying diners. Only a couple of the competitors had experience cooking for more than an extended family gathering. For reference, in the typical third week of MasterChef U.S., Gordon Ramsay and Co. are still trying to decide whether someone’s chocolate mousse with salted caramel is good enough to make it past auditions. The whiplash is jarring.
But Australia’s amped-up difficulty leads to more fruitful conclusions—for both the contests and fans of the show. “It’s been such a long-running show in Australian popular culture,” Melissa Leong, a MasterChef Australia judge currently in her fourth season, told me last year. And she’s right: The series is the most successful television program in Australian history, and was the single most popular reality TV show in the world in 2020. “The impact of the show is far-reaching and it has affected in such a positive way the IQ of our country in terms of food knowledge and just general cultural understanding of each other’s foods.”
It should be noted that MasterChef is a twofold misnomer: All of the contestants are amateur home cooks who have never worked in a professional kitchen, and many are just beginning to learn where their true culinary passions lie. Simply having the privilege of cooking for established chefs in the industry was enough, or so I was conditioned to believe from watching the U.S. version. But when I tuned in to MasterChef Australia on a whim in the middle of the pandemic, frustrated by the quality of the most recent U.S. seasons, I didn’t realize how different this iteration could be, how much more expansive it could feel.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, the show has been an international institution for more than a decade, but it wasn’t always that way, especially for the nervous network executives who green-lit the show in the first place. MasterChef Australia began, in the late aughts, as a Hail Mary. At the turn of the century, Australia’s five major commercial television networks, not unlike its U.S. network equivalents, ran on reality. The Ten Network, specifically, had placed an inordinate amount of pressure on reality television formats, stretched—or, in TV parlance, “stripped”—across five or six nights a week to keep their ratings afloat. When Big Brother Australia, a show marred by sex-related controversy, was canceled in 2008 due to declining viewership, Ten was left with a massive crater to fill. MasterChef was posited as a solution, one almost unanimously derided.
“To say that the new big show for the Ten Network next year was going to be a cooking show was kind of laughed at,” Paul Franklin, the original executive producer of MasterChef Australia, told me. “It’s like, how do you replace a reality show with a cooking show in prime-time TV? That’s insane.”
Television networks are in constant pursuit of show formats that have a compelling proof of concept. And MasterChef, while then an established brand in the U.K., wasn’t exactly the kind of television event that Ten was desperate for. Created by the British filmmaker and television producer Franc Roddam in 1990 for BBC One, the first iteration was a quaint afternoon talk show of sorts. Each episode ostensibly featured three competing amateur cooks preparing three-course menus of their own design, but any sense of competition was incidental; there was as much if not more focus on sit-down conversations between presenter Loyd Grossman and the guest chef du jour, lounging in padded accent chairs, talking about the restaurant industry. The show ran from 1990 to 2001 before ratings became untenable.
In that span, a new paradigm of reality television had been cast: Viewers craved the immersive drama of watching strangers forced to interact in pressurized bubbles (as in the aforementioned Big Brother and Survivor) and sought out aspirational formats (as in Pop Idol and later The X-Factor) that affirmed the latent, star-making talents of the everyperson. MasterChef UK reemerged in 2005 (as MasterChef Goes Large) with a structural overhaul to reflect the contemporary palate, placing a greater emphasis on challenges: Cook something delicious with a hodgepodge of ingredients hidden beneath a box, invent a dish using ingredients available in the studio’s open pantry, identify specific flavors using only one’s senses of taste and smell. But the show still lacked continuity of personnel. Early episodes featured heats of four brand-new contestants who wouldn’t interact again until 10 weeks into the series, at the start of the semifinals.
Rather than follow that edict directly, MasterChef Australia infused its format with the two biggest draws of reality television’s modern paradigm—the institution of challenges and a pool of contestants living together, siloed from the outside world—and then juiced it further. Upward of 24 contestants make it past the audition stage and compete in an expansive kitchen build-out for $250,000 and a cookbook deal. The format was inspired by Franklin’s previous work on Australia’s version of The Biggest Loser, as well as his love for the iconic Japanese food competition series Iron Chef. (“A lot of people think the idea was from Top Chef, but actually, Top Chef wasn’t really a big influence,” Franklin said. “Although it doesn’t look like Iron Chef, because they put so much theater around food and challenges, we used that concept.”)
“It was supersizing the production values, which they didn’t have in the U.K., and then looking at how you build that out across multiple nights to give it some theater and drama,” said Franklin, who spent a week in London with the MasterChef production crew in 2008 seeking clarity for the show’s path forward. “It was, Let’s go for broke. Let’s make the biggest show on the planet when it comes to cooking.”
They did. By the end of the first season, MasterChef was the most-watched show in the country. The finale of Season 2 (which was popular enough to force a televised 2010 Australian federal election debate to be rescheduled for fear of a ratings disaster) drew an average of 4 million viewers, the second most in Australian television history, behind only the 2005 Australian Open men’s singles final, wherein Aussie Lleyton Hewitt lost in four sets.
MasterChef Australia’s success became the ultimate proof of concept, and Franklin’s eye for structure was suddenly a hot commodity around the world. He flew to France, India, Norway, and other countries to help build out their own versions of MasterChef. And in 2010, Franklin boarded a plane to the States to shepherd MasterChef U.S., in turn introducing the country to the tough-guy-sweet-guy persona that Gordon Ramsay has honed in the past decade. The initial contestant auditions were rough—Ramsay, not quite checked out of his demonic Hell’s Kitchen character, was too tough in his judging. “It’s MasterChef,” Franklin recalls telling Ramsay. “These are home cooks—you’ve got to calm down a little.”
He got there eventually, and the U.S. version became based on a sort of bait-and-switch: Ramsay’s reputation casts an aura of an irate tyrant, when what you’re far more likely to get from him is teddy bear energy. But as a result, there is a certain cynicism in MasterChef U.S.’s feel-good optimism—are these really the best home cooks the country has to offer, or is that just what Ramsay’s dramatic performance leads us to believe?
In my near-obsessive viewing of MasterChef Australia over the past three years, I’ve felt like I’ve plugged myself into the Matrix. There is no going back having seen the true extent of what home cooks are capable of when the language of food—and the nurturing act of developing and balancing flavor—is a cooking competition’s primary focus.
There are other cooking competition formats that have mastered the art of selling interpersonal drama (Top Chef), that are more theatrical (Iron Chef), that more clearly depict the creative and executive process of fine dining (Great British Menu), and that traffic more heavily in the milk of human kindness (The Great British Baking Show). Lately, some food competition concepts have lost their own plot entirely: Crime Scene Kitchen turns Baking Show into a round of Clue, for some reason; Next Level Chef asks the entirely unnecessary question of what a food competition would look like if it earnestly adopted the postapocalyptic class stratification of Snowpiercer, the 2013 film by Bong Joon-ho.
But what MasterChef Australia has over any other competition is persistence. An average season lasts 66 episodes, roughly three to four times longer than most cooking shows. MasterChef Australia’s most recent season, which concluded with a grand finale on Sunday, was given a truncated schedule of merely 50 episodes—still twice the length of the longest MasterChef U.S. season.
In the average MasterChef Australia season, new episodes air five nights a week for three months—not unlike the pace of Love Island UK today, or the early seasons of Big Brother U.S. two decades ago. It is a rate akin to watching half a season of Major League Baseball. The rhythms of play become familiar, and that is entirely by design.
All reality competitions serve as an analog for sports, where participants agree to operate within a rigid framework of constraints (limits on time and resources) and affordances, a term coined by the late ecological psychologist James J. Gibson, referring to the spectrum of possible actions within an environment. Certain constraints, like the physical dimensions of a soccer pitch or the duration of a cooking challenge, are fixed. But affordances expand with experience and repetition.
That expansion of what’s possible—the learning and relearning of what someone is physically and mentally capable of in a given environment—supplies the thrill of watching professional sports, where athletes fine-tune their skills to a level that only a microscopic fraction of the world’s population can reach. MasterChef Australia taps a similar frequency, but in a way that’s far more accessible: watching home cooks get progressively better at cooking.
Where the Australian version differs from its cooking competition peers is how brazenly its challenges redraw the lines meant to divide amateur from professional. Celebrity chefs occupy an outsize plot in the popular imagination, which is why they are often cast in cooking competitions as gods at the judgment table. But in MasterChef Australia, they are treated more like bosses at the end of a ’90s beat-’em-up video game—an overwhelming adversary, but an adversary nonetheless. In no other popular cooking competition do amateur cooks expect to cook against a nation’s best chefs once a week. Only within the past year has Food Network aired a show, Outchef’d, that pits home cooks against pros. But even there, the conceit relies on a sense of ambush: The amateur’s professional counterpart is revealed just moments before the competition. This could explain the staggering quality of contestants that MasterChef Australia brings into the fold every season. Because cooking against professionals is baked into the format, auditioning for a season shows not just a tacit belief that one’s cooking can stand up to some of the best amateurs in Australia, but some of the best chefs too.
The beat-the-chef challenge introduced in the first season was a small gamble within the much larger gamble of pushing MasterChef as a reality entity worth caring about. Franklin and the original production crew debated its merits at the time: “Should we do this or not? Because surely you’d never beat the chef,” Franklin said. “But maybe someone will.”
There were 10 celebrity chef challenges in the first season of MasterChef Australia; the contestants won two of them, a revelation to the production crew and the country at large. Over the years, the chef’s challenge has been reformatted countless times, including team challenges in which contestants work together to serve a menu against a renowned restaurant’s kitchen staff. Wins over chefs became less of a shock. If anything, audiences quickly recalibrated to the level of competition. If you were on the show, you were expected to have that ability.
Watching from the perspective of an American who has witnessed a fair bit of chef idolatry, I was floored by the premise, never mind the results—I couldn’t imagine too many notable American chefs putting their egos and their restaurants’ reputations on the line against amateurs. Most of the chefs featured in Outchef’d are, at this point, food personalities recognized more for their presence as Food Network staples than they are for their restaurants.
“Certainly the chefs that take part in that challenge in MasterChef, it’s a generous person. It’s someone who is prepared to show a bit of their vulnerability and not be afraid,” Franklin said. “There’s a thing in Australia called the tall poppy syndrome. If anyone gets too far ahead of everyone else—in a field of poppies, if one poppy gets its head too high, it gets chopped. We don’t like people grandstanding too much.”
In the latest season of MasterChef Australia, one of the best chef challenges pitted a handful of the show’s competitors against Ross Magnaye and his crew at Serai, the modern Filipino restaurant that was named 2022’s restaurant of the year by TimeOut Melbourne. Magnaye swaggered into the kitchen, while Leandro, one of Serai’s young chefs de partie, was humbled to be on such grounds, having been a fan of the show since he was a child. Surely the hottest restaurant in Melbourne didn’t need to trot itself out against amateurs. But their willingness to play ball speaks to both the culture that MasterChef has nurtured over the past 15 years, and an Australianness writ large.
“I don’t think it’s Australian chefs being less insecure, but there is this very Australian attitude of: just have a crack—a very crude way of just saying, ‘We’ll attempt anything,’” MasterChef judge Leong said. “We’ll give it a try once and see what lands. And I think when it comes to the professionals competing against these fans, these home cooks, there’s just a certain level of good humor. Let’s just have a play and see what happens. I think that no one can really underestimate a keen home cook. Sure, their repertoire might not be as far-ranging and broad, their technique might not be as sharp, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t produce an incredibly delicious plate of food.”
The biggest imprint that chefs have on the show, however, is in the recipes they leave behind, recipes that often haunt the contestants long after their respective seasons. Every MasterChef franchise has its own “pressure test” challenges, wherein amateurs are asked to follow a recipe in an amount of time that leaves little margin for error. Australia’s just happen to border on sadism. The challenges range from re-creating a three-tiered signature dessert from a Michelin-starred restaurant to replicating a banh mi–inspired pork Wellington with short-crust pastry and a crispy pork skin lattice draped over top. (“The pastry discipline does lend itself well to a particular brand of cruelty,” Leong said.) Depending on the recipe, which could have anywhere from 25 to 150 different steps, contestants have somewhere between two and five hours to produce a dish as close to the chef’s model as possible.
The psychological toll is apparent from the start. Eyes dart back and forth, trying to make sense of pages upon pages of steps. Basic instructions read like gibberish. Panic often sets in as contestants grapple with raw nerves and anxiety. It is a wholly unnatural task for an amateur in any field to have to be alert and in constant motion for upward of five straight hours, exacting very precise instructions and measurements to a T. Producers consistently refill cups of water at each workbench, reminding contestants to hydrate, because, under such pressure, it’s common to forget to breathe, let alone drink water. During his two seasons on the show, Pham knew that a pressure test would be particularly grueling when the producers would hand out little cups full of gummy candies—to bring blood sugar levels back up when contestants invariably begin flagging. “You can tell everyone is just moving slower, because they’re just mentally and physically exhausted by the end of it,” Pham said. “Honestly, everybody is like a zombie and they’re just like, What did I just go through? You can’t have a proper conversation with anybody after a pressure test because you’re just worried that you might be going home.”
Chefs over the years have relished creating recipes specifically for pressure tests, but they are not designed to be impossible. Each recipe is tested weeks and weeks in advance by the show’s food team, and must be able to be completed by even the most junior member on staff. But those tests aren’t put up against a clock. As with the rest of the show, the most insurmountable constraint is time.
It was a pressure test that stopped Franklin in his tracks during the filming of the first season. The show hadn’t yet reached air, but the slack-jawed reaction from his crew told him all he needed to know about what MasterChef Australia would be capable of. In Week 7 of the competition, four contestants were given two hours and 15 minutes to produce a croquembouche, a towering mountain of profiteroles bound together by a webbing of toffee that cools and hardens into a crackling shell. It was presented by the Australian pastry chef Adriano Zumbo, who would later garner the nickname “The Pâtissier of Pain” because of the many grueling pressure tests he would design for the show. Zumbo’s model croquembouche was exemplary: a tightly bound cone of cream puffs pointed skyward, laced all around the exterior with spun sugar, which gave it the aura of a glowing Christmas tree. When Julie Goodwin, one of the contestants faced with the challenge, asked Zumbo how long the creation takes him, Zumbo responded casually: an hour and a half.
What unfolded for the contestants was a comedy of errors: instructions were ignored, cream puffs stuck to the cone mold, fingers burned raw from the molten caramel. Panic, anguished screams, buckets of sweat. As Franklin walked from the control room to the production office, he noticed everyone on staff staring at the television screens together. They were stunned by what was happening in real time. “In the world of reality TV and all the rest, you have to edit shows to make good things great,” Franklin said. “This was just great. It was like watching a live sporting event. It was like the World Cup final.”
It’s been 14 years since then. Goodwin, who managed to survive elimination during the croquembouche test, went on to become Australia’s first MasterChef winner and an overnight food celebrity—Ina Garten without the bulletproof self-assuredness. The show’s theme song, Katy Perry’s “Hot n Cold,” was less than a year old when the show debuted and now persists, if only as proof of the show’s staying power.
MasterChef Australia has now lasted long enough to examine its own legacy. During the croquembouche challenge, Goodwin admitted that she’d never worked with choux pastry or made crème pâtissière in her life; these days, it’s practically a prerequisite for being on the show. Every recurring competition exists as a palimpsest, its history overwritten by each new victor. In sports, there is an unavoidable impulse to compare eras. How might a competitor have fared in a different context, with different expectations?
The theme of the 2022 season, MasterChef Australia’s 14th, was “Fans & Favourites,” featuring a contestant pool of 12 newcomers and 12 returning cooks hoping to answer that question for themselves. Among the returnees was Goodwin, who, in the early episodes, becomes an avatar for her cadre, a portrait of self-doubt standing beside new, energized contestants who refract a decade’s worth of accumulated knowledge that Goodwin herself helped to jump-start.
In the 2023 season, Brent Draper, a contestant who had originally competed on Season 13, returned to the kitchen after a heart-wrenching exit two years before. At one point during his first appearance on the show, Draper, bleary-eyed and blank-faced, raised his hand and told the judges in the second round of a two-round elimination that he had nothing left—health concerns in his family had affected his psyche, as had quarantining at the height of the pandemic. (He would mention after leaving the show that he also dealt with insomnia and panic attacks.) Draper’s return was a portrait of resilience after becoming attuned to one’s mental health, something that isn’t always seen. His biggest edge on the competition his second time around wasn’t culinary skill, but knowing what to expect under the pressure and exhaustion of the 12-hour shoots that the MasterChef kitchen demands. “Because it’s not about the cooking,” said Pham, who also competed in Draper’s original season. “So much as it’s about: How can you keep your head up after getting knocked back?
“It really shows how mentally strong you are if you can get through those days,” Pham continued. “Anybody that can get through a two- or three-round cook has an advantage of: I can get through a hell of a day.”
But there is a reason each returnee accepted the phone call to make it back to the kitchen, and it’s no different from the reason they auditioned the first time around.
“I think with the Australian MasterChef in particular, the contestants put a lot of trust into the show—that you’re not going to be made into some kind of reality show person,” Pham said. “I think growth always has to be personal. If you really want to grow, you have to really want it. And I think with MasterChef Australia, it’s like, you can really want it because you’re not scared that they’re going to make you look like an idiot for wanting it so much.”
There are massive success stories in the show’s history. A number of contestants have become some of the country’s most beloved chefs and food personalities. Current judge Andy Allen was a 24-year-old semipro basketball player when he auditioned for the show in 2012; he has since become a co-owner of Three Blue Ducks, an award-winning restaurant with five locations in the country. But where many reality shows constantly dangle the grand prize as a carrot to keep contestants motivated, the $250,000 is never mentioned outside the first and last episodes of a season. The money and momentary fame are almost besides the point. “The experience of MasterChef—it’s immaterial whether or not someone goes on to end up being in commercial cookery or the industry in any capacity,” Leong said.
In those months of filming, paired up in Melbourne apartments, contestants are whisked off into an alternate reality—away from their lives as lapsed lawyers, electricians, stay-at-home parents—where their only concern is how they might improve in the kitchen. There, big questions await them. Is it worth the pressure? Is it too late to learn new tricks? Is this truly a passion? Answers are given in the form of a composed dish brought to the judging table.
“I see the process of the competition as an opportunity to self-examine,” Leong said. “An opportunity to grow, and an invitation to be present enough to work out who you want to be, and whether or not this is it—if food is it.”
