'Illusion shattered': Surprise MasterChef secret shocks fans

MasterChef fans have been left reeling from a revelation about how the beloved cooking show films its tasting sequences - and it could change the way you watch.

Reality competitions are notoriously arduous to film, and often a ten minute sequence on-air can take hours to film in production.

So what does this mean on a cooking show when hot dishes need to be assessed?

Well, it turns out when the judges tuck into a morsel of scrumptious looking grub, it is almost guaranteed to have been sitting there for at least an hour or two.

Yep, they are usually plated up cold, and the judges just have to grin and bear it.

Fans ‘shattered’ by cold-hard truth

On Twitter, one fan had his illusion absolutely shattered when a fellow fan served him up the truth as stone-cold as the show’s deceptive dishes.

“How do the judges try all the food without it getting cold when they are judging one by one?” he wondered.

“They don’t,” the bearer of bad news responded. “Some of it will be cold. So they aren’t meant to comment on temperatures.”

Others backed him up, confirming that the judges do indeed sample cold food, and even suggesting that it’s not ‘some’ but all of the food that comes out icy.

Current contestant Harry Foster confirmed the news in his Instagram stories on Wednesday, sharing that the long filming means that the judges have to try and imagine hot food when they sample the offerings.

He even stated that the tasting sessions could go on for up to seven hours, meaning food is purposely refrigerated to keep it fresh.

Fans ‘deeply upset’ by filming trick

Fans were left shocked by the revelation, reporting they felt ‘betrayed’.

“No really?” the original asker responded. “The illusion is shattered!”

“It deeply upsets me that they have to judge cold food on Masterchef,” another enlightened fan agreed.

One labelled it ‘crazy’ in a fan Facebook page.

In fact, the information is far from new, but has only been rediscovered by fans recently. Returning All-Star Hayden Quinn first revealed that the tasting sequence stretched for hours and included cold food back in 2018.

At the time he told the PopSugar Podcast that the judges have a sneaky taste of dishes while contestants are still cooking them, and then do their final tasting far later.

“It’s a huge process to go from uncooked produce, to cooked produce, to then be tasted,” he explained on the Podcast.

“If you’re tasting 24 dishes, they’ve got to cool it, get it in the fridge and store it and then they have to shoot it,” Hayden continued. “It’s cold food basically.”

It’s not this season’s first controversy after last night’s episode left fans squeamish over a chicken feet caramel concoction, and there were even claims an earlier challenge was ‘rigged’ in one contestant’s favour.

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