MasterChef's Poh 'obsessed with being popular' when she was young

She’s a firm fan favourite with MasterChef viewers and is well used to being in the spotlight ever since she shot to fame back in 2009.

And it seems like Poh Ling Yeow was always destined for being in front of flashing lights, revealing on the podcast Freedom Hunters with Suzanne Delahunty that she was always attracted to the thought of being in the public eye.

“I fantasised a lot about being some kind of entertainer. There was a lot of singing into hair brushes and doing accents to myself,” Poh said back in August 2019 when she was chatting about her childhood.

The 47-year-old said she loved getting her hands on scripts and used to sit there and do all different kinds of characters.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to be but when I look back on it there was a lot of that kind of thing going on,” she said.

Poh went on to study a Bachelor of Visual Communications where she specialised in illustration.

“The idea of doing something like that was very attractive to me because I was obsessed with being popular because I was so not that and I thought: ‘I think that’s how you do it, you do something like that, you put yourself in the limelight’,” she said.

“So the idea of being an entertainer, I liked that because people like you.”

During the week, Poh hit back after fans of MasterChef called her out for ‘stressing them out’ with playing with fire when it came to the cooking deadlines on the show.

The 47-year-old uploaded a snap of her pressure test challenge dish, a stout beef pie with blue cheese crust, to her page.

Alongside the snap she wrote: “To answer those who ask why I keep pushing it with my time limits? Simple - it’s why I came back on the show - to see what’s possible.”

The fan backlash over Poh’s ‘stressed out’ cooking methods came just after others slammed the preferential treatment some of the contestants have been receiving from the judges.

Many were quick to clarify it was the judges’ treatment and not the returning star, they had an issue with.

“Are the judges contractually obligated to heap high praises on Poh’s every dish?” one woman wondered. “She’s alright as a person, but it’s starting to get old, and it’s only been a few weeks!”

Others worried the show was becoming the ‘Poh show’ and that other contestants are unfairly missing out on screen time.

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