To be honest, I wasn’t really keen on watching the new season of MasterChef Australia. A live-it-breathe-it fan of the show for the better part of a decade, I wasn’t sold on the idea of a season, or for that matter any season, without the men — Gary Mehigan, George Calombaris and Matt Preston, the show’s judges for the last 11 seasons who made it what it was. The trio made MasterChef Australia much more than a culinary competitive format, engaging audiences all over the world not only with the delicious food that’s whipped up in every episode, but also with the dreams and hopes of its contestants, their underdog stories finding resonance in viewers, cutting across geography and demographic. The three bowed out last season, marking the end of an era for the MasterChef Australia fan.

But the world, even otherwise, is no longer what it once was. As we grapple with a new normal, what we are now looking for is familiarity. And I am happy to say that Season 12 of MasterChef Australia, despite a change of face in terms of its judges, delivers that in spades. How? Well, with the masterstroke of bringing in contestants from earlier seasons for an all-star series called MasterChef: Back to Win.

Currently streaming on Disney+Hotstar, the all-new season, perhaps aware of the fact that it would have to work doubly hard to hold on to its old audience as well as engage new viewers, has gone in all guns blazing. After all, what can get better than having familiar favourites like Ben Milbourne, Ben Ungermann, Reynold Poernomo, Poh Ling Yeow and Laura Sharrad among others, enter the hallowed precincts of MasterChef Australia for one more shot at the trophy that eluded them the first time? What makes the first week of this season, that’s currently playing out, even better? The presence of the ‘master chef’ himself — Gordon Ramsay.

The globally famous chef, known as much for his acerbic tongue as he is for his skills in the kitchen, is the star presence that this season has relied on to help it breeze through its first few episodes, even as audiences (and the contestants) familiarise themselves with the new judges — celebrity chef Jock Zonfrillo (who looks like a dish himself, ahem!), food critic and travel writer Melissa Leong and, what is a surprise choice, Andy Allen, who took home the MasterChef Australia trophy in 2012.

The report card on the new judges? Well, they are earnest and enthusiastic (a lot of high-fives and fist bumps in the first few episodes), but they still need to find their feet on the show, given that everything they say and do seems to be carefully choreographed.

No such worries in the case of the contestants, though. The two-dozen hopefuls, no longer the amateur cooks they were the first time, guarantee that this edition of MasterChef Australia will be banging. The tone for this season was set in the first episode itself with the kind of sophisticated dishes the contestants came up with — from Reynold’s delicately beautiful all-white dessert to Dani’s all-flavours-out Sri Lankan crab curry. Which is why perhaps the launch episode clocked the highest ratings for any MasterChef Australia opening episode in the last five years!

The good thing about knowing most of these contestants (and rooting for them in previous editions) is that audiences can mark out their favourites from the start, without having to wait a few weeks to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each. A lot of MasterChef Australia’s popularity lies in how it emotionally engages its audience and we’ve seen that happening in the first few episodes itself, with Jock and Laura forming an emotional connect over food when she walked up to present her dessert, inspired by the time she spent under Jock’s tutelage. We look forward to some ‘Bandy’ moments on the show with buddies and Season 4 co-contestants Ben Milbourne and Andy Allen on opposite sides of the table, as contestant and judge respectively.

‘Go big’ is perhaps the mantra that will define MasterChef Australia this season. The competition promises to be stiff (Dani won the only Immunity Pin of this season in Episode I) and the cooking of the highest standard, but what we are really looking forward to is an appearance by singer Katy Perry for a challenge that will be inspired by her popular song Hot N Cold, which, incidentally, has also been the show’s theme music.

And when we say ‘big’, it brings us back to Ramsay, who, after a sedate Episode I which saw him on his best behaviour, has livened things up in the MasterChef kitchen by giving us the vintage Ramsay we know. In Episode 2, he referred to a dish he didn’t like as, “That pork looks like it’s been chewed on by a bulldog”. Colour is what Ramsay brings to a show like this, something that the judges will have to work really hard to keep up with. With or without Matt Preston’s now-famous pink pants.

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