Kiwi chef Ben would like to win MasterChef, 'but not at all costs'

Warning: This story contains spoilers for MasterChef Australia back to win

When New Zealand chef Ben MacDonald was told his one mouthful of food was “too much” for the MasterChef Australia judges, he was relieved to wave goodbye to the kitchen and bounce back across the Tasman.

“I was just so tired,” he told RNZ.

“You're in that place and you're going into that kitchen and you're just getting hammered,” the 47-year-old father-of-two says of the full-on experience. Now back in Auckland with his partner and two young girls, his exit from the reality TV cooking show aired on Thursday night.

“Your adrenal system is getting hammered. You're peaking. Your adrenaline is coursing through your body and then you go out and then you have lunch and then they're judging and then out again and then back for the tasting. And then by the end, you're just going up and down, up and down, up and down for not only days, but weeks and months on end.

“It's a very intense experience. It's very tiring.”

MacDonald, the only international representative on this year’s Back to Win season, was booted from the show in fifth place, losing in a very posh one bite challenge set by South Island culinary legend Vaughan Mabee. It was a place better than he scored during his first spin in the apron, coming in sixth in 2014.

The dish that ended his run this time was chicken wings stuffed with whitebait mousse, sitting on a seaweed and parmesan tuile. There was also chicken liver parfait, chive oil emulsion and caviar on the plate.

“Making a single mouthful of food to summarise your many months on MasterChef is a little bit hard to swallow, ironically.

“I would have loved a pressure test because I was clearly not bad at them,” MacDonald told RNZ the day after his departure aired on NZ television.

MacDonald thinks he had to cook in all but two of the high stakes pressure tests during the season. Despite his shaky, adrenalin-charged hands and beads of sweat on his brow, he loved all of them. Especially one of the earliest, cooking alongside Gordon Ramsay, earning himself an immunity pin that kept him safe for the first few weeks of competition.

“I cooked more than 40 times, you know, possibly more than anyone. I haven't counted it up, but like it is tiring and it does tax you physically, emotionally, mentally and creatively. It's hard, really hard.

“….I was just like really, really ready to go home. I really wanted to win too, but not at all costs.”

MacDonald didn’t think he could take on MasterChef a second time. He is 47 now, sharing parenting of his two young girls and juggling his own software business.

He had said immediately after finishing his first turn he would never do it again, especially with children. He’d had the call up a few times before and turned it down.

This time though, his partner Sandy backed the idea. Eleven years had passed, and he had "forgotten all of the bad and boring parts". He had the support of his family and sorted out the logistics. He wanted to get his cooking mojo back. His kids had watched his original run recently and were big fans of the show.

“One of the big reasons I did it was because I thought it'd be fun for them.”

Back in 2014, the popular cooking competition was a roll call of home cooks. Whangarei-born Macdonald was 36, living in Brisbane and working in a restaurant. He applied to the reality show to “shake my life up a bit”. After a grueling audition process the Kiwi was picked and took up residence in a flash Melbourne mansion with 24 others, sharing three bathrooms to prep for TV each morning. They cooked meals together and had cameras on them outside of the cooking comp.

“We'd honestly get home from set back then and then have to cook dinner for each other. We couldn't even order. There was no Uber Eats… we didn't have our wallets or our phones. We had no communication with the outside world.”

The judges were Gary Mehigan, George Colombaris and Matt Preston, who were “firmer” as Macdonald puts it, “who would routinely say things like, I hate this or this is terrible or whatever. So it was a bit of a different era”.

If things were the same now, there’s no way MacDonald would have signed up for this year’s Back to Win series, he says.

This time, each of the familiar contestants had their own apartment to stay in. Now a dad, MacDonald flew back home a number of times during the long stretch of filming. He could call his family and even run his business from Australia. The contestants would go out for dinner or pints of Guinness to unwind after a day on the tools.

In the decade between runs, MacDonald had relocated back to Auckland and worked in kitchens at Grey Lynn RSA and Westhaven marina brunch spot, Buoy. He’d run a catering business. His skills were polished.

“I remember back from the first time I had to learn to do a whole lot of stuff like choux pastry and rough puff pastry and, you know, all these different things.

“But a lot of that stuff, from having worked in professional kitchens, I just know now.”

Despite the foodie’s fire being lit and doing so well in the competition (“I got two cook-a-longs, four pressure tests, got to cook in a Michelin starred kitchen in Doha, cooked in Vue de Monde”) he has no plans to get back into the hard hours of hospitality which would take him away from friends and family.

“I'm planning on doing a whole lot of food content because the part I love doing is coming up with the dishes and cooking them and sharing them. And I can do all that online now, which I couldn't do before.

“I've also got the time to do it. I'm not constantly exhausted from standing in a kitchen all day.”