First MasterChef Asia winner talks agony and ecstasy of reality TV
Singaporean Woo Wai-leong withstood the heat in the kitchen to win the inaugural title, but warns prospective entrants of the pressure cooker-like environment of performing on the popular TV programme
MasterChef Asia is calling for contestants for its second season and potential applicants are advised to learn a thing or two from Woo Wai-leong, the first winner of the competitive cooking reality show.
Recently in Hong Kong to promote the programme, which was aired on Now TV, the Singaporean says the show was so stressful he would never do another one, but the experience is so valuable it will last a lifetime.
“As long as you’re a fan of cooking and want to see how you perform under pressure, just do it. Don’t do it for the prize. Don’t do it for the fame. Do it because you want to challenge yourself. You want to see whether you can survive under that environment,” says Woo.
“Before this show, I found myself watching MasterChef at home and thought ‘I can do better than this. How could he forget that? How could he screw that up?’ But at the competition, I was eating my words. It’s this hard. It’s this tough.”
At an event at Flame in Tsim Sha Tsui, the lawyer turned MasterChef took his time to recreate the short ribs with brown-butter purée and mirin-glazed leeks dish that he made during the second challenge at the finale.
But Woo says aspiring contestants should be prepared to work under a lot of pressure because during the actual competition nothing ever goes according to plan. He recalls in the seventh episode, each of the contestants was to cook for 150 people in about 2½ hours.
