This Indian chef is now a guest judge on MasterChef Australia

As a guest judge on MasterChef Australia, Mumbai-based chef Saransh Goila hosts a butter chicken challenge

July 06, 2018 12:43 pm | Updated 12:43 pm IST

If you’re a MasterChef Australia fan — and I’ll just go ahead and assume that you are — you know that the most nerve-racking part of the globally-popular cooking reality show is its pressure test. The clock ticks, the judges hover, and your future in the show rests on how you handle an unfamiliar, complicated dish or cuisine.

Usually, presiding over this tense situation is the show’s iconic, affable trio of judges: Gary Mehigan, George Calombaris and Matt Preston. But in the latest episode of Season 10, the embattled contestants had another force to reckon with: Mumbai chef and cookbook author Saransh Goila.

The celebrity chef’s claim to fame is his Goila butter chicken, and that’s exactly what the three MasterChef contestants had to whip up within two-and-a-half hours, “along with coriander-mint chutney, sirke wala pyaz , and rumali roti ,” says Goila over a phone call from Mumbai.

The task was by no means a simple one, and Goila admits as much. “In our kitchen, we usually take four hours to prepare all four. If they had to do it in 2.5 hours, even my chefs would struggle,” he acknowledges.

The thirty-year-old’s butter chicken, available at a takeaway joint in Andheri, had already accorded him celebrity status within the city, by earning rave reviews from film and TV stars, as well as from the likes of chef Sanjeev Kapoor. The Delhi-born chef is also a cookbook author and host of a TV show called Roti Rasta Aur India , a show that enabled him to travel the length and breadth of the country and dive into its various cuisines. This journey led to the publication of his book, India On My Platter: The 20,000-km Food Journey .

He came up with his butter chicken recipe after moving to Mumbai and realising the city lacked a really good version, but why take it to the global platform? Because certain preconceptions about Indian food had to be broken, says Goila. “We discussed how even butter chicken is presumed to be just tomato and cream. But it’s actually a complicated dish. It’s very difficult to get the right balance of sweet and spicy,” he explains. “You can’t make a good Indian dish just by adding garam masala , or ghee. There’s more to it than that.”

Goila should know. He was, after all, described as “the best butter chicken chef in the world” by Calombaris during a Mumbai visit last year. In fact, it was during that trip that the seeds of Goila’s short, maiden MasterChef stint were sown. “George had already tasted my butter chicken last year. I was supposed to do a pop-up with him this March, and that was when he invited me to have Goila butter chicken for the pressure test,” recalls Goila, “I stayed back after the pop-up for a week, to shoot.”

Although the episode was filmed months ago, it was aired in the US just this week, and congratulations have already begun pouring in.

“I’ve been receiving messages of support from everywhere: New Zealand, Pakistan, Canada…”

Indian viewers, however, will have to wait till September to catch the Mumbai lad on their favourite cooking show.

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