Amir Manoly’s MasterChef Australia journey came to an end on June 8, 2021 — after a challenge at Daylesford’s Dairy Flat Farm, set by Alla Wolf-Tasker.
While Manoly’s beetroot may have been a little burnt, the same cannot be said for his bridges in the MasterChef kitchen, with the Victorian native revealing that he has plans to work with Pete, Brent and Justin.
“We talk pretty much every day,” Manoly told POPSUGAR Australia following his elimination. “We’re planning to do stuff together in the future. I have these guys as lifelong friends now.”
For Manoly, his focus is now on his new business — Mister Collective — which was designed to educate, inspire and collaborate with the men of Australia to encourage them to have fun in the kitchen, whilst breaking the stigma surrounding dealing with mental health challenges.
When asked what he found to be the most unexpected aspect of filming MasterChef, Manoly confirmed that the cooks are just as stressful as they appear on television.
“Watching previous seasons, I always thought: ‘There is no way everyone finishes with a couple of seconds to go!” he revealed. “It just can’t happen week after week, season after season.
“But it just does! In 99% of my cooks, I finished down to the wire with a couple of seconds left, so what you see on TV is pretty real. It’s a pretty genuine show, there’s not much editing to it. But yeah, that definitely threw me.”
Seeing as applications are now open for home cooks who would love to try their hand in the competition in 2022, we had to ask Manoly what advice he would give to future applicants.
“For me, MasterChef provided a great platform,” he said. “If you asked me this time last year, whether I thought I would have got on the show, I probably would have said no, I just applied for the sake of it.
“I didn’t think I was good enough, but I made it a substantial way through the season — just over halfway — and I never thought I could have. So even if you’re just passionate about cooking, and you want to give it a crack, then I’d say apply.
“It’s an amazing platform and it will essentially put you in whatever direction you want to end up in.”
