With Celebrity MasterChef Australia just around the corner, we’re more eager than ever to find out all the juicy details of what to expect in the upcoming season.
Lucky for us, Chrissie Swan has dished up plenty of new deets about her Celebrity MasterChef experience, calling it a “dream”.
Chatting to Fitzy and Wippa, Swan said she had the time of her life on the show, saying: “It felt great. It felt like school camp, it felt like the last week of year 12, it was magical. The cast are fabulous.”
“I’m a huge fan of the show; I felt like a prize winner!” she gushed. “It was like there was a whole cast of legitimate people, and then they gave away one golden ticket to just, a fan of the show, and I turned up.”
The enthusiasm is especially evident, Swan said, in one of the recent promo pics posted on the MasterChef IG.
“There’s a photo of me on the channel 10 socials walking up the stairs with Tilly Ramsay, and the sheer joy and excitement on my face, every time I look at it, it makes me laugh because I wish I could tell that woman ‘please learn something before this moment!'” she laughed.
In fact, Swan revealed, she went into the kitchen with “no repertoire” and “no plan”.
While other contestants had “spent a few weeks before the show learning stuff, like how to make a hollandaise or how to flambé”, Swan said she “hadn’t practised anything”.
“So, seriously, I got there and I was just so excited to be walking through the doors that I hadn’t really thought too much beyond that,” she laughed.
That’s not to say she didn’t come with skills ready to go, though. Asked what her best dish is, Swan gave us the secrets to her killer schnitty.
“I do a great schnitzel,” she said. The key? Self-raising flour.
“First of all, you get your chicken fillet and you bash it out so it’s all even. You need a basher, or you can use a rolling pin,” Swan explained. “Then, you put it in self-raising flour, it’s key. You dip it in self-raising flour first because when it heats in the pan down the line it puffs a bit, so you get that lovely crispy, crunch.”
After that, Swan said to dip it in egg wash, panko crumbs, and to fry it in “normal oil, not olive oil”.
“Just whatever you’ve got, canola, sunflower, whatever,” she said.
While we can’t wait to make a delicious schnitzel for dinner tonight, whether it’s enough to make it all the way through the competition remains to be seen, though.
Aside from going up against chef royalty Tilly Ramsay, Swan revealed that Olympian Ian Thorpe is — perhaps unsurprisingly — the most competitive out of the bunch.
“He’s very competitive,” she said. “I reckon he’s the most competitive one, and I’m the least. So there’s the scale and everyone kind of peppers in between.”
We can’t wait to see how it plays out!
Celebrity MasterChef Australia premieres at 7.30pm this Sunday, October 10th, on 10 and 10 Play on Demand.
