While most of us were dumping two-minute pasta into a microwave bowl and serving it with a side of James Speight’s finest, an ex-Otago student has been rubbing shoulders with the likes of Nadia Lim on the latest season of MasterChef New Zealand. Critic Te Arohi caught up with Alice Taylor to talk TV, flat cooking and hall food.
Readers of Critic Te Arohi may remember Alice as the student behind our last cooking column: “Fuck! I Can’t Cook!”. For her, the column, alongside her food Insta @alicetayloreats, was a natural progression for someone who has always been passionate about food. “I always wanted a career in food growing up,” she said, “but never fully went for it.”
Alice’s time at Otago began at Arana College, and like many Arana students, she had her sights set on law. Unlike most Arana students, though, she realised she didn’t actually enjoy law, quitting in sem one to pursue history and politics instead. While she “loves academia,” managing to smash out a Masters over the next few years, by the end of 2021, she said that “I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life… [I was] getting quite lost, quite sad.”
It was around this time that her dad let her know about the upcoming MasterChef auditions. As someone who grew up as a “superfan,” this was a dream opportunity, but as a time-pressured postgrad with a looming dissertation deadline, it was also “terrible timing”. She ended up handing in her dissertation just two weeks before heading for auditions.
Being a postgrad, Alice said she was a “chronic studier,” but added that this was a key strength heading into the show. “I had watched every episode,” she told Critic Te Arohi, meaning that while not all the challenges were the same, “[they all] fit into this framework”. She also crammed everything from world cuisines to bovine anatomy in the months leading up to the competition. “I took it very seriously,” said Alice, saying she didn’t want to “fuck up a once in a lifetime opportunity”.
In some ways, Alice said being on MasterChef “was what I expected,” having studied the different challenges from cover to cover. There are some things which she didn’t expect in front of the cameras, though, like the strong emotional element, which she says she found “surreal” at times. Despite the intense pressure-cooker (heh) environment, she came out of it with some really “strong friendships”. “That’s the best thing about [being on MasterChef],” she said.
For gourmands, being a student can sound like a nightmare scenario: having no money, little time and dingy kitchens can often mean years of grim subsistence meals. Even food-loving Alice was no stranger to this. As a dead-broke postgrad, her “pretty feral” lunch most days was half-thawed slices of rye bread with slivers of butter. It’s no surprise that most questions directed to Alice’s food Insta were along the lines of “Where the hell do I start?”.
Alice’s pro-tip for budding flat chefs: “Have three meals that you know how to cook, and you can go back to them. Like if you know how to make a bolognese sauce, you can add beans and chili to make nachos; or replace the mince with meatballs.” To keep things affordable, Alice suggested you “buy basics in bulk, use veggies to stretch meat out, and try cheaper cuts like chicken thighs or mincemeat.” She’s also a fan of changing recipes “strategically” to suit your pantry and budget: “You probably don’t need that one teaspoon of dried oregano… sometimes you don’t need that extra layer of flavour, sometimes you just need a decent-tasting feed.”
Most importantly, she encouraged flatties to be kind to each other. “If you’re starting flatting, and you don’t know how to cook, everyone’s in the same boat. It’s all good. Be kind to yourself, don’t put too much pressure on… as long as you put in effort, even if it’s not great, [your flatmates] will love you for it.” So don’t knock your flatmate’s half-burnt, half-raw pasta bake: it could be their first baby step towards celebrity chef stardom.