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MasterChef Australia season premiere: meet the new contestants – and prepare to cry

Lovable tradies are braising huge chunks of meat and cheerfully quoting Shrek. A beautiful man cooks congee while crying and praising his Vietnamese mother. A cancer survivor is reclaiming her food dreams after regaining her sense of taste.

Everyone is crying and clapping and elbow-bumping. A middle-aged man is telling a stranger he loves them while another sweetie reassures a woman making some kind of dry ice dessert mushroom that she’s a queen.

Yep, MasterChef is back! And it’s been supercharged with an extra post-Covid sentimentality.

“2021 is the start of a new year and a new era,” says judge Melissa Leong, addressing the contestants in last night’s season premiere. Unlike other seasons, she notes, there are no friends or family present as they compete to get into the Top 24. Instead, they have to support each other – a task that they grasp with both sanitised hands.

“Take a look around at each other because, as of today, we welcome you to the MasterChef family.”

Most viewers would argue that last year was the start of this new era. Leong and the other judges – but, let’s be real, mostly Leong – brought a fresh and empathic energy to the show, and the entire MasterChef: Back To Win season proved to be a much-needed comfort and distraction to the nation during lockdown.

But it’s true that this season promises something new too. This is the first time we’re seeing these new judges with everyday contestants (not pros like Poh Ling-Yeow and Reynold Poernomo). And it’s the first time we’re seeing everyday contestants in the wake of a life-changing pandemic.

MasterChef has always been about people taking a chance and chasing their dreams, but abandoning your job to make choux pastry carries a bit of extra weight now that jobkeeper’s gone and the hospitality industry is subject to effective closure overnight. The stakes are higher, and the stories are even more affecting.

Some of the standouts from the first episode were there because they’ve had a change of heart over the past 12 months; an epiphany about what was really important, and that life is too short to not pursue your passions.

“Because of Covid, I started to question myself,” says Brent, a “dirty old boilermaker” from Queensland who wanted to expand his horizons.

Therese, the dessert mushroom queen, wanted to harness her creativity, taking time out from her career as a real estate performance analyst – a job which I assume involves putting your feet on a desk and watching an endless exponential curve crack the top of your computer screen for ever.

Her ornate mushroom dish is a hit. The judges call it “patisserie excellence” and used it as evidence of the staggering quality of food this season.

Some of the most impressive dishes came from women with even more compelling stories. Minoli earns her apron after making a six-dish Sri Lankan feast, all in just 75 minutes. It’s a feat she says was unthinkable just a few years ago. She was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in 2017 and lost her sense of taste while undergoing treatment.

Then there’s Kishwar, who stunned the judges with a Bangladeshi sardine dish. She feels it is “very selfish” to be away from her children, but dreams of writing a Bangladeshi cookbook to create a legacy for her family.

“It’s a small dream,” she says, before bursting into tears.

“This year is a time for opportunity,” Mel says, at the beginning of the episode. And in that spirit, no one went home. The contestants who didn’t get an apron last night will compete again tonight, Tuesday, for the five final spots. Everyone gets a second chance!

Even Ben, the stood-down flight attendant who said “I’m auditioning for MasterChef because I never really fail at much” – and immediately rejected the judges’ rejection of his dessert. Even Ben can stay!

After the 2020 season premiere, Adam Liaw predicted MasterChef would have a record year with “the entire country a captive audience, craving wholesome nostalgia, with every aspect of their lives revolving around cooking and eating”. He was right.

And though we’re less captive than this time a year ago, I think … the rest holds up. In this new year and new era, who isn’t craving something a little sweet?

• MasterChef continues on Tuesday 20 April on Channel Ten, with eliminations each Tuesday and Sunday. Meg Watson will be live-blogging the Sunday night eliminations