Good food the key for Masterchef judge
Ray Mcvinnie, the bespectacled, cool, calm and collected judge on Masterchef, isn’t even a qualified chef. Sure, he might have a diploma in culinary arts, but that’s from the Auckland University of Technology, where he lectures in gastronomy, and he only got that when he started work there.
Other than that, he’s not qualified to cook an egg.
That doesn’t mean he can’t cook an egg, of course. But the fact remains, one of New Zealand’s most high profile chefs has no formal training.
Not that it stopped him carving out a successful culinary career, which has included stints at some of Auckland’s most highly regarded restaurants – he was executive chef at Auckland’s Metropole Restaurant for six years.
He’s also an experienced food judge. Aside from Masterchef, which is back for another season next week, he has judged the Corbans Food and Wine Challenge and the New Zealand Cheese Awards for many years.
He was on the international jury for the Italy-based Slowfood Awards, and has twice been on the panel of judges for the World Food Media Awards.
He lectures at AUT, is food editor for Cuisine magazine, contributes regularly to newspapers, holds weekly cooking demonstrations and writes cookbooks.
Not bad for a kid from Matamata whose first dining out experience was ‘‘fish and chips at Pivac’s Esperanto Restaurant in Matamata, or whatever it was called. It was damn good’’.
But not good enough to make him want to become a chef. Nor was it his mother’s cooking which inspired him. While most everyone says the best chef in the world is their mum, not Mcvinnie.
‘‘She was a plain cook. We weren’t rich, we didn’t have flash food, we couldn’t afford much and she did good plain cooking,’’ he says.
‘‘She couldn’t stand garlic, don’t think she knew much about it really. I’d never seen broccoli until I came to Auckland.’’
In the big city, Mcvinnie signed up to do a post-graduate course in history at Auckland University, and that changed everything.
‘‘While I was there I worked in restaurants as a student job and it
‘‘The role cooking plays in any society or culture is crucial and yet it’s so taken for granted.’’ Ray Mcvinnie
was really good and then I just decided I’d like to keep going with that,’’ he says.
‘‘Then my partner, she decided to open a French restaurant and I said ‘hey I’ll be the chef’ and she said ‘sure’. Back in those days it was a bit easier, next thing you know I was a chef.’’
‘‘I really liked it, and after we got out of that I thought I’m going to keep doing this, so I was a professional chef for a long time, not formally trained, no.’’
That he now has a diploma of culinary arts is ‘‘the irony of ironies’’, he says.
He says while the unusual path to success worked for him, he wouldn’t want to try it these days. ‘‘It’s a bit harder now, I think.
‘‘It’s a hard life being a chef. It’s hard physical work, hard mental work as well.’’
And the key to
being a good chef? ‘‘You have to be totally organised. You’re not going to be any good unless you’re organised, but you can learn that.’’
Food, he says, is all about the person cooking it.
‘‘People say the food’s no good but you’ve got to find the cook, food’s always about the cook. You can give two cooks the same ingredients, the same recipe you’ll get two different results. That’s the good thing about cooking, that’s what we love about it.’’
Mcvinnie doesn’t cook in restaurants any more, and despite the similarities between the names, he has nothing to do with Vinnie’s Restaurant in Auckland.
‘‘I never have but people think I have because of the name, so boring.’’ For Mcvinnie, food is very important, more important than anything else.
‘‘The role cooking plays in any society or culture is crucial and yet it’s so taken for granted, and people don’t understand that. ‘‘Have you ever heard them talking about cooking when they rave on about the so-called obesity problem? They never do, they don’t understand the role that cooking and eating plays in our society. Food’s not just about eating, it’s far more than that.
‘‘In 2003 at Harvard they did research and learned that the higher the amount of cooking in any society, the lower the obesity. End of story. Interesting eh. It’s common sense.
‘‘You eat less, you eat better food, you understand what you’re doing, so it’s much better.’’
Another season of Masterchef is about to begin, but Mcvinnie is unable to talk about it except to give it a shameless plug.
He says people cooking at home should simply ignore most of what they see and hear on the show and stick with making good food from good ingredients.
Fancy presentation, which seems to be a crucial element of television cooking shows, has no place at home, he says.
The same goes for trends, which seem to thrust another style of cooking into the spotlight every couple of years.
‘‘I always tell people cook for yourself, cook what you like, don’t be a slave to the rhythm, that’s just bulls... and everyone should ignore it.
‘‘Eat real food, don’t eat processed food full of edible foodlike substances, and enjoy it.’’
So what would Mcvinnie order for his last meal? ‘‘It depends on how I’m feeling.’’ Given it would be his last meal, I suggest he probably wouldn’t be feeling all that crash-hot.
‘‘Then pizza. Really good Italian pizza from Naples.
‘‘I’d have to go there and get it of course, and some nice red wine.’’