masterchef john white chocolate veloute

John Attempting A White Chocolate Velouté In A ‘MasterChef’ Relay Was A Cultural Reset

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There are three subjects that will unite any group of true MasterChef fans: a hatred of the hibachi grill, an undying love for Maggie Beer, and above all, a bitter memory of the 2015 relay challenge.

Yes, we are absolutely talking about John Carasig’s white chocolate velouté. And John’s most infamous Season 7 moment is more relevant than ever with the former contestant being brought back for this year’s MasterChef: Fans and Favourites. 

As soon as John arrived in the MasterChef kitchen, fans lost their goddamn minds. It was the throwback to end all throwbacks!

In the years since that notorious relay challenge, John and his white chocolate velouté have become deeply ingrained in MasterChef Australia’s mythology.

So what actually happened? It’s time to journey back to the 2015 season of MasterChef.

If you cast your minds back to Season 7, which crowned Billie McKay the winner, during week three the fateful relay challenge was introduced. The contestants were divided into four teams, with each team tasked with making one dish. Each team member was only allowed 15 minutes of cooking time and a mere 45 seconds to exchange information with the next contestant to continue the designed dish.

In the blue team, Jarrod Trigg was the first cook so he decided to make a simple easy-to-continue dish: mussels in a coconut and tomato broth. He started the cook before handing instructions over to the second relayer, Fiona Grindlay, who continued the dish. But things got complicated when John arrived and despite being told the plan for the meal, he decided to add a completely different element: a white chocolate velouté. To pair with ummm…. mussels?!

“Do you think white chocolate works with shellfish?” the week’s mentor Marco Pierre White asked John. “It does,” John brightly replied. You sure about that, hun?

Despite John’s big plans for the dish, he didn’t manage to actually finish the velouté, so by the time Amy Luttrell arrived, she couldn’t make much sense of what she was meant to be cooking.

“John hands me a block of white chocolate and tells me ‘This is for the velouté’,” Amy recalled. Georgia Barnes then had to pick up the pieces from Amy and plate the dish, but was baffled by what she had to finish. “There’s all these weird elements and nothing seems to flow,” Georgia said, panicked.

Unsurprisingly, the blue team couldn’t salvage the dish and they were sent to an elimination. John was left licking his wounds, admitting that he “stuffed up” by randomly introducing chocolate to a seafood recipe. Viewers were truly furious with John’s chaotic choices, which intensified when another one of the relay team’s members, Jarrod, was sent home on the following episode — instead of John.

Back in 2015, John became one of the more controversial contestants ever but with a few years of hindsight we can look back at the relay for what it truly was: very, very funny.

The story of the dreaded white chocolate velouté took on a second life — contestants and viewers alike couldn’t stop talking about it in the years since. Following a relay challenge on the 2021 season, contestant Jess Hodge joked, “I was determined not to go down in MasterChef folklore and cook a white chocolate velouté or something.”

The year before, past winner Adam Liaw correctly called the relay the “best ever episode” and John the “best ever contestant”.

After his season, John went on to start a chocolate business as the founder of Adobo Kitchen Bean To Bar Chocolates, which will soon relaunch as TSOKOLATE.

Every year since the iconic episode aired, whenever white chocolate or a relay is mentioned, fans on Twitter immediately joke about John’s white chocolate velouté again.

The meme never gets old and, at long last, this year’s MasterChef might give John the chance to redeem himself. And that means it’s time to manifest another relay challenge.

Will history repeat itself? We bloody hope so!