MasterChef Australia 2024 runner-up Josh “Pezza” Perry has clapped back at “haters” criticising his finale dish.
During the tense July 26 grand final, Pezza battled it out against eventual winner Nat Thaipun in a two-round cook challenge.
In the first round, the MasterChef finalists had 75 minutes to cook a dish based on a hero ingredient, which was black peppercorns.
While Nat served a scotch egg with sai oua (a Northern Thai sausage) alongside nam prig noom (Thai chilli dip), Pezza plated up a rib-eye steak with potatoes, a brussel sprout purée with peppercorn sauce.
As it turns out, fans weren’t having it, given a steak meal seemed to be his go-to on the show.
“Pezza saying he’s not just the meat and three veg guy and then immediately doing meat and three veg…” one fan commented on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“How is steak and veg grand finale food?” another questioned.
A third asked: “For f*cks sake, steak and veg AGAIN. Oh, don’t forget the peppercorn sauce. Where are we, Dapto RSL?” LOL.
MasterChef Australia‘s Josh ‘Pezza’ Perry responds to criticism
Chatting to PEDESTRIAN.TV after the MasterChef finale, Pezza didn’t seem too fazed about the criticism his dish copped online.
“You’re always going to get haters,” he said, admitting the backlash “keeps [him] on [his] toes”.
“It could have been the undoing of me. But I think if you go into something like that, you cook what you know, don’t you?” Pezza confessed.
“Sav [Perera] cooked Sri Lankan, Sumeet [Saigal] cooked Indian, Harry [Butterfield] cooked fish. I’m sure if they had that same cook in the grand finale, you would have seen their dishes come out, which they knew.”
The Tasmanian butcher concluded: “I knew steak, and I just needed to jazz up a bit. So yeah, there’s always going to be haters and that.”
Even though he wasn’t victorious in the MasterChef finale, he still walked away with $40,000 — still a winner!
Pezza admits to starting rumours about MasterChef Australia finale
Yahoo Lifestyle reported that MasterChef Australia filmed two endings in January, so contestants weren’t privy to who won until it aired on TV.
In an interview with PEDESTRIAN.TV winner Nat denied this, telling the outlet that the finale was “very real”.
But what’s more, Pezza confessed he may have started the rumour about the show’s alleged alternate endings.
“I gotta be honest, I told a fair few people that [rumour] because they all asked me [who won] when I got home,” he said.
“I did that with all my family, except the ones who were there [at the finale]. They asked me, ‘Did you win? Did you win?’. I said, ‘I don’t know. They just filmed two endings, and we don’t know [which one is real].’
“So that was probably me who started the rumour, so sorry about that.”
Genius!
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