AIL meets Dhruv Baker

We caught up with the 2010 MasterChef winner to find out what he's up to now and to learn just how nerve-wracking the competition really is!
AIL meets Dhruv Baker picture

Dhruv Baker won series six of MasterChef in 2010. Since then he’s started a catering company called Earlsfield Kitchen and hosted supperclubs at Benares and the Jam Tree in Clapham. He’s also been appearing on the current tenth anniversary series of MasterChef, judging the skills of the new hopefuls. We caught up with him to find out just how nerve-wracking the competition is.

"Why don’t you do something constructive like apply for MasterChef?"
If it hadn’t been for his wife, Dhruv may never have applied to go on the show in the first place. After complaining about a frustrating day at the digital media company he worked at, she simply said “why don’t you do something constructive like apply for MasterChef?“ Despite initial protestations he sent off the form, and a few weeks later he had a phone interview. Had he really never considered it up until then? “I’d watched MasterChef from the start avidly, so I’d always loved the show and secretly always harboured dreams of going on it, but it was one of those things where you think, ‘oh that’s just silly’, and that it’ll never happen.”

Cookery beginnings
His passion for cooking started when he was a child growing up in India, when his mother encouraged him to prepare simple dishes. Nowadays she is one of his favourite people to cook for. “I love cooking for my mum because she’ll always give me a straight answer, and if there’s something wrong she’ll tell me immediately. And there’s something immensely satisfying about cooking for children. I’ve got kids who are aged five and two. They can be quite fussy, but to watch them really enjoy something that I’ve cooked I find hugely rewarding.”

Cooking for Alain Ducasse
Contestants who reach the quarter finals in the new series will have to run services for Bruno Loubet at Grain Store and Adam Handling at Caxton Grill, while two Michelin-starred Marcus Wareing will be brought in as a judge. One of Dhruv’s challenges was to cook at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant at the Dorchester. Cooking for the chefs was harder than cooking for the critics, he says. “These are the guys who do this day in day out, so I have the upmost respect for them. It’s always a little bit intimidating to be judged by their exacting standards. It was quite scary.”

Proudest moment
Aside from winning, his proudest moment was cooking for the maharajah of Jodhpur in India, along with 120 guests in 100 degree heat. “You’re cooking in this unbelievable palace in the most ridiculously amazing setting, for a royal family who have a whole brigade of sets of hands all the time, and they’re used to having the very best food. I feel that that was one of the highlights of the show.”

Panic!
Dhruv says that all the contestants have a moment of panic at some point. What’s the most stressful part of the contest? “Different things, when you’re cooking for a hundred people and you’ve got half an hour to go and everything’s gone wrong, nothing could be more stressful at that point. When you get home and you look back on it you think, ‘my goodness this whole competition is immensely stressful’. Then if you’re cooking for a group of Michelin-starred chefs nothing could be more stressful than that, so it depends what context you’re looking at. It was basically quite stressful all the way through (laughs). Then when you get to the final three you can start enjoying it a bit more, because some of the pressure comes off.”

Catering, TV and writing
As well as his catering company, Dhruv presents on Waitrose TV and has written for Delicious magazine among other publications. Does he have any ambitions to open a restaurant? “Not right now. If you open a restaurant you’re in the kitchen from 7 in the morning till 1 or 2 at night so that means no writing, no presenting, and I would never see my children. Nothing beats that feeling of being in service, but you’ve got to make sacrifices along the way to make sure you’re doing everything to the best of your ability.” And in a fantasy scenario, what kind of restaurant would he like to run? “I’d keep spices as the theme. It definitely wouldn’t be fine dining, it would be accessible, fun and relaxed, and hopefully good value for money.”


Dhruv Baker’s book SPICE, Layers of Flavour is out on July 4th.

Published Apr 28, 2014