At this stage in the MasterChef Australia competition, each elimination has been harder and harder to watch, as we say tearful goodbyes to contestants we’ve come to know and love.
On Wednesday night (July 8th), Alyona Iljuhhina was, and it caused quite the divide.
“While I don’t entirely disagree with Alyona’s elimination, I’m not happy about it,” one fan wrote online.
“Another fave goes home! Farewell Alyona! You’ve been a great contestant!” another commented.
Aside from admiring her talent in the kitchen, Alyona has also become a fan-favourite for another reason. After viewers witnessed a sweet hug between her and fellow contestant Petro, the rumour mill exploded with theories about a secret romance between the pair.
With Alyona now gone, how will fans be able to decode their every glance and embrace? Truly tragic.
Jokes aside, what fans – and guest judge Sam Aisbett – were paying attention to on Wednesday was how Alyona coped under pressure during the cook.
For Alyona, this meant misreading the very first step of how to cook the mud crab, rattling her early on. After some sound advice from judges Andy Allen and Sofia Levin to take some “deep breaths” and reset, the hopeful pushed through but while her dish was beautiful, it missed the mark in a number of other areas.
Speaking to WHO, Michelin-starred chef Aisbett revealed exactly where Alyona went wrong, as well as sharing advice for how to work under pressure.
Sam Aisbett pinpoints where Alyona went wrong
“Alyona has great energy and a good palate — she knows flavour,” he told WHO. “My recipe has multiple elements that need to be followed to the T and this overwhelmed her slightly.”
“She made a few flustering mistakes early on, which meant she had to work faster to catch up,” he continued. “When she started to multitask on too many things at once, clutter built up on her station, and that’s when things started to go wrong.”
Her nerves did not go unmissed by viewers, with some recalling that they had long predicted that she would crack under pressure.
“Personally I feel Alyona went out exactly as I always thought she would,” one commented online. “She’s always been bad at handling pressure and she was spiralling hard today.”
Others shared that they were surprised by her fumble and subsequent elimination.
However, Aisbett shed more light on how the cook continued to unravel, explaining, “In any kitchen environment, when clutter builds, your judgement gets clouded and you lose focus,” he said. “Clean section, clean mind. That’s how you work through pressure.”
Turns out cleaning up isn’t just tedious, but also necessary if you want to make it in the culinary big leagues.
Alyona weighs in: ‘It was incredibly intense’
Unsurprisingly, Alyona revealed that the cook was just as stressful as it seemed on our screens.
“It was incredibly intense,” she told WHO. “It was my first pressure test, there were so many elements and so much precision involved, and I made a mistake early that definitely affected my mindset.”
“Once I fell behind, I think I became so focused on not making another mistake that, for a while, I forgot to trust the skills and instincts that had taken me that far.”
Despite this, Alyona was proud of how she “never gave up.”
“I had made it all the way to the final eight without doing a pressure test, so this was my first experience of that very particular kind of challenge,” she revealed. “I really wanted to nail it.”
“But strangely, if I had to leave, I’m glad I left on a pressure test. I think I would have found it much harder to leave because one of my own concepts or dishes had missed the mark.”
Fans ‘crabby’ over Alyona’s elimination
Alyona wasn’t the only contestant who struggled with the mud crab challenge, with Casper also finding himself in the bottom two thanks to some loose shells in his dish.
“Casper you have dodged a BULLET,” one viewer wrote after he was marked safe. “But that was a really tough call. You really could argue for both to go, or stay – I’m so sad to lose Alyona.”
“Didn’t expect Alyona…” another confessed.
However, Aisbett revealed the reasoning behind this decision.
“The mud crab is the star of this dish so everything relies on how well it is cooked,” he told us “The cooking time is absolutely critical and if the timing is off, it affects the overall texture of not just the crab but the entire dish.
“Deshelling the crab will also be part of the challenge, and I think the audiences and contestants may also underestimate how difficult that can be.”
MasterChef Australia Season 18: Sundays at 7pm and Monday – Wednesday at 7.30pm. Watch and Stream on 10.
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