NEED TO KNOW
- Casper Kenworthy has been eliminated from MasterChef Australia, just shy of making the top 3.
- The 28-year-old was sent home after a challenge in which his family picked which ingredient he had to hero.
- Vinne, Aaron and Petro are now the top 3 and will battle for the grand prize.
As the MasterChef Australia finale approaches, each elimination is getting harder than the last. In the latest kitchen departure, the top four contestants received letters from home, reading out emotional letters of encouragement from the loved ones who inspired them to pursue their MasterChef journey in the first place.
On Monday night (July 27), Casper, Aaron and Vinnie were tasked with creating a dish showcasing an ingredient chosen by their family, while Petro watched safely from the sidelines after winning immunity during Meghan Markle’s guest judge challenge.
Vinnie and Aaron’s families chose fairly normal ingredients—picking sardines and garlic, respectively—but Casper’s family went in a more niche direction, giving him grapes to work with.
Yes, grapes.
Although his relatives may have had a very good reason for choosing the fruit as the hero ingredient (and we are not discounting sabotage at this point), many fans felt that Casper’s family had done him dirty—a sentiment that only intensified following his unfortunate elimination.
MasterChef fans accuse Casper’s family of ‘letting him down’
“Poor Caspar, if only he’d had something decent to cook with, he would have been in the top three,” one person wrote online. “It was a stupid challenge because obviously some of the contestants would have an advantage over the others. The judges should have set the challenge so that everyone was on equal footing.”
“I don’t understand why they chose for Casper to use grapes; it seems ridiculous to me,” ranted another.
“His own family let him down,” someone else said.
Casper’s full circle moment
Although Casper appreciates all the support, in an exclusive chat with WHO, he explained that being presented with grapes was actually a sweet callback.
“It was a bit of a full-circle moment, actually, because my audition dish had grapes in it,” he told us. “Grapes were a pretty big component of that dish, so it was funny seeing people say, ‘Oh, how unlucky that you got grapes.’
“But if you go back and watch that first episode, I made a grilled grape salsa with grape potatoes and a few other grape elements. So, yeah, it was kind of like I came in on a grape and went out on a grape.”
Reflecting on the overwhelming support he’s received from viewers, the 28-year-old tech consultant was clearly touched.
“[It] really shows that I did connect with a lot of people, which was great to see, and something that I never expected to be able to do coming in,” he told us. “So I think it’s been a nice close on a chapter.”
It was just the fans that Caspar connected with, either with the young cook revealing just how close he and his fellow finalists became during the competition.
When four become three
“At the end of the day, cooking in the kitchen is only a couple hours at a time,” he said. “The times we’re spending outside of the kitchen, where we’re together the most, I think you see people in very emotional, vulnerable states in the kitchen and in those sort of moments there. So you get pretty close to them there.”
He added, “Everyone genuinely cares about each other, and so there’s really good pastoral care element there, just from the contestants. We really look after each other.”
The final four got so close, according to Casper, that they didn’t want anyone to be eliminated.
“Us four boys, we all said going into this [that] we’d be happy for anyone to make it to the end,” he explained.
“Any of us four – no one wanted someone to leave. It could have been four of us cooking in the semi-final, and we would have jumped at that in a heartbeat.”
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