Tomorrow night MasterChef returns for its 10th season. While I understand the show is really a chance to take bets on what ridiculous new look I’ve decided to go with this year – colourblind Palm Springs golfer? Flamboyant Colombian drug lord? The Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine? – it plays a role other than smirking at my fashion sense and watching a bunch of good home cooks chase their dreams.

Each season is a barometer of where Australian food is at and a (self-fulfilling) prediction of where it’s heading. Many hardcore food trends have moved into the mainstream via MasterChef, from salty caramel or paleo seven years ago to pickling everything and torching meringues, both of which have been massive for the past three seasons.

This season we’ve seen some distinct shifts in what and how the contestants have been cooking. Here are the major trends.

Back to earth with a bang

We were getting a little bored with all the frou-frou dishes and challenges that seemed to be more about painting skills and obscure chemistry experiments than making a tasty dinner. Thank heavens this season the food has come back down to earth – no more floating ice creams – and it’s all the better for it.

DIY everything

This is real cooking. We’ve always seen pasta making and more recently loads of pastry, tuiles and biscuits, but this year the contestants seem to be making everything by hand – whether it’s rosewater from the roses petals in our garden, fresh noodles for Vietnamese pho or coriander noodles for ramen, delicate (sometimes disastrous) fairy floss, and pastries, from rough puff and shortcrust to Middle Eastern kataifi, Moroccan brik, or even spring roll wrappers. It’s great to see how easy it is to make these exotic delights at home.

Bread rises

There has been an explosion in contestants baking bread during challenges – brioche buns for burgers, crisp roti to go with Malaysian curries or even loaves for 60 guests in a challenge where electricity was banned and time short. Impressive stuff.  The recipe for my amazing four-ingredient, no-knead bread (it takes less than five minutes to prepare) is here.

Mousse

While cremeux has largely disappeared, chocolate ganache and chocolate mousse in myriad forms have more than taken its place. We’ve seen lots
of smoked chocolate mousse, dark and milk, white chocolate mousses and a couple of (spoiler alert) unsuccessful attempts at baking both, undoubtedly inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi’s baked ganache in his book Nopi.

Meat and three veg

Maybe it’s an older average age of contestant or maybe it’s because more parents have earned aprons this year, but we’re seeing a lot more familiar ingredients such as chicken, lamb, beef, cauliflower and carrots being used as opposed to, say, quail, kale and snails.

With gravy

Constantly banging on about the importance of a decent gravy for the past 10 years has finally paid off for us judges, and you’re going to see some amazing and totally delicious gravies made from scratch by our 24 contestants. It’s amazing how with a few simple steps you can make a gravy or red wine jus to rival the classics without fancy ingredients or hours of stove time.

Retro returns

It seems our contestants, just like the rest of Australia, are a little obsessed with making, and taking inspiration from, retro classics. Expect to see everything from suburban Chinese takeout classics like lemon chicken and beef with black bean to vol-au-vents, veloutes, bubblegum-flavoured ice cream and one of the best schnitzels any of us has tasted. This wonderfully lives up to our motto that simple is okay in the MasterChef kitchen; it just has to be perfect.

Clam juice

Imagine taking the cooking juices from steamed clams or mussels and using them in a dressing for a tomato salad or a simple sauce (with added acidity and oil) for fish. Delicious!

Choux

If you don’t know how to make choux pastry puffs, might I suggest that now is the time to learn. They’re quite a thing this season, especially when they’re crackle-glazed (choux au craquelin, to be correct and French about it). You’ll find our fail-safe recipe here.

The biggest names are back

Nigella returns for a week to tell them to “taste, taste, taste”, and no sooner has she left the MasterChef kitchen than tornado Gordon blows in. The three words that sum up the advice he gives the contestants during his week would be “season, season, season”. Both pieces of advice are as valuable to anyone cooking at home as to those cooking under the pressure of the dreaded MasterChef clock and the hawk-eyed criticism of these two culinary superstars.

Fried chicken

Korean, Southern, Chinese, Thai – this is a trend from the last couple of years that ain’t going nowhere.

Deconstruction is dead

After seven years of deconstructed desserts, we’re finally seeing people cook proper tarts rather than crushing the pastry into a crumb and strewing it around a plate with little piped mounds of flavoured curds, creams, gels and meringues. This has put a big smile on Gary’s face, especially. He rightfully holds that it shows more skill to make a classic tart than to smash it up.

Lemon meringue pie

Lemon meringue pie popped up a lot this year in various forms: as inspiration for a profiterole, as a 3D-printed dessert and even – shock horror – as an undeconstructed (thank heavens) number of pastry tart shell filled with lemon curd and topped with torched meringue. You know, like a real lemon meringue pie!

Dust is back

This should concern all of us, but flavoured dusts might be on the verge of making a comeback. It’s been a few years since the holy trinity of molecular gastronomy – dusts, foams and air – terrorised restaurant dinners but this season has seen the occasional return of the first of dusts in flavours like bright raspberry, kale and kombu. To make matters worse, they even tasted rather good. Interestingly, that kale dust was about the only time we saw kale on a plate in the MasterChef kitchen, which leads us to…

On the way out

Some of the previous trends, like pickling everything, fiddly high-end restaurant dishes that look better than they taste, grapes (whether sliced and raw, roasted, or pickled) and torched meringue (unless it’s on a proper lemon meringue pie) have all dropped massively in popularity.

The new season of MasterChef premieres on Channel Ten at 7.30pm Monday 7 May.

For more from Matt, click here.