Young chefs are drawn back to India for its rich food, says MasterChef Australia Gary Mehigan

“I love India. Everyone here is a foodie and they love talking about food passionately,” says celebrity chef and the face of MasterChef Australia Gary Mehigan.  Mehigan first came to India in 2010 when he and fellow Masterchef Australia judge George Calombaris were invited by the Australian High Commission to promote tourism and relations between the two countries. Masterchef was in its second season and extremely popular in India. “We were treated like superstars. George and I did a book signing and were mobbed. We got so much adoration and adulation from fans,” he smiles fondly.   

It was love at first visit for Mehigan who has since been to India 14 times. He was in New Delhi recently to curate a meal at The Chambers at Taj Mahal Hotel where we caught up with him. In a free-wheeling chat Mehigan spoke about his love for India, life after MasterChef, what he likes to cook and eat and why he became a chef. Excerpts: 

Tell us a little more about your love for Indian food. Which dishes do you like to cook? 

I’ve always loved Indian food. I am from England originally. I left when I was 25. There are great Indian communities in England. Bradford and Bingley, Birmingham, you know, so you can get amazing Indian food. I've always loved it. But what I didn't realise until I came here was the diversity. And, and what I love about it is the constant conversation and debate about the tiniest things. I love that. 

My dishes were fairly clumsy. Whereas now, on every visit since 2010, I've just been collecting recipes. So my pantry has changed. It drives my wife mad, but there's 30 or 40 spices, always just on rotation. I have got a spice box on the bench, with my favourites, like turmeric, fennel, green cardamom and black pepper. 

I love cooking fish moilee. I make a South Indian black pepper chicken that the family loves. Vindaloo turns up occasionally because a chef friend of mine gave me a great vindaloo recipe so I've been cooking that for years. I make a quick dal tadka because well its so easy, and then I cheat. We just buy some frozen nan from the supermarket. But my daughter makes great lachha paratha so sometimes we have that. And yeah, rice. We like biryani. I’ve been to Hyderabad and have been taught how to make different biryanis. 

 

Do you strictly follow recipes or do you like to play around with them? 

I change recipes and I think that is good. I add things to my dishes and people go ‘oh that doesn’t go with that’ but I like it. That's why I like chefs like Thomas Zacharias, you know, because he would take something like, sarson ka saag and add jaggery popcorn on the top, or a haleem and put lots of crispy things on top. So I love that innovation. And it's funny because, once during filming a series in India, for example, I've met Rocky [Mohan]. And he is such a staunch and fierce traditionalist. And he told me once he gave a recipe to Rick Stein. He's a famous English chef, and he changed it and he's wrong. So I won't argue with that. But I think some people feel that, that tradition would be lost at that recipe will be lost, but it will never will be. But I think what we think traditional today was also innovative at one point in time. If you think about it, you know, rewind the clock for 400 years and there were no tomatoes, cauliflower or potatoes. These didn't exist. So you know a traditional kind of sambhar or rasam was actually pepper. It was brown. Didn't have chillies in it. So you just go well, at one point, that was an innovative dish, like butter chicken. Like it didn't exist until the ‘40s. It was an innovative dish, and yet people go oh, no, you can't change it. Yes, you can. Young chefs now in India have travelled, they've learned overseas and they've been drawn back to India. They've discovered that it's richer here than what they were chasing. You know, they were chasing the idea of The Michelin Star restaurant in France, and then they've learned that there's more to play with [in India], there's a bigger palette of flavours to play with here. 

 

How has life been post MasterChef Australia for you? 

It's been strange. I mean, it was time with MasterChef. It was either going to be that year or the following year. George and I, and Matt [Preston] did 16 series, including two juniors, one celebrity one All Stars one. And we were just getting to the point where I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. We made it very difficult for Channel 10, and the production company to negotiate with us because we just didn't want to film for six, seven months of the year. And we said, look, we don't want to, we think the series should change and should be a bit shorter bit faster. We'd been very heavily involved in how the show had run. You know, we were the judges, we had a lot of say, we wrote our own scripts. And you know we were pretty loose. We're a great team. And we loved working on it. But it was time to change. We made it almost impossible for them to do anything else other than to get rid of us. And when we left, it was almost as if there was a sense of relief. I promised my wife many years ago that I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it. And I was pleased that I still loved it when I left. I felt that if I stayed much longer, I wasn't going to love it. 

The only thing that I regret is that they took the narrative and made it about them rather than about the show. So they said we couldn't come to commercial terms about the judges, they did the press release. And they tried to paint us with, you know, it's typical television, they tried to make us look bad. What I wanted to happen is that we've decided to move on, but we always want to remain part of the family. And they decided that they didn't want us as part of the family anymore. And I think that's a shame. 

 

What’s next? 

The last couple of years we had crazy lockdowns in Australia. Someone sneezed and we went into lockdown. So now to be travelling and moving around is a privilege. I wrote a book during the lockdown. We're filming a new series for National Geographic, which is called Mega Festivals. So since September, I've been in India, probably a total of eight weeks. So we filmed Onam in Kerala, and we filmed Durga Puja in Calcutta. We went to the Hornbill festival [in Nagaland], and next year we'll be covering Holi, Eid, and probably Diwali. So it's not a food show. But it's a food show as well. Because how can you celebrate without food? 

I do a podcast but I need to work hard on it. I am a bit lazy.  

But I have just been travelling and promoting travel. Really, if I can travel and eat for the rest of my life, I think I'm going to be the happiest man on the planet. So I'm kind of doing it, I'm living the dream. So what's lovely about it now is that, you know, whereas at Masterchef we have to go to work every day, it was becoming work. Whereas now I'm doing three or four projects a year, and I'm loving it. So I got the opportunity to go to Hong Kong and, and film and shoot.  

I've got a coffee brand in Australia. So we launched that about two years ago. It is home delivery focused. We do three blends including an Indian robusta. It's available with 40 independent grocers in Australia. But basically it's a subscription or online order. So you order your coffee, it gets delivered to your front door even better. 

I've got an outlet at Melbourne Airport. It opens in April next year. It is a fun Asian concept. Like the greatest hits of Asia, you know, so things like dumplings and yu char kway. So like KFC, it’s a GMFC [he laughs].  

 

You were in Nagaland recently during the Hornbill Festival. What all did you eat there? 

I had everything from live larvae to deep-fried crispy hornets to red wood worm, silk worm, carpernter worm, spiders. In Nagaland they don’t deep fry it. They just cook it in water. They put aromatics like wild ginger, garlic. They don’t use spices like we do in North India. So they put a bit of fish in a little bit of water, they'll put some fresh aromatics, like Naga fern and things like this, and they'll bring it to the boil or put a lid on, cook it for a minute or two, take it off, evaporate the liquid down until it starts to go. And then you just have a little bit of like stock with those aromatics. And they put the insects in the same way. So what they cleverly do with the insects is say with the carpenter worm, put a few spices and aromatics in. So it's almost like a stock as it's boiling, but then they just evaporate off and there's a natural oil in the in the insect. And they taste like the wood that they burrow in. Okay, so to describe the flavour.  If you're in a forest and you scrape a branch. That's that smell. I said I've not tasted it but I've smelt that taste. Does that make sense? 

Most of the vegetables are just boiled, which is quite interesting. I always wanted to go up to the northeast, and it feels like you're in India, but not really in India. There's a hint of India. 

 

You are a trained French chef. But why did you become a chef in the first place? 

It was my grandfather. He was a chef. As a boy I wanted to be a fighter pilot but I realised I was not clever enough to be a fighter pilot. Then I wanted to be an engineer. My dad was an engineer. And my dad really identified that possibly being an engineer wasn't for me. And it's because he's very quiet, intelligent, patient, and I am none of those things. I'm impulsive, annoying, talk too much. So he said to me, maybe you should think about other things. He said, what about doing what your granddad did, which was a chef, and it dawned on me that I loved cooking with him. And then he said, look, if you're going to do this, before you finish school, go get a part time job. So I got a job in a little local hotel in the UK. And I started off as a waiter. And I hated it. You know, so I literally did a week or two front of house and I said, please can I go in the kitchen. I can't deal with customers. So anyway, I got a job in the kitchen. And I loved it. And that's it. I was off, you know, because I just used to love, love working. Of course, I then went on to proper hospitality school.  

 

Could you tell us a bit about the meal you cooked at The Chambers, Taj Mahal Hotel New Delhi? 

It’s just a snapshot of what I love to eat. It’s not trying to put up Michelin star food, or, you know, blow your way with, you know, domes of smoke and, and bubbles. It's just food that I love to eat. And at the moment I'm really enjoying, at home, particularly things like big bowls of laksa and, you know, cooking curries. So, I've got a little snapshot of, of Southeast Asia, I suppose. I've got a crispy prawn that's on a Vietnamese salad -- green mango, peanuts, coriander, knockdown dressing. Then there is a fish dish in laksa sauce with a steamed rice cake. The first course is a bun stuffed with jackfruit. So that’s vegetarian. Then we had other vegetarian alternatives.  

 

Is it more difficult to cater to vegetarians? 

It is a compromise in terms of it isn't precisely the food that I'd love to feed everyone. You know, our food is very protein based and it's very ingredient focused. So for example, you know, I might serve you a ceviche of king fish with a, you know, a soy dressing. But if I serve it here, half the audience won't eat it. Number one, it's fish. Number two, it's raw, you know. I'd love to serve you a rare wagyu steak, but you know, nobody's gonna eat it. So yeah, there's a compromise in a sense, but what I do is I design dishes now that are vegetarian first. So I start with the vegetables and I flex the protein on, whereas traditionally when I design a menu at home, I think of the protein and then throw in the vegetables.