Nigella Lawson on her MastChef invention test week

The original Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson is appearing on MasterChef this year with a week of challenges inspired by her repertoire.

Nigella Lawson will host the MasterChef Series 8 Invention Test.

ONE of great ironies about doing anything around food (travelling/filming/book tours) is that you never get to go out and eat.

On a book tour you tend to do signings at the time people can come, which is lunchtime and supper time.

I tend to make the most of my opportunities to eat but of course, I ate so much on MasterChef, I didn’t need to eat anything else!

But travel does inform my cooking and I get inspiration from everywhere. Like George Calombaris’s chips at Gazi that were so good. Fat ones, cooked in garlic oil, tossed with oregano and fetta.

I immediately started to think about how I’d do it at home. Roast some potatoes, whole cloves of garlic, crumble fetta atop. I’m always thinking, how would I translate that dish into something easy to do at home for supper?

Australian food has been very influential in the world. All food editors read Australian food magazines, and I think Australia was the first to take food away from the set dark look and transformed it into light and bright.

There’s a boldness to Australian food that I like.

Gary Mehigan, George Calombaris, Nigella Lawson and Matt Preston.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a recipe before I’ve cooked. I take an idea, cook it, start playing with it and write it down. I tend always to end up with more than I can use for a book.

I have a big session with myself called ‘choose it or lose it’ and it’s not until very late in the process.

Every time I cook I change something, so by the time we do the shoot, things are changing. It’s quite fluid. I think this is important, because the way I cook, food is living.

Food is more fixed in a restaurant because people want consistency. But when you cook at home, you don’t have those constraints.

People always talk about the limitations of the home cook, as opposed to the professional chef, but for me, creatively it’s much more open.

I feel I have to cook for my own palate, you can’t please everyone. And we all bring a bit of ourselves when we cook.

I’ve now realised I don’t need to ask people for their honest feedback, I can tell by how they eat whether they like it or not.

I’d say to people absolutely take my recipes and play with them. That’s what cooking is. Now you have to be fairly confident to do so, but you don’t need to be an accomplished cook. You just have to know your own tastes.

You need to have cooked enough to know what things can be altered and what can’t.

I’m the antiperfectionist. If you want to be perfect you’ll be so frightened of taking risks but you need to take risks. That’s the nature of experiments, they sometimes fail.

It’s about knowing when the good times are to make mistakes. At home, frankly, you’re not being judged in that way and if you are, you’re inviting the wrong people to supper.

Nigella Week on MasterChef starts on Sunday (May 22) on Ten