Kishwar Chowdhury placed third on MasterChef Australia 2021 behind Pete Campbell and winner Justin Narayan, taking home a grand $20,000 in order to get her culinary career off the ground.
The final challenge was an intense one as the finalists were tasked with a five and a half hour pressure test set by Quay restaurant’s Peter Gilmore, with Chowdhury telling POPSUGAR Australia that watching it back, she remembered how exhausted they all were at that point.
“It was quite gruelling, and such an epic finale, and it really put us under immense pressure,” she said. “But also, just knowing that you could do that both physically and mentally… it was challenging and really rewarding as well. As you could see, Pete, Justin and I were proud of ourselves.”
The mum-of-two used her time in the competition to not only win over the judges but to bring her love for Bengali food to Australian audiences and to her fellow contestants too. For Chowdhury, the cuisine is wrought with meaning and she often produced dishes that had hundreds of years of history behind them.
It was an approach that has seen Chowdury not only become a fan favourite on the show but someone who has attracted attention from all over the world.
“The impact that it’s created, and just the love and the letters and the stories that people have been writing to me, I receive thousands of messages from all over the world, where people feel like finally that they’ve been seen,” she said.
Now that her time in the MasterChef kitchen is over, Chowdury is hard at collating some of her most cherished Bengali recipes into a cookbook – a process she says she doesn’t want to rush – while also pursuing philanthropic efforts with the Australian Centre for Asylum Seekers and Refugees.
In incredibly exciting news, the talented cook has also been getting some valuable experience in the kitchen of a Michelin starred chef. “I’ve been training under Chef Yomo (Masahiko Yomoda). You might remember from the bento box challenge,” she revealed.
“Chef Yomo is absolutely fantastic. He’s a Michelin star chef who has his restaurant Ishizuka, and he creates this incredible fine dining: French/Japanese Kaiseki degustation menus. Training under him has meant I’ve learned so much even after leaving the show.
“And something exciting that I’m doing is on the 29th of July, I’ll be releasing my own menus from Adam D’Sylva’s Tonka. I’ll be in Tonka from the 29th onwards, and I’ll be releasing my family’s menu and a few dishes that I’ve done on the show, but then a few of my original concept dishes as well.”
Follow Kishwar on Instagram @kishwar_chowdhury
