7 things you need to know about new Celeb MasterChef judge Grace Dent
Grace Dent is replacing Gregg Wallace as judge on hit cooking BBC show Celebrity MasterChef. The 51-year-old will judge the 20th instalment of the series alongside John Torode.
'I'm absolutely over the moon. I'm already drunk on power,' she gushed on Express and Star. While she may have worried about it for '10 seconds', the nerves quickly disappeared. 'It’s one of the most wonderful shows on British TV and, when you go out into the public, you feel that warmth,' she said.
Here's everything you need to know about the restaurant critic, author and podcaster.
She had reservations about being a judge
While thrilled, she did anticipate the upcoming scrutiny and loss of anonymity, wryly noting that, 'You can’t eat anywhere in privacy ever again. You can’t even go into a supermarket without people looking in your trolley [saying], "I can’t believe she’s bought that."'
One thing she wasn't looking forward to was the challenge of eliminating contestants as a full-time judge. 'Now I am that person. Now I am the baddie, and I don’t enjoy doing that,' she confessed.
However, BBC and MasterChef voiced their support for the incoming judge. Kalpna Patel-Knight, Head of Entertainment at the BBC said: “Grace Dent is the perfect choice to step in for the next series of Celebrity MasterChef. Grace is not only an energetic and well-established member of the MasterChef team, but is also a world-renowned food critic, so she will certainly keep the next batch of celebrities on their toes.'
Echoing her, John Torode declared: 'Expertise is what MasterChef is all about. The love of food, the love of MasterChef, and that unquestionable expertise, makes Grace the perfect person to step in.'
She is an eminent food critic and journalist
Already appearing regularly as a critic on MasterChef, Grace is also a restaurant critic for The Guardian and wrote a food column for the Evening Standard between 2011 and 2017. Hailing from Cumbria, she studied English Literature at Stirling University and got her journalism chops while freelancing for Glamour, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire.
To date, she's written 11 novels for teenagers and won "Reviewer of the Year" in 2017 at the London Restaurant Festival. Every two weeks, she releases an episode of her podcast, Comfort Eating with Grace Dent.
She grew up eating "beige" food
Grace grew up during the 70s eating 'beige' foods, according to Daily Mail. She loved 'mince and Findus Crispy Pancakes and butterscotch Angel Delight' and found supermarkets particularly exciting because 'this was when the really big supermarkets arrived'.
Elaborating in the The Guardian, she explained that 'My mum did cook – hotpots, stews, fairy cakes – but my most exciting meals were tinned. I still feel the love from a tin of macaroni cheese, ravioli, baked beans.' She has 'strong memories' of watching Pipkins 'with half a tin of Heinz tomato soup and some white bread toast spread with Dairylea'.
She's had a complex relationship with food
Aside from her nuanced culinary observations, Grace has also experienced personal ups and downs with eating. In her book Hungry: A Memoir of Wanting More (Mudlark, £16.99),she shared the tricky relationship with food that she had endured since the age of nine, detailing that at one point she adopted a dangerous 800-calorie daily diet:
'The dry Ryvitas stuck in my throat and then I couldn't sleep at night as my stomach growled while I dreamt of morning when I could have three tablespoons of Special K with skimmed milk.
'Yes, I knew 800 calories a day was too low and might make me feel faint, but f*** it, by Saturday I could wear a catsuit to the Hacienda and dance to Todd Terry and I would look f***ing incredible again for a bit.'
Daily Mail notes her mentioning trying the Atkins diet: 'One solitary boiled egg for breakfast, then black coffee for lunch and dinner with occasional pieces of grilled chicken had indeed given me a size-ten body and cheekbones like razors, but I also had breath like Satan's bumcleft and the occasional minor blackout.'
She has been "mainly vegan" since the early 2010s
Describing herself as plant-based or flexitarian, she shared with The Guardian: 'The vegans aren’t happy with me because I’m not fully vegan and the meat eaters say I’m trying to destroy the farming industry. Any nuance seems to get lost. It does seem to fascinate people, though, that I’m a food critic who doesn’t love foie gras. Stereotypically, those guys love a kidney, bone marrow, sweetbreads. Not me.'
Calling veggie burgers a 'really handy' staple that she always has in her freezer, she defended her choice by highlighting that taste was the priority, not its components: 'When you have a beef burger, you don’t just want the patty – you want the lovely bun and the butter and the sauce and the chips and the salad. Who cares what the patty is, as long as it tastes peppery and herby and has that mouthfeel?'
She's been teetotal since 2021
She also revealed to The Guardian that she's been sober for a few years. 'I had been drinking in a very British way since I was 14,' she said. 'I wouldn’t have said I had an alcohol problem – I didn’t binge or drink secretly – but I began as a teenager in a field, then moved on to student bars, dinner parties, the media industry, and then to reviewing restaurants where endless drinks are on offer.
'I grew sick of losing bits of life to feeling shit. So I just stopped completely. My skin looked radically different right away. When I go out now, I usually have a shrub or booze-free aperitif.'
She regularly eats 2,000 calories in one meal
Being a food critic means that Grace has learned to save her food budget to splurge on one massive feeding session: '2,000 calories in one meal is quite normal – lots of butter, sugar, fat, cream – all the things that make things taste delicious,' she told The Guardian. 'I realised early on in this game that I could only do it if I ate quite sparsely the rest of the time.'
It's therefore breakfast that takes the hit normally. 'Often, it’s just a litre of coffee with oat milk, and I eat lots of protein at lunch – eggs in any form, a block of tofu I’ll have marinated and baked – and lots of nuts and dried fruit. And I roast loads of vegetables: broccoli is a favourite. I eat like a wild animal – apart from the meat.'
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