Jonathan will be compete with Devon tomorrow night in MasterChef to avoid be the 1st to leave MasterChef Kitchen !
Jonathan Daddia
Age: 33
Home Town: Sydney, NSW
Marital Status: Married
Cooking Style: French Moroccan
Even for a diehard sweet tooth, Jonathan surprised himself with just how far he could go to create the perfect ice cream dessert during a trip to Italy a few years ago.
“I lived in London for a while and did a trip to Milan, where I didn’t buy anything you should like clothes, leaving there instead with an ice cream machine,” he says. “It was quite an effort stuffing that in my suitcase! I really was on a mission to make the perfect ice cream and I have experimented a lot with it, even using savoury flavours.”
Jonathan’s hunger for cooking developed while he was living in London when he was 22-years-old. After growing up on a diet of fairly simple meals, he relished the chance to experiment.
“I discovered how great cooking was and that I had a creative side,” explains Jonathan, who married his wife Mandy during the filming of the Top 50 episodes. “My dad is Moroccan so I started to look towards that style of cooking and asked him about different flavours and dishes.
“The first major meal I cooked was for a group of friends in London, and it was a huge Moroccan banquet. There were piles of couscous, piles of tagine, Moroccan desserts and dips. The kitchen was a bomb site but it really was a defining moment for me.”
It didn’t take him long to infuse his Moroccan heritage with his love of all things French.
“I trained myself, trying to capture the classic French style of cooking and then blend it with the Moroccan style,” says Jonathan, who spent a year in Bordeaux, France, to study the language.
What started as an interest in food is now an obsession. He dreams of one day working as a fine dining chef and names Gordon Ramsay as his favourite chef. In fact, he’s such a fan of the Michelin Star chef that when he ate at his London restaurant Petrus a few years ago, he was so in awe of the food that he rang up the following day and asked for a job as a trainee chef.
“The food was just mind blowing,” he says. “I thought I’d give them a call, and I said that I noticed they trained chefs of all levels. They asked me what level I was at and I told them that I wasn’t a chef and that I hadn’t worked in a kitchen.”
Despite being knocked back for a full time job, Jonathan was persistent and asked for some unpaid work experience in the kitchen.
“I went into the kitchen for a few Saturdays and it was fantastic,” says Jonathan, who moved back to Australia shortly after his experience. Now, he’ll have his dishes judged by the MasterChef Australia judges, but Jonathan isn’t daunted.
VS Devon Headland
Age: 30
Home Town: Originally from Auckland, New Zealand and now lives on the Gold Coast, Qld
Marital Status: Engaged
Cooking Style: Hearty country
Devon is more emotionally invested in winning MasterChef Australia than most, given that he postponed his wedding to his childhood sweetheart to take part in the series.
“We’ve been engaged for a couple of years,” says Devon of his fiancée Catherine. “Our wedding was booked for February, which was when filming was happening, so we’ve had to postpone it. That was a really hard decision. Catherine had been planning our dream day, friends were going to travel from overseas and we’d progressed on a lot of the details. But Cat was very understanding that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we’ll reschedule the wedding.”
Devon grew up in Auckland and met Catherine, who is a nurse, when he was 15-years-old at a party, with the carpenter saying “it was love at first sight”. After several years living in New Zealand and a stint in London, the couple has lived in Queensland for nearly three years.
The other true love in his life has been food. He and younger brother Blake and older brother Conrad have big appetites and he fondly remembers how his grandmother inspired him to cook, and reminisces at the thought of afternoons spent in his grandma’s kitchen watching her cook old favourites like roasts and carrot cakes.
“When I was a teenager I had a part time job as a kitchen hand in a restaurant, where I was mainly washing dishes,” he says. “During school I was offered a building apprenticeship, which was great because I was good with my hands and couldn’t see myself finishing school.
“At the same time I was offered a chef apprenticeship but I was young and didn’t think I could handle the rough hours of working in a kitchen, so I took the building apprenticeship.”
Close to 15 years has passed, but Devon’s interest in cooking has never waned, and he dreams of one day opening his own restaurant. He has even lived in the food capital of the world, France, where he indulged his love of fine wines.
“I went to Alsace for six months when I was in my 20s and worked through a wine harvest,” he says. “Learning how to make wine was fantastic. But it was a bit of a hazy blur to be honest!”
Devon hopes his time on MasterChef Australia will be anything but a blur, and is hopeful that he can win over the judges with his country rustic cooking.
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