Is food still hot by the judge's tasting? Your most burning Masterchef question answered.

If you’ve ever watched any one of the 616 episode of Masterchef Australia, you will have thought/muttered some variation of the following: ‘Surely the judges are eating cold food?’

This thought/confused muttering generally stems from three observations:

1. After the challenge clock stops and all the slicks, tuiles, reductions and deconstructions are plated up, next comes a shot of the contestants waiting nervously behind their benches for judging. Benches that are suddenly perfectly clean. Cleaning takes time. Time means hot food becomes… well, less hot.

2. Where’s the steam. Huh? HUH?

3. Neither George, Garry nor Matt ever has to blow on a bowl of soup.

Well, former star contestant Alice Zaslavsky has dished to The Weekly Review, and it turns out you’re right. The food is cold. Stone cold.

“Once you finish cooking, they take your plate away and shoot it with an overhead camera so it looks fresh,” she said.

“When your name was called, you’d walk up and put your dish on the bench, then they’d show that overhead shot. The judges put a fork in, eat a mouthful of the cold gloop for the cameras and pretend it’s the first time they’ve tasted it, but by that point they already knew what they thought!”

Yes, as judge George Calombaris told The Daily Mail, he, Matt Preston and Garry Mehigan taste everything hot off camera to make sure they can judge it properly.

"We will go around the room and the three of us will taste everything hot out of their [contestants] pot," she said.

"It looks sexy on TV but it takes time to film. So when you see us tasting at the end - it's cold but I've already made the decision, I already know what it tastes like."

At last! An explanation for this Mystery Box conundrum...

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