St Albans MasterChef contestant promises to keep cooking despite exit

More off-screen cooking is in the pipeline for a professional St Albans DJ after she was knocked out of BBC1’s MasterChef this week.

Tyttenhanger local Lyndsay Evans, 36, has previously stunned the judges with her ambitious and flavoursome dishes, but could not spin plates fast enough in semi-finals week.

The last few cooks had to make a meal based on their favourite ingredients - Lyndsay whipped up a dish based on seaweed, which played on her love of Japanese food, and included courgette flowers stuffed with scallop and crab mousse, seared tuna and seaweed salad, and asparagus.

Judge Gregg Wallace said beforehand: “Very few cooks I’ve seen are as exciting and creative as Lyndsay.

“Her knowledge is incredible. She crams twice as much cooking in as most contestants will ever meet.”

But after they had tasted her food, the judges were disappointed, and Gregg said: “Lyndsay’s dish looked lovely, it just tasted a little ordinary.”

John Torode added: “The flavour of Lyndsay’s dish was a bit flat.”

Although she was knocked out, Lyndsay said it has inspired her to pursue cooking, and will reveal her next steps in due course.

She said she has no regrets: “I feel surprisingly good, everyone has said such nice things, even from people I don’t know. Enough people have said, ‘you should be so proud’.

“Nobody wants to leave but there was no-one there I was thinking, ‘yeah, they should go first’, and I couldn’t pick a winner.”

Lyndsay added that she had amazing experiences cooking in a professional kitchen and for Michelin star chef, Tom Kitchin.

“I was aware by that point that John and Greg like a certain style of cooking, they are big meat fans and I would prefer to go out doing my style cooking rather than change my cooking for the competition - I liked that dish.”

The contestants are not competitive with each other, she said, and when her leaving was announced the impromptu group hug was genuine and not scripted for television.