by Thinus Ferreira

You went into your final challenge and basically packed out everything – every kitchen appliance – first at your workstation. Was that strategy? Did you think you must use more types of equipment to show how and what you’ve learnt since the brief was to show your evolution in the MasterChef SA kitchen?

Shawn: It was quite an active decision. I’m an engineer. So I started my career as an engineer. My brain thinks in order. As soon as my world becomes cluttered or I don’t know where I’m going, I start falling apart.

One of the first things in the MasterChef SA kitchen as I went through the episodes – the better I was at the start in preparing all my equipment and my order of event, the faster I was actually getting.

Everyone would race off to the pantry, would race off to start cooking. It was quite funny – I would be the last man still writing in my book and still putting my equipment out in the order as I’m going to cook. 

It was just a way of me feeling I could be calmer than being frantic and running backwards and forwards and fetching equipment the whole time.

Were you comfortable in using all the equipment you felt you had to for the final or were there things you felt you don’t really want to use but that you need to?

Shawn: Everything was an active decision but had I used it before? No. Like a sous vide machine – I’ve never used one before. 

But what I did is to study the principles of using one, so I watched YouTube video after YouTube video, I was studying recipe books on what technically I need to do. So it was a technical execution over an experience execution. 

Every piece of equipment I put out there, the recipes I’ve written down and the equipment laid out as I was going to use it.

With all of the kitchen equipment that you and the two others as the top three won, are you realistically going to use all of that? Did you already receive it, and do you foresee using it all or are you going to sell or give some away?

Shawn: The truck arrives yesterday and filled my garage!

Yesterday at 2pm and I haven’t even had a change to go and open it up. I know roughly what it is – there are a whole bunch of things that I really needed like a hibachi grill. 

I didn’t have an air fryer, there’s a multi-fryer, there is an industrial kitchen Kenwood mixer which I didn’t have, spiralised coffee grinders. I would say 70% of the kitchen equipment we’ve received is actually what I need. It’s very welcomed!

What do you want to do as MasterChef SA 2022 winner? Obviously, you have a career, what do you want to leverage your MasterChef SA win towards?

Shawn: I’ve got four businesses and 100 staff, so I am already very busy. But I am a serial entrepreneur. This is giving me a launch into my next business called TheRoastedDad and the website at theroasteddad.com has gone live, the Instagram is called RoastedDad.

Underneath that brand I’m launching two subcategories called Little Roast – it’s children’s cooking apparel like children aprons in leather, baby aprons, and then there are also the adult versions of it called Roasted. I’m looking to partner with a big retailer to launch that.

The second part of my journey after the MasterChef SA win is to start a pop-up restaurant that will repeat once a month for 4 nights, with chef Callan Austin who was on the show in episode 11 and chef Darren Badenhorst who owns Le Chêne and Le Coin Français.

The three of us are coming together on 27 April for an exclusive pop-up restaurant which is for 24 people for 4 nights and 10 courses. The first one is in Cape Town but we’re planning to also take it to Johannesburg and Durban.

I will also be doing food influencing. I’m also going on a 3-week road trip through South Africa with my family all the way to the Kalahari, to Pilanesberg, and we’re going to food-journal the whole trip for three weeks.

You obviously like making food. Do you think the pressure of that will now increase from friends and family expecting Shawn to be the one who has to make the food because he’s a MasterChef SA winner?

Shawn: Hundred percent! [He laughs.] It’s actually already starting to happen. 

I find now people go “No, no, I can’t cook for you anymore.” I go for a braai and they go “No, no, we’re not cooking for you.” And yet I would actually appreciate someone else cooking. It’s not a case of having won the MasterChef SA title that I don’t enjoy someone else’s food.

Everyone thinks that now my level is up here, so it looks like I’m going to be motivating friends and family to cook for me.

From food levels I want to pivot to emotional levels. Compared to a lot of the extroverted and sometimes dramatic contestants, you seemed emotionally muted and lower on the emotional spectrum. Was it a strategy to not show so much emotion and rather focus on a task, or are you not an emotional person, or are you and you just decided to internalise how you feel instead of showing it?

Shawn: Good question, I am actually a huge extrovert, very loud, I’ve got friends and family at my house all the time. I’m very hyper-focused on my job. 

So I’m CEO of a lighting company where I’ve got 86 staff just in that company alone. I’m very focused. So if I’m working, I’m there to win something or I’m there to do something properly and I throw everything at it.

Then when I’m socialising, I also throw everything at it and them I’m loud and noisy. 

What the show definitely brought out, which I wasn’t expecting of myself, what it did bring out was my obsession with detail, my obsession with technical perfection and following a recipe to the tee.

I studied like crazy. I was the one person that didn’t stop studying. When people were socialising or people were relaxing I would be sitting there studying recipes, studying techniques.

It brought out a side of me that’s there already – it’s work life-me, and it was definitely portrayed on the show.

Was there a low point emotionally for you?

Shawn: A lot of the contestants really struggled – we had an in-house psychologist, Anton Brummer and Errieda du Toit was the house mom, so we had a lot of support.

Throughout the whole journey, it was really interesting. People were having severe ups and severe downs, and sometimes people would arrive in the MasterChef SA kitchen and couldn’t seem to want to even cook. 

What happens when you hit the MasterChef SA kitchen there’s so much pressure – your adrenalin goes super high. And then afterwards your adrenalin goes down. And you’re cycling that, day in and day out.

I saw some people who would arrive in the morning and say “I can’t do this anymore,” and they would go out in that episode. They mentally couldn’t cope. 

MasterChef is 50% emotions and 50% cooking. I don’t think people realise that. There is so much pressure, there is so much pace. Everything is remembering, you don’t have time to casually start thinking when the clock starts about your recipe – you’re eating into the time you’re supposed to be cooking.

If your brain or heart is not in that zone. I won’t name names but there were three people who said they feel down and one person even said “I won’t be surprised if today I go home” – that day they went home.

I’m very strong emotionally. I took a company through Covid. My factory – I had an over R3 million wage bill a month and I couldn’t invoice out of my factory when Covid hit. The mental strength that I needed to work with my business partner to get that business through, prepared me for MasterChef SA because that was months of brutality.

But I did get to a point where I was properly exhausted. I was feeling a little bit “gatvol” of the process and it was just after chef Michael Cook’s episode of this past Monday.

I wasn’t going into that challenge in a bad space but coming out of it was brutal. The producers were actually polite in what they showed. 

There was a lot more heartache and a lot more brutality that they gave, let’s call it a “nicer version”. And even the nicer version was still brutal. As I finished that episode I’m pretty glad they didn’t show it. I started crying. I was so frustrated with myself because I’m so hyper performance-driven.

What was your calculus to try and win if you were up against Andriette, or up against Tarryn?

Shawn: Tarryn is very good on balance, on stronger Asian and Indian and Malay flavours. She gets her balance right.

I created a decision tree. I had decision-tree dishes. Below main and in dessert, I had two options. I studied those recipes to the tee and depending on if it was either Tarryn or Andriette, I would go either left or right at each of those decision trees.

If it were Tarryn I was going to make sure that I was not going to go down any Asian or any Malaysian flavours because I knew she would do it hands down better. Then if it was Andriette I knew she would beat me hands down on dessert but I’m stronger on the savoury side of things.

What I decided to do was go simpler on dessert and go harder technique on my mains. 

How irritating is it when the judges come to your station to talk and you just want to use the time to cook?

Shawn: It’s not just the judges, there are the content directors as well and there are there of them. 

It’s a double whammy, and it’s really irritating. I’m very hyper-focused and I would shield out and box myself. If you watch while I’m cooking, people said that they would often talk to me and I wouldn’t answer, and some of it was actively and some of it was just I didn’t even hear them.

In the beginning it kept throwing me, but you get better. Later on it feels like you know more what you’re doing and when they ask a question you feel you can kind of walk and talk at the same time. It gets better but it really did irritate me.

In the show you’re a dad of two but now you’re a dad of three and you said you want to win for your kids. What do you take away from this experience?

Shawn: My third born is now 6 weeks on Friday. I’ve got a 4-year old, a 2-week old and now a 6-weeks old. 

It was a huge sacrifice for me to go on the show. People see my pregnant wife in the show. She entered me and said “you’re a good cook, you need to go on this show. You’re very ambitious, you’re very focused, you’ll do well”.

She entered me, but I knew the sacrifice that it was – heavily pregnant with two toddlers on your own …

So I went in there knowing that I wanted to cook for them because it was a sacrifice that I was away for nearly six weeks. 

I felt there’s something that I want to teach my children, and also other dads out there. 

There’s often this thing where entrepreneurs and people running a business – they separate their families and they’re very separate from their families. I wanted to prove that you can do both. You can be a good father, you can be linked to your children, and you can also do business.

The third thing I felt was really important is, I don’t think to be successful you have to be the smartest in the world.

You have to really work hard at something. And you have to be motivated enough to believe that you’ll succeed. And sometimes you don’t have to be the smartest, but if you combine passion, you work hard at something and you know you want to get to the winning goal, you can get there. If I can give that as a gift to my children, that will feel like job done on MasterChef SA. 

I don’t know who they’ll turn out to be. They might be the smartest in the class or they might not be. But if I can teach them tenacity, and that hard work will get you somewhere, they’ll go places.