Masterchef: The Professionals

Monica Galetti

Monica Galetti needs her own television series. I see her as the world's first cooking cop, a hard-hitting sous chef with a badge and mission to rid the streets of cuisine's criminal underbelly. "Freeze! Your over-cooked duck and collapsed soufflé days are over." "You'll never take me alive, Galetti." Think Prime Suspect meets Nigella, but with hopefully more nudity.
The new series of Masterchef: The Professionals started last night and the undoubted star of the show in these early stages (before Michel Roux Jr makes his Darth Vader-esque appearance before the terrified hopefuls), is Galetti, Roux's right-hand woman and all-round ice maiden. She's there to sort the wheat from the chaff and make sure that none of the contestants go on to poison her boss. Galetti stalks around the kitchen like a praying mantis, displaying a multitude of facial expressions that would challenge the UK's finest gurners. But by god, and maybe it's just me, there's something incredibly alluring about her (not the gurning, but the power, the authority, the skill at deboning a chicken...). It's an odd attraction, I'll admit, and to be honest if I were ever to be standing in front of her naked (not a nice image, I know) I'm not 100% sure whether I'd pass her stringent criteria and my wilted veg would never get to "meet her boss".
Oh, the actual programme – there were ten chefs, one who looked like Sid Vicious, another who was the only French bloke who can't cook garlic, all creating dishes using duck and blackberries. There were a lot of schoolboy errors (obviously I went to the wrong school where overcooked duck and burnt leeks was never an issue), and there was a discussion about gastric sauces that left me none the wiser. To be honest, I'd long been distracted by the delectable Chief Inspector Galetti...