MasterChef champion savours victory

SHE can cook — and has the apron to prove it — but Ireland’s top amateur chef has no immediate plans to permanently pack in her day job.

Instead, Mary Carney, 28, is taking a year-long career break from her job as business manger to the chief executive of Eircom, to focus on food writing, launching a website and developing her own recipes after taking top honours in the country’s very first MasterChef competition.

Producing a cookbook is high on the agenda if her soon-to-be- launched website — marycarney.net — gets the kind of feedback she’s hoping for.

“I’m hoping to visit professional kitchens and learn as much as I can and share my ideas on my website, and hopefully inspire others in the kitchen. I’d love to write a cookbook but I’m starting with the website,” she said yesterday.

She is also planning to fulfil her promise to treat her mother Mary, whom she describes as “a superb cook”, and husband Mike, to a special night at the Hélène Darroze Michelin-star restaurant in Paris, a long-held dream of hers.

Mary’s culinary pedigree goes back a long way — her grandmother, Mary Flahavan, was a member of the family that produces Ireland’s most popular porridge.

“It was her father that set up the mill in its current form at Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, but my family have no commercial interest in the company, it’s my mother’s cousins,” Mary said.

Mary used some of the famous family oats in one of her MasterChef dessert recipes during the “Me on a Plate” challenge.

The most difficult challenge for her during the competition was replicating the dish created by judge and Michelin-star chef Dylan McGrath following his masterclass. “It was really, really tough to recreate his dish, it was technically very challenging,” she said. Her other favourite restaurants include the Cliff House Hotel in her home county of Waterford and Chapter One, the Michelin Restaurant she worked in during MasterChef.

Mary had to keep her win secret from all but close family members since July, so this weekend she’s planning a party from friends after her unveiling on Thursday night. “I won’t be doing the catering though. It’ll be more a liquid party,” she said.

Fellow finalists, 28-year-old Bridín Carey from Co Tipperary and 37-year-old Mike Curran from Limerick, also have plans. Next week, Bridín, an occupational therapist at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dun Laoghaire, plans to cook for all 150 patients and has invited her MasterChef competitors to help her.

She is also hooking up with fellow-contestants Richard Speedie and Conal Markey to kickstart a seasonal supper club.

Mike’s ambition, to open a restaurant in the west of Ireland, remains, for now, a pipe dream, but his culinary endeavours will continue in Limerick, starting with a six-course tasting menu in November at The Glasshouse Restaurant, based on dishes cooked during MasterChef, and also at the Limerick Strand Hotel.

All three will also take part in a Taste of Christmas, which returns to the Convention Centre Dublin for the last weekend in November.