Cooking duo eye a $100,000 prize
JEWISH super chefs Clint Yudelman and Noah Rose are set to cook up a storm on Australia's newest reality TV cooking show, My Kitchen Rules.
NAOMI LEVIN
FORGET the stereotype of the Jewish grandmother slaving away over bubbling chicken soup and kneidlach in the kitchen, Australia’s newest Jewish super chefs are Clint Yudelman and Noah Rose.
The culinary duo are the Victorian contestants on Australia’s newest reality TV cooking show, My Kitchen Rules.
The AJN caught up with Yudelman in his family’s home in Caulfield North to talk about the show and the prospect of fame and fortune.
The quiet but confident Mount Scopus Memorial College graduate said he had found his way onto the cooking show after a friend applied to be a contestant.
Following phone and face-to-face interviews, the 24-year-old cooked a dish of seared tuna with Asian greens and Japanese sauce in 15 minutes to wow the casting agents.
And wow them he did, with Yudelman and Rose, 23, selected as the only Victorians on the Channel Seven show which premieres on February 1. In the show five pairs travel to each others’ dinner parties under the watchful eyes of celebrity chefs, and My Kitchen Rules judges, Peter Evans and Manu Feildel.
“It was a great opportunity to travel the country,” Yudelman said.
The pair ate at homes in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth -— where they stayed a few extra days to surf and discover the culinary delights of the Margaret River region.
After the initial dinner parties, the show moved into a commercial kitchen, where contestants pitted their abilities against each other.
“It was daunting and hard to be natural,” Yudelman said of his first television experience. “You had to pretend [the camera was] not there.”
He explained that the pair teamed up in the kitchen because they both used to be vegetarians.
“We couldn’t eat salads all the time, so we had to get creative,” he said.
Rose agreed: “You need to be creative or it just becomes boring being vegetarian. But it did expose me to many different vegetables and spices.”
Eventually, however, they both returned to eating meat, and Yudelman -— who graduated as a vet last year and has just begun practising in Brisbane -— joked that he is familiar with animals “from paddock to plate”.
Somewhat surprisingly for a couple of Jewish boys, they list their favourite ingredient as fresh seafood.
Rose opts for scallops, which he likes to serve seared with seasonal produce. Yudelman’s signature dish, meanwhile, is pan-fried Wagyu beef eye fillet finished in the oven, on lightly sauteed snow peas with caramelised shallots, sweet potato puree, red wine sauce and mushroom duxelle.
On a more Jewish note, though, Yudelman’s “dream dinner party guests” are mostly members of the tribe —- the three lead men from the hit TV comedy Seinfeld, Albert Einstein and Woody Allen. Rose would also invite Jerry Seinfeld, as well as Napoleon Bonaparte, Oscar Wilde and Tiger Woods.
It is not celebrities, however, who the boys will have to impress to be crowned kings of the kitchen, but their fellow contestants. And with a $100,000 prize up for grabs, the winning chefs will certainly get their just desserts.
My Kitchen Rules premieres on Monday, February 1 on Channel Seven at 7.30pm.
Watch an interview with Clint Yudelman: jewishnews.tv
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