Awesome / MasterChef Australia

• Season 2:
  • For finals week, the judges bring in a very special guest for the next team challenge. No, not Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver. It's none other than the king of the Iron Chefs, Mr. Hiroyuki Sakai!

• Season 7:
  • The first episode of auditions, where the judges had to hand out 12 out of 24 aprons. They end up having to, for the first time, change the rules, going out to the crowd and stating that they would be handing out more aprons that day because the people auditioning were just that astoundingly good.
  • In a moment from the first, and going with the above entry on just how good the cooks of this season are, a Scottish lady named Fiona auditioned with a risk taking dish of haggis, with her own spin on it. Judge Matt Preston is very open about how much he hates haggis, but he actually liked Fiona's so much that he gave her an apron right to the Top 24.
  • In the 2nd audition, one contestant, James, decided to make a deconstructed French onion soup. As the judges come to inspect his work, Gary, who is known to absolutely hate deconstructed dishes, haughtily mentioned how he's eaten a very good onion soup in a high class restaurant, and if James could not produce something better than what he had, he would not win an apron. When the dish was presented, Gary ended up licking the plate clean, and the fellow judges jokingly asked how the humble pie tasted.
  • In one of the Immunity challenges, "Dessert King" Reynold plated up a dish so good that all the judges gave him 10/10, earning him the very first perfect score conceived in the entire history of the competition, something that even the professional chefs so far had failed to achieve. Unfortunately, since it was a team Immunity challenge, and his partner Jessie did not do as well, they did not earn the pin.
• Season 8:
  • For 8 years, the Risotto has been labelled as the auditions' "Death Dish", because cooking such a dish is pretty much a ticket home, and no one had ever gotten an apron (or even a second chance) for making Risotto during the Auditions. Come Matt Sinclair, who brought an audition dish of Duck Risotto. The judges were already thinking "no" the first time they see the dish. But it ended up being so good, that all three gave Matt a yes, securing his place as Masterchef's Top 24.
  • In episode 6, Charlie went from almost being eliminated the previous week to being tasted this week. A good enough moment itself. He brought up his dish, a honey Semifreddo ^note (a semi-frozen cream-based dessert similar to a frozen mousse) and Chef Marco Pierre White called it the best dessert he had ever had on the show. And this is the chef who taught Gordon Ramsay. Reminder that Charlie wasn't some elite pastry chef. He was a professional golfer.
  • Season 7's Reynold returns for an Elimination challenge in episode 12, coordinating a pressure test. Considering how only dishes that are considered the cream of the crop are used in such events, this truly highlights how the guy had grown after just one year since leaving the competition in 2015, despite not actually winning it. According to the judges, his dish was on equal grounds to the ones brought by past professionals. Even better, he mentioned in one interview that it's actually one of his easier dishes, and the producers didn't want him to bring something so difficult in such an early stage of the competition.
  • One of the team challenges in season 8 was to visit to 2 top restaurants, try to memorise 3 of their recipes, and plate up 30 of each dish within 90 minutes (half an hour for each meal). While the blue team did a decent job in delivering some strong flavours, their lack of organisation due to the pressure meant that there were some missing elements in each of their dish. The red team, however, not only managed to plate up their dish faster than their opponent for all the courses, but their mains and desserts were almost exact replicas to the original dishes, that the judges had to confirm with the restaurant's head chef that the team captain/vice-captain really didn't cheat by writing hidden notes or taking secret pictures.
  • Episode 35: After their poor performance in the previous team challenge, Trent, Elise, Chloe and Nicolette must face each other in two rounds of Cooking Duel to stay in the competition. In the first round, Trent went against Chloe to plate up an "Autumn Leaves" themed dish. Trent decided to make smoked butter sauce to go with his beef — something neither he nor the judges had ever done before. The judges were sceptical that the sauce would be properly balanced, but when they ate it they loved it so much that Matt declared it "one of the best things he's eaten all year", even comparing the dish to some of the things they've been eating at top restaurants. Trent's dish eventually beat out Chloe's, which was already considered "the best dish she's made so far in the competition".
  • Victor Liong, one of the guest chefs brought in for the Immunity Challenge, plated up a dish that is "as close to perfect as it can be", which earned him the second ever 30/30 in Masterchef history (the first was achieved by Reynold in the previous season). Considering how indecisive he was throughout the cook because the pantry Matt picked didn't have a lot of the ingredients he was familiar with, and the fact that his dish was very simple (it only has about 3 elements, one of which was only thrown in at the last minute when Shannon Bennet told Victor that he needs something more than just crayfish and sauce) truly highlights his formidability as a chef.
  • One of the elimination challenges in Season 8 involved Marco instructing the contestants on a dish they had to cook, with several complex steps and the process gradually getting faster. Cecilia - who had come on the show after originally having to pull out of Season 6 due to a brain injury and was still struggling slightly - not only managed to follow Marco's instructions correctly, but managed to keep up with him from start to finish. End result - heaps of praise for her effort and she was the first deemed safe.
• Season 10:
  • In the (first) Pressure Test during Gordon Ramsay Week, the bottom three homecooks had to replicate Gordon's Raviolo of Marron, with a catch: they had no recipe to follow, had no idea what the final product would look like, had to keep up with him cooking, and were given only ten seconds to finish their dish once Gordon himself was finished plating. Ben not only kept up with him all throughout, but also helped out Chloe when she struggled with removing the shells of the Marron, aware of his own possible elimination, and had little to no issue regarding his replication. This earns a lot of respect from Gordon, who himself had never seen something like that before, and was deemed safe.
    • Michelle, despite her elimination in the Pressure Test, must also be given mention, as she had cut herself early on while handling the food processor, thus falling behind everyone, and eventually caught up anyway. While the issues of her dish sent her home, Gordon gave props, telling her that she still managed to finish cooking ten seconds after him.
  • For the first time in Masterchef Australia history, Sashi becomes the first contestant to ever win two immunity challenges in the same season.
  • Episode 43: In a season full of big surprises already, this was probably the biggest of them all: The remaining nine contestants cook in a Team Challenge for Prince Charles. That's right, they're cooking for royalty. That alone is already an awesome moment in itself.
  • Episode 52: Instead of an Immunity Challenge, Khanh and Sashi faced off for the chance to go straight to Finals Week. Khanh won, and had two choices: A sweet pantry or a savory pantry. However, there was a catch: in choosing the pantry, he'd choose which guest chef to face: Season 7 contestant Reynold Poernomo for the sweet pantry, or Season 8 runner-up Matt Sinclair for the savory pantry. He chose the savory pantry. Not to mention, Khanh didn't have a headstart this time, meaning both had 60 minutes to cook. Khanh scored 24 points. Matt scored a perfect 30.
  • Sashi has probably gotten the single greatest run a MasterChef contestant has in history. He's won two Immunity Pins, something that's been unheard of in the show's history. He never had to cook in a Pressure Test or an Elimination Challenge until Week 10 and even then it was only because he had narrowly lost to Chloe in the day before Elimination of Survival Week. The final week before the Grand Finale did have some concerns, falling into the Elimination Challenge both times, but he just managed to escape elimination...both times. And in the end, he did cap it off, winning the Grand Finale against Ben, who had really come onto his own himself over the course of the competition. The score was 93 to 77. Still, Ben nonetheless deserved to make it to the Grand Finale.
• Season 12:
  • Episode 5: For the first Elimination Challenge, all contestants were tasked with completing their dish within the allotted time limit of 90 minutes, and any time they had remaining before stopping their clock would be used in the second round if their dish wasn't accepted by the judges. Poh's dish was a strawberry and litchi sponge cake, so unlike the others she decided to use the full 90 minutes for making and baking it (a recipe she normally takes around four hours to finish). The kicker is that everyone else got to finish their dishes before her, and she finished it with a measly 6 minutes to spare. Thankfully, the judges loved it and she avoided elimination.
  • Episode 14: During her first chance at winning Immunity, Jess lucked out in the reverse auction round and is left with the most cooking time (100 minutes) and an assortment of ingredients that are very suitable for making desserts. To everyone's surprise, the Dessert Queen decides to take a risk and cook a savoury dish instead. She reasons that she's going to have to cook a savoury dish at some point, so she might as well start. Although she did have some trouble trying to get her eggs perfectly cooked, and Curtis Stone expresses concern about her dish (he says he can't think of a decent savoury dish involving rice and eggs), Jess manages to pull of a luxurious noodle dish that won her that week's immunity.
  • Episode 33: 11 contestants are given a special Mystery Box challenge where they must create a dish based on their childhood memory, with 4 of them winning the chance to partake in the subsequent Weekly Immunity challenge. After an emotional start, each and every single one of the 11 cooks deliver phenomenal dishes (special mention goes to Jess and Reynold's desserts, which were very technical and complex, and considered by the judges to be mindblowing to even attempt — much less pull off as spectacularly as they did — within 60 minutes), and the judges couldn't pick just 4 best dishes out of all of them, and decided to send 5 chefs for the Immunity instead.
• Season 14:
  • Episode 45. Elimination. Alvin from Season 2, saved himself from elimination on the third and final round by creating Drunken Chicken 2.0, a recreation of the dish that made Alvin popular in the first place, Drunken Chicken. The kicker? It was revealed that he hadn't cooked Drunken Chicken for twelve years since Season 2. That's impressive.
  • Billie, winner of Season 7 of Masterchef, returned for the Fans vs. Favorites season as one of the Favorites (obviously)...and ended up becoming the first person in the show's history to win Masterchef TWICE.
    • How she won was nothing short of spectacular - after the first round, she was trailing five points behind Season 6's Sarah, and needed a near-faultless performance in the last Pressure Test (Heston Blumenthal's Taffety Tart). After a gruelling FIVE AND A QUARTER hours cooking, Billie scored 37 out of a possible 40 points, overtaking Sarah by two points at the last moment and securing the trophy.