The invisible “jacket” that wraps Mariló Montero allows her two things. On the one hand, boasting of having won the tenth edition MasterChef celebrities. On the other hand, hide behind her to avoid talking about her political attacks on TVE, the network to which the culinary program that announced her winner at dawn belongs: “When the wave passes, you will ask me and we will have debates on current affairs”, she replied this morning on a rooftop in Madrid to several media outlets, including EL PAÍS.
It’s only been two months since your visit The revolt by David Broncano, where he accused the same network of “building a one-way public television under the orders of the president of the government”. All this as a participant and when I already knew I was the winner of the La 1 competition, because registration ended last July.
Montero, who was morning presenter on La 1 for seven years (until 2016), kept the secret of her triumph “like a priest”. In his passage The revolt, did not prevent him from analyzing the TVE schedule: “In the morning, ideology of the left-wing presenters. In the afternoon, more left-wing and at night, more left-wing”. A controversy to which the president of RTVE himself, José Pablo López, responded with his “Now I wear the jacket of MasterChef“, assured the winner, “I don’t wear it physically, but it gives me a lot of respect.”
With the trophy in front of her – which, she says, makes her more excited than Nadal when he wins one – she recalled how she experienced the competition: “I saw my teammates, who knew how to cook. They did it for their families or friends; they liked to cook and I was absolutely indifferent in the kitchen,” Montero explained. Sensing that the other participants were speaking in terms she didn’t know and after having asked in vain to be able to “sculpt” animals in butcher’s shops or “destroy” fish – even with the “food hygiene course” – she hired two teachers: “one for savory and one for sweet”. Then “the miracle happens”: chef Mario Sandoval invites her to work in his restaurant. “That’s where I started to organize in a perhaps disorganized way all the knowledge I was acquiring.” He worked with the Madrilenian on Fridays and Saturdays, “from 10 in the morning until two in the morning”.
It is the same public body that criticized the one that crowned Montero the winner of its star contest. “It’s a rush of energy and it’s great for me. It’s a push for the next phase of life,” acknowledged the current collaborator of public mirror on Antena 3 when she declared herself the winner. The presenter beat former footballer Miguel Torres in a tight final and won the 75,000 euro prize awarded to her NGO – in this case the Spanish foundation that promotes research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) -. The final two finalists defeated singer Juanjo Bona and collaborator Torito.
The jury’s instructions for the final duel of MasterChef celebrities The 10 that Mariló Montero and Miguel Torres had to face were clear: five minutes of shopping at the supermarket to create a complete menu consisting of a starter, main course and dessert, for two portions of each dish in 150 minutes of cooking. Montero called his owner The orchardin homage to the Spaniards, the Navarrese and his mother’s orchards. And she dedicated her dishes and her story to her children Rocío Crusset and Alberto Herrera, who accompanied her in the final: “I want you to know what your grandmother did, who didn’t know her, who was a woman who dedicated her life to raising her children because she left an orphanage and we lived on the hill of a mountain on the outskirts of Estella. My mother, with my uncle Luis, made a garden that fed us”, she explained showing her plate of vegetables from different consistencies.
For the main course, Montero chose a sirloin Wellington surrounded by a puff pastry that he named himself You kissand which, according to her, was a tribute to her children, since it represented the moment when she put them to bed when they were little and the next morning, when she woke them up, “kissed them”. “It’s a 10, you can’t complain,” Pepe Rodríguez reacted after tasting it. To conclude, Montero presented starswhich according to him was a dessert that represents a veil of pure pacharán: “I didn’t want to remove the alcohol”. The recipe included cotton candy, which for the communicator reflected the nights in which she slept in the garden at home with her children, who looked at her excitedly on the set of MasterChef: “I covered them with blankets to see and look for shooting stars.”
The dishes were a composition he prepared with the help of Mario Sandoval of the two-Michelin-starred Coque restaurant. Montero joins the already long list of winners of Masterchef Celebrity as the actor Miguel Ángel Muñoz won the trophy in 2016. Followed by the Olympians Saúl Craviotto and Ona Carbonell, Tamara Falcó – special guest of the final and winner of the fourth edition -, the actress Raquel Meroño, the duo Juanma Castaño and Micky Nadal, the host Lorena Castell, the actress Laura Londoño and the presenter Inés Hernand.
