PASSING THE INVENTION TEST
‘You’ve got to have a hunger for it. You only get out of it what you put in to it’
She trained at Angus College in Arbroath
and took part in the ScotHot competition, which gave her a taste for the extra-curricular activities that were on offer. ‘I thought it was amazing and decided it was
what I wanted to do,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to have a hunger for it. You only get out of it what you put in to it.’ Having worked at Edzell golf club while
training in Arbroath, Hay began working under David Littlewood at the Milton Restaurant in Banchory after college. When the Milton’s then owners, Neil and Julie Rae, took over the Raemoir Country House Hotel on Royal Deeside in 2010, Littlewood and Hay joined them in the kitchen. It was Littlewood who encouraged her to enter Masterchef. ‘It started as a joke with David,’ Hay laughs.
‘At the start, we didn’t realise how much work was going to be involved. I didn’t think I would get as far as I did because thousands and thou- sands of people entered. So I applied on a whim, thinking I had nothing to lose and it could only make me a stronger person. I told myself that, as long as I didn’t get knocked out in the first round, anything else was a bonus.’ The invention tests on the programme – in
which contestants are given a set of ingredi- ents and told to create a dish – had the biggest impact on Hay and her cooking, especially after she took over from Littlewood as the Raemoir’s executive chef in September. ‘We didn’t know what we would be cooking
until we got there,’ explains Hay. ‘We would get to the kitchen and the first we knew about it was when Gregg Wallace and Monica Galetti told us. We were being filmed all the time so it was 100 per cent real, there was no acting. ‘The invention tests were quite intense. We
A
lexandria Hay has already packed a lot into her career. Despite only turning 28 in June, she has been crowned 2011
Grampian Chef of the Year, made it through to the quarter-finals of the television series Masterchef – The Professionals, and then took over as executive chef at Banchory’s Raemoir House in September. Not bad for someone who never set out to become a chef. ‘I fell into cooking,’ says Hay, from Fetter-
cairn. ‘It was never part of a long-term plan. I liked food so thought I would give it a shot.’
Above: Alexandria Hay, executive chef at the Raemoir Country House Hotel, was a finalist in the BBC’s Masterchef professional competition.
only had two minutes to look at the ingredi- ents. It’s all right when you’re in your own kitchen because you have time to think about these things. It has made me more spontane- ous. Sometimes you get stuck in a rut and put the same thing on the menu again and again. It opened my mind to think outside the box. ‘There was one task that involved goat –
something I had never cooked before. Things like that make you think: why don’t I put that on the menu, or why don’t I cook something in the water-bath rather than in the pan? There’s more out there than just your salmon or your chicken or your venison.’
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