Cody Karey's stovetop has gone cold at MasterChef Canada.
The world has been watching Karey through the window of the weekly cooking competition on CTV. The local youth, 24, survived a complex audition process and several rounds of spotlight competition, making it into the Top 10.
Over that period he heard some criticisms but earned liberal doses of praise from judges Alvin Leung, Claudio Aprile and Michael Bonacini - all of them master chefs.
Despite whipping up the judges' consensus best cream and thickly spreading it inside a light, firm, flakey tart crust that all three adjudicators complimented, a clerical kitchen error caused his downfall in Sunday night's final challenge.
"You don't like raspberries?," asked Bonacini when Karey presented his dish. For the sake of the television audience he reminded Karey that this pressure test was a replication exercise. Karey had forgotten one of the multiple fruits that filled the model tart.
"That was an oversight," Karey admitted, with fingers crossed it was a mistake that would be offset by the otherwise successful fruit tart and/or the mistakes of the other competitors.
It almost worked out for him. Fellow competitor Andrew Al-Kouri of Nova Scotia ran into bigger troubles with his tart that caused the judges to cut the apron strings, but it was a rare episode in which two were eliminated and because of the rough raspberry patch, Karey was picked.
Despite the downfall detail, Karey was sent home by the judges with unanimous praise. Bonacini spoke for all three, the others nodding their appreciation for the kid from Fort St. James.
"Cody, for someone of your age, your level of cooking has a degree of finesse and refinement that is truly awe inspiring, and we know this is just the beginning of your journey," he said.
Karey waved goodbye to the remaining home cooks still in the hunt for the MasterChef Canada title, folded his apron neatly on his work station, then exited with an air of disappointment but satisfaction.
"Being the youngest cook in the competition and making it into the Top 10 is a pretty amazing feeling," he said. "It's very validating and a once in a lifetime experience. I feel like I've grown so much, since stepping into this kitchen, as a cook and as a person. Almost everybody else in the competition has 10 years on me. So if I can make the Top 10, and I have 10 years to catch up...better watch out."
So now it's back to regular life for Karey, which for him is anything but regular. He is one of Canada's fast-rising pop stars, having already sung duets with the likes of David Foster and Katharine McPhee. He was on national television twice in one weekend, in March, thanks to the broadcast of the 2015 Canada Winter Games closing ceremonies from UNBC in which Karey was one of the guest stars singing to the nation as a representative of the region.
He put his next album's work on hold when the MasterChef Canada auditions called him into the celebrity kitchen. He considers himself as passionate about food as he is about music.
"Now I'm going to really focus, in the immediate short-term, on my music and the directions I'm preparing my music to take with this next project," he said, but admitted that he is always mentally designing the restaurant he will one day own if his long-term dreams come true. "It's going to be a gastro-pub: fine dining with an approachable twist. It's going to be romantic, a sensual food experience, a fusion of absolutely any tastes that I come up with but all deliciously prepared and amazingly presented."
Karey has now been in the pressure cooker of high-end stage performance of two kinds, and rose to international attention in both. The food challenges - from the high point of building a gourmet pizza that knocked the judges out to the angst of being on the chopping block for missing the raspberries - were by far the most nerve-wracking, he said, but also were personally constructive.
"Every team challenge was a big growth opportunity for me, because I was in there with all these big personalities who all felt they knew exactly what they should do in that moment, and I had to decide when this young kid was going to step up and take charge or step back and let more experienced people get me closer to the goal. It was hard to balance, but the people were so amazing that even those mistakes were helpful for me in the long run."
The TV drama elements caused each cast member on MasterChef Canada to be edited heavily down to mere caricatures, so the real Cody Karey never came across on the cooking show, and adversarial elements were played up by the show's producers, but he said behind the scenes, the other competitors were people he looked forward to seeing each day.
"Everybody there - every single one of them - was inspirational for a different reason and I got to share an incredibly special experience being beside them."
The final eight competitors will be whittled away each Sunday evening at 7 p.m. on CTV and the viewer never knows when Cody Karey may be back for a surprise appearance, or on a concert stage either for that matter.
