MasterChef favourite tipped to replace Gregg Wallace says 'I grew up eating sludge'

She may have grown up eating Angel Delight and Findus fast food, but her palette is now finely tuned for TV stardom, as Grace Dent is hailed the firm favourite to present MasterChef.

The food critic - a former Daily Mirror journalist - is the bookies’ 15/8 favourite to take over, after a string of controversies saw current presenters Gregg Wallace and John Torode sacked from the BBC1 show.

Given a taste of MasterChef glory, as co-presenter of the celebrity version alongside Torode since the end of last year, Grace, 51 - who talks proudly of her working class roots in Carlisle - is keen to become the new “ Queen of Cooking.”

She says: "I have been on telly for a long time. I love being on telly. I've been on MasterChef since 2013 as a ‘turn’. But I have been watching it since I was a little girl, when we had Loyd Grossman.

"I used to sit on the sofa with my dad, and the restaurant critics would walk in and we would laugh our socks off at them coming in and going, ‘Well, this is the worst foie gras in the world ’. We would just be laughing, going, ‘Look at this person’.”

READ MORE: Gregg Wallace and John Torode's MasterChef replacement favourites revealed

Chuckling as she remembers people running through their dishes, she impersonates them, going: “‘I've got a ballotine of lamb, and a port reduction, and a fondant potato,’ and all of these things".

“We didn't have them in Carlisle.

"But the show is this incredible rollercoaster that makes people happy all over Britain.“

Grace is keen to follow in the footsteps of cooking shows’ great women presenters, like Mary Berry and Prue Leith.

She says: “Food is the biggest love of my life. I want to do more. Prue and Mary Berry, I mean, they go on forever. So, yeah, that’s what I want to do.”

The BBC has yet to confirm who will be MasterChef’s new hosts, but Grace leads an eminent line-up of contenders, including chefs Tom Kerridge and James Martin, former Radio 1 star Chris Stark and rapper-turned cook Big Zuu.

If she does land the coveted role Grace, who shares warm memories of growing-up in a “Coronation Street-style” house, says her one regret will be that her parents are no longer around to see it.

"It is jarring to me this has happened in 2025 when my parents have gone,” she says. “Because to present MasterChef is the first that I would have had that they would have fully understood.

"My mother would have bored people to tears. “

Her parents were married to other people when they met and ran away together.

Grace recalls: “My mother looked like Diana Doors. She was booby and blonde and glam and wore trouser suits and my father was a squaddie, a soldier and had been stationed up in Carlisle for a while.”

Of their affair, she continues: “They had me very, very quickly. It was quite a big deal in the 70s. I think that my parents met and ran away in haste and then lamented their decision over the next 50 years.”

Grace, who was speaking to James O’Brien for his Full Disclosure podcast before Wallace and Torode were sacked, credits her parents with cultivating her love of food.

And she has no time for food snobbery, adding: "This is the problem that we have with the ultra-processed food debate, going back to the 70s when I was a child.

“The fact is, a Findus crispy pancake in 1970 filled with minced beef was delicious, as well as oven chips dipped in salad cream.

"I didn’t eat the rainbow when I was a child. We ate the sludge. I want to tell the truth about the 70s. These were exciting times, like if you had butternut scotch flavoured Angel Delight.

"I had no idea what posh really was.”

Admitting she was "nothing special" at school, Grace says she became focussed on TV fame after seeing people like Paula Yates, the late flamboyant peroxide hostess of Channel 4's pop culture show The Tube, on the box .

She says: "There was no one in my family that was in academia, I was brought up by pop culture.

"From the earliest part of my life, I looked at the television and looked at Kenny Everett, Top of the Pops and bands like The Human League and ABC. I remember looking and thinking, ‘there is a world out there and I want to go there’.

"I had a very northern working class childhood, so I was never told I was beautiful, I was never told I was special, but I remember going, ‘But I'm going to be famous.’

"I wanted to go to university, because I knew that if I went and read English literature then it would be handy as some sort of arts degree that I could then take to London for my glorious plan to become Paula Yates.

"I remember by the time I was 14, Paula was raging on The Tube, bringing her sparkle, glamour, the dresses, hanging out with popstars. And then she was also writing a newspaper column with her big hair at the top of the page, firing out the old paperback fiction.

"I wanted to be Paula Yates or Janet Street-Porter. Janet was controlling youth TV on BBC2, hanging out with the Pet Shop Boys. She was running TV channels. I was like ‘I want that’”.

And Grace was inspired to move to London after watching her late Cumbrian aunt "jump the working class fence," shocking her family by marrying a Lord.

She says: “One of my aunties, who was every bit as common as me, was called Grace and married a Lord. She was a force of nature.

"I was fascinated by her and this idea that one day, you can just suddenly go, ‘no. This is who I am’. She would go to London and play Bridge.

"I remember at the end of our street in Carlisle, there was a railway track and I knew that London was 235 miles away. It took seven hours by train back then in the 70s, and I wanted to go.

"So, as soon as I could, I was coming down on that train and getting that taste for London, and that was what inspired me.

“I love Carlisle. Now I'm in my 50s, I love that place. But when you're 14, all you want to do is be in Soho, potentially snogging John Taylor from Duran Duran."

Her move to the smoke paid off. She bagged an editorial assistant's job at women's magazine Marie Claire after she graduated from Stirling University.

Other magazine and newspaper jobs followed, she went on to publish more than 20 books and has appeared on countless TV shows, such as The Great British Menu, Very British Problems, Have I Got News For You and had a stint hosting the Radio 4 series The Untold.

Now with the big MasterChef job in her sights, she reflects on her mum’s cautionary words about her success.

"My mother said this until the day that she died about my life. She would look at it all and go, ‘You don't half make life hard for yourself, don't you?’

“Because my life would have been probably kind of lovely if I'd stayed in Carlisle.

"Her dream was that I would have made a good marriage with somebody from Carlisle. I could even tell you the guys that I should have married, whose dads had building firms, and we could have had a nice house and done it up and had a breakfast bar.

"Me and my mother fought like cat and dog from when I was a child. We loved each other fiercely and I nursed her right up until the last, her last dying breath.

"But yeah, proper northern, northern working class women, with massive aspirations to leave and do fantastic things."

Laughing about her success, so far this year, she quips: "I don't think that I'm a role model or a massively great example for anybody. I do think that I am in a lot of ways a terrible warning, and if anything, just winging it.

"I always knew that I'm not the most beautiful girl and I'm not the cleverest girl and I'm not the richest girl. But when I go into a room, I can sometimes raise the frequency…a little bit."