MasterChef's Sara Danesin Medio cooks up a treat

SARA Danesin Medio’s kitchen isn’t big; but it is well cared for. It’s dominated by a huge Aga, with two plates on top that are permanently hot. One’s for frying, Sara says, the other’s for simmering.

On a worktop nearby is an electric gadget – a combination of chopper, blender and fryer – that she uses to make her tomato sauce. And what tomato sauce.

No opening a jar of Sainsbury’s Bolognese base for her. She uses fresh onion, carrot and celery, chopped and blended with tinned Italian tomatoes and plenty of olive oil, and then slow-cooked for 30 minutes. The scent of that wonderful sauce – rich in the smells of the Mediterranean – wafts through her small kitchen as it cooks.

Fans of TV’s MasterChef will recognise Sara.

She’s the dark-haired, slightly anxious-looking one with the lilting Italian accent who, after a quiet start, is coming up fast on the rails and impressing everyone with her amazing Mediterranean cooking.

This week she was seen getting all stressed out cooking John Dory in red wine with razor clams for guests at exclusive Corrigan’s restaurant in Mayfair. “I’m a bit behind,” she fretted, before getting a telling off from the resident chef for not calling out loudly enough when her dishes were cooked and ready to go. “Yes chef!” she yelled, in acknowledgement.

The previous week, if anything, was even tougher: she and her fellow contestants faced the daunting task of cooking lunch for 100 hungry Scotsmen at the Invercharron Highland Games. Most of the contestants served up hearty, basic dishes such as steak. Sara went for an altogether more sophisticated dish – a langoustine, mussel and potato broth. The programme gave the impression that only one Scotsman was tempted: although that was a bit of a misrepresentation, she jokes. “I sold 20 actually! All the cameramen and everybody liked that soup!” She pauses for a moment, before adding cheekily: “Probably it was too delicate, too sophisticated for Scotland.”

She sailed through this week, however – even though her pan-fried squid in the second half of the show received only a muted “your dish is okay”. She avoided the cook-off, and is firmly in the last eight.

To get as far as she has in this most gruelling of cookery competitions, she’s clearly no slouch in the kitchen.

That’s immediately obvious just from watching Sara at work. She chops and fries and tosses and blends in a way that’s unremarkable: but there is clearly some magic somewhere. The smells given off as she prepares one of her favourite family recipes, Pasta alla Norma, for today’s Press, are utterly ravishing. The kind of smells, rich and exotic, that you’d expect to find wafting out of the open back door of a small backstreet trattoria in her native Venice.

It’s no surprise she’s such a natural in the kitchen. Her grandfather owned a restaurant in Padua. “And I grew up in a typical Italian family where an obsession with food was natural,” she says.

“As a child, I was taught techniques along with all of the family recipes – and I still manage to visit home regularly to update my cooking skills.”

By home, she means Padua and Venice, where she grew up. She and her husband, David Medio, a marine scientist with dual British/ Italian nationality, have lived in York since 1994, however, when David came here to do his PhD.

They now live in a street of pretty terraces in view of the city walls with their daughter, Emma, 14. “She’s a real foodie. She’s my hardest judge,” Sara says.

In her day job, Sara is a critical care sister in the intensive care unit at York Hospital (but don’t ask her about hospital food). In person, she has a cheeky, gentle sense of humour which hasn’t so far really come out on MasterChef. Her English is now fluent. But when she first came to York, she says, she didn’t speak a word. She took a job behind the bar at a pub in Sutton-on-Derwent to meet people and force herself to use English. Somebody asked her for a John Smiths. “And I went looking for somebody called John Smith,” she says.

“Somebody had to say ‘it’s a beer, darling!’”

Filming MasterChef completely took over her life for a while, she says. That’s all finished now, thankfully: though she’s under strict instructions not to reveal how far she goes in the competition. She hasn’t even told Emma – which means watching the show is still hugely exciting for her sternest critic. “She jumps up and down and really enjoys it,” she says.

And does she enjoy watching herself? “I enjoy it more now than when I was doing it!” Cooking on TV for paying customers is incredibly stressful, she says. “John and Gregg kept saying to me: ‘Sara, in your job you keep people alive, how can this be stressful?’ But cooking for 100 people in two hours is a huge task!”

MasterChef constantly plugs the line that all its amateur contestants dream of becoming professional cooks.

After experiencing life in a kitchen restaurant – albeit with a TV camera observing her every slip – when she cooked at Corrigan’s this week, Sara is not sure she’s ready to work in or run a restaurant just yet. But she would like to do more with her cooking.

Once MasterChef is over, she says, she’d quite like to launch a dining club, where people can meet and enjoy each-other’s food and wine. “Something like that doesn’t exist in York yet.” She’d also like to run cookery classes. “I believe I have a talent when it comes to cooking that I need to prove,” she says.

She’s doing a pretty good job of that on our TV screens every Wednesday.

MasterChef continues on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC One.

Recipe - Sara’s Pasta alla Norma

Max prep and cooking time 1 hr

Ingredients for 4

For the base sauce:

2 tins of Italian plain plum
tomatoes ( Sara uses Cirio)
One small carrot
Half stick of celery
Half an onion (or two small shallots)
Extra virgin olive oil for sautéing
4/5 Basil leaves
Salt and pepper for seasoning.

For the rest of the sauce:

3 small aubergines (available from Morrison’s or any Asian veg shop) or one medium-sized
Italian purple one
5 tbs sunflower oil (or enough to cover the base of a medium frying pan)
A handful of basil leaves (fresh)
2 tbs of capers (brined are better) rinsed and pat dried
2 generous cupfuls of tomato sauce (made above)
350g tortiglioni (or penne or any short pasta)
Grated Parmesan (a generous 50g at least) or ricotta salata (available on order from Le Langhe deli in York).

Method

Start by making a rich tomato sauce by roughly chopping in a blender all the veggies, place them in a deep pan, add some extra virgin olive oil and sauté til soft.

Add the tinned tomatoes and cook for 30 minutes til the sauce is half the volume. Add the basil and adjust seasoning.

Put the sauce in the blender and blitz to a fine, loose purée.

This sauce will be plenty for the recipe and you can store the leftover in the fridge for 3-4 days (or simply put it on bruschetta or to dress a simple pasta al pomodoro!).

In the meantime: Cut the aubergines length-wise, sprinkle with salt and rest for a few minutes, remove any excess water, pat dry and shallow fry until nice and soft.

Cut the aubergines in strips and place them together with one clove of garlic finely chopped in a pan, add the capers, fry lightly all the ingredients and finally add the strips of aubergines and the two cups of tomato sauce. Leave on low heat for a gentle simmer for ten minutes and at the end add the basil leaves (cut in strips).

If you wish, add some chilli (possibly dry Italian) for extra kick.

Boil the pasta and make sure it stays “al dente”.

Drain the pasta and mix the hot sauce, garnish with some basil leaves and serve at once.