At just 20 years of age, Bella Di Conza has earned a place in the MasterChef kitchen not once, but twice – and all while navigating the devastating loss of her best friend, Amelie, who died late last year.
“I didn’t realise how much I was still grieving,” Bella tells TV WEEK of her first stint in the competition, before her elimination and eventual return after winning last week’s second-chance cook.
“In hindsight, I can see I was in those very early stages of grief, so I had a lot going on emotionally. That probably impacted my cooks more than I would have liked.”
While the MasterChef journey hasn’t been straightforward for the agriculture student, it’s something she knows would have made Amelie incredibly proud.
“We’d often talked about what it would be like to sit down and watch the show with me on the screen – and how surreal it would be,” Bella recalls.
“She always saw it as my destiny that I would get on the show one day.”
Returning to the competition has given Bella a fresh perspective and, this time around, she is approaching the experience very differently.
“I didn’t want to put any pressure on myself this time,” she explains. “At the start I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to be the first one to go home. I don’t want to be the second one to go home,’ and it just kept building from there. This time I thought: ‘I’m back. That’s incredible!’ Anything from here is just a bonus.”
One of the people she was most excited to reunite with on her return was former roommate and MasterChef bestie Dot but, before the pair could cook together again, Dot was eliminated.
“It felt so wrong,” Bella admits. “I just wanted one more cook with Dot.”
Now, Bella is determined to enjoy every moment she has left in the competition and, as she tackles more challenges this week – including the infamous Taste Tester challenge – Bella is hoping her comeback could become a story of redemption.
MasterChef Australia airs Monday to Wednesday, 7.30pm and Sunday, 7pm on Network Ten and 10.
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