Masterchef victim flags fruit loaf for good

Chelsea Holmes has been eliminated from the latest season of MasterChef New Zealand. Photo / TVNZ

Chelsea Holmes says she will never cook a spicy fruit loaf again after her failed attempt at a gluten-free version saw her eliminated from MasterChef New Zealand.

The Auckland mother's baking was criticised for being raw and tasting like baking soda in the first individual elimination challenge of MasterChef's third season.

Contestants on the TV One show were woken at midnight and tasked with running an Auckland bakery, with each contestant assigned a different bread-based recipe.

When it came to judging, Holmes was told her spicy fruit loaf was the worst dish of the day and she was eliminated.

But the 23-year-old told nzherald.co.nz she stuck to the recipe she was given and has no idea why her loaf tasted so bad.

"I kind of thought it wouldn't be that hard because I expected that everyone would expect it wouldn't taste too good," she said.

"You work everything out exactly on the scale and pour it in. It was all (in a) recipe."

Holmes said there were worse "disasters" in the kitchen that night, like Ben Munro's ciabatta - the dough for which was too moist and rejected by the bakery's ovens twice.

"I thought because of the disasters in the kitchen that it wouldn't be me. Ben, you could see last night lots of ciabatta loaves didn't work," she said.

And she said she wasn't allowed to taste her loaf as they were packed up before she got a chance.

"We couldn't taste any of them (but) I wouldn't have known what it was going to taste like anyway," she said.

"I probably would have preferred it if they'd said, 'Look, go and make your own gluten-free loaf,' because I would have been able to experiment and taste it and try different things."

Holmes, whose signature dish is Macadamia Crusted Chicken, plans to write a "mums and bubs" cookbook, and will continue writing her blog and running home cooking demonstrations.

* MasterChef New Zealand screens on TV One every Tuesday at 7.30pm. nzherald.co.nz will interview every contestant after their elimination.