Nine home cooks arrive with both their dreams and ingredients ready for their first test, the Audition Round. This year's auditionees come from all over the UK - cooking a range of dishes that not only aim to challenge the palettes of the judges, but to make their tastebuds dance. Cooking their Family Favourite dish and making it MasterChef worthy, the hopefuls must show John and Gregg who they are as a cook and how good they could become. John and Gregg don't witness them cook in the MasterChef kitchen. Instead, they taste each dish in the Tasting Room. Just like diners in a restaurant, they judge each contestant's food solely on the plate that is put in front of them.

After tasting all nine plates, John and Gregg pick their three favourite dishes, giving those cooks a well-earned MasterChef apron and immunity from cooking in the next round. However, for the remaining six contestants, the competition is not over. Faced with an invention test, they must pull out all the stops to cook a dish – sweet or savoury – good enough to get them into the competition, and this time, John and Gregg are in the kitchen witnessing their every move. The pressure is intense, and the stakes are high, as at the end, only four cooks can join the three already fast-tracked in the next round of challenges. For two, their MasterChef dream is over.

It's the third quarter-final, and this week's most talented four cooks return to fight for a place in Knockout Week. They face just one intense challenge. They must cook two courses that will excite not just John and Gregg, but also some of MasterChef's most inspiring winners, finalists and contestants, who have all gone on to careers in the food industry.

Their fate is in the hands of 2019's MasterChef champion Irini Tzortzoglou, Tom Rhodes, who won the trophy in 2021 and Nisha Parmar, who was a semi-finalist in 2018.

With just two Knockout Week places up for grabs, these amateurs need to show real flair and ambition to edge closer to the MasterChef 2023 trophy.