Alvin Quah

The MasterChef kitchen welcomes 12 emerging home cooks and 12 of MasterChef's most loved past contestants. Together they will share their love of food and compete to become Australia's next MasterChef.

MasterChef 2010 kicked off with the top 50 contestants cooking a BBQ dish of their own choosing.

Instead of a team challenge this week each Contestant will have to cook 5 identical signature dishes for some of their Culinary heroes.

The first challenge was a series of kitchen prep tasks. The final task saw Marion, Daniel, Adele and Courtney cut salmon fillets of the correct weight andtheywere given their Top 24 aprons.

Dessert king Adriano Zumbo returns to the MasterChef kitchen for a pressure test like no other. The contestant with the least impressive take on Zumbo's Polly Want A Waffle will be sent home.

The contestants each cooked their signature dishes but were judged by their fellow contestants, not the judges. The women tasted the men's dishes and voted for the best three.