MasterChef Judge John Torode Wants Everyone to Know That He and Gregg Wallace Aren’t Friends

It's been 12 years since cooking competition show MasterChef brought Australian chef John Torode and former greengrocer Gregg Wallace together as co-hosts. Since then, the pair have critiqued countless steaks with red wine foams, stacks of lobster ceviche, and chocolate mousses with cherry coulis drizzles as hopeful chefs battle to win the judges' affections and avoid a blasting.

And yet, despite the many deconstructed desserts and underseasoned dishes weathered by the Torode-and-Wallace duo, it turns out that the men might not actually like each other.

Following Wallace's recent appearance on daytime TV show Lorraine, in which he claimed to be close friends with his co-host, Torode has spoken out to vehemently deny that they get on.

Torode, who first met Wallace 26 years ago when the latter supplied vegetables to his restaurant, made the comments in an interview with The Mirror. He told the newspaper: "It's funny, we've never been friends. If we do go out for a drink, I'll invariably be at one end of a big old table and he'll be at the other. We've not been to each other's houses. He's so OCD, he wouldn't know what to do."

Or maybe Wallace just doesn't want to deal with your snide comments about food presentation.

Wallace, on the other hand, tells a very different tale about his relationship with Torode. When speaking about his co-host on Lorraine, he said: "I film with John six or seven months of the year, so we are very close to each other physically, and emotionally we are very close to each other."

He continued: "What's great about having a partnership is that if one of you is a bit off, a bit down, the other one naturally steps up, so I rely on John a lot."

But according to the Australian chef, things aren't nearly that peachy on set. Torode also told The Mirror that disagreements between he and Wallace over contestants get heated: "Once, we had a bit too much to drink and filming got called off. We ended up having a massive fight about one of the contestants, and he got really stubborn—it was ridiculous. We've had a couple of standoffs over the years, about contestants, and I've just had to walk away from him."

Turns out suffering through soggy soufflés together isn't enough to create a (buttery biscuit) base for friendship.