Masterchef: Cutter Brewer

Another week and another chance to chat with MasterChef contestants. One thing I love about getting this opportunity is seeing the passion all of these home cooks have for food. To them it's not necessarily about the fame or making lots of money. It's about developing something even further that they've come to fall in love with.

This time I sat down and chatted with the 33-year-old Petroleum Landman from Beaumont, Texas, Cutter Brewer. He's still fighting for his chance in the top 10 to eventually grab that title of MasterChef.

Thanks so much for talking with me today.

Well hey there! How are you doing?

I'm great. How are you?

Doing good. Just enjoying the weather down here in Texas.

Lucky! Now I'm curious, what inspired you to audition for MasterChef?

I've always been in a house full of home cooks. That's what we do at family gatherings. I've always been the guy in a group of friends that has to entertain and cook for them. One day a friend of mine started posting pictures of my food on Facebook, and another friend suggested I try out for the show. I didn't think I was going to be good enough to do that, but I got talked/bribed and tried out and now here I am.

So you were one of those people who would always take pictures of their food and post to Instagram?

Right! I was kind of a foodie. I liked to go to restaurants and eat new and different things, but that gets really expensive. So I started going home and trying to recreate dishes that I would see on menus. I would try them and take pictures of it and post to Instagram and Facebook.

So what were some of those dishes that intrigued you and made you want to recreate them at home?

Well, especially for me being from the Gulf Coast, seafood dishes are something I like to recreate. I really like to experiment with seafood and mix the creole with seafood. My family has roots in Louisiana, and I live on the Louisiana border of Texas so I have a lot of that influence. I like doing other things too like mixing Tex-Mex and other avenues of food. I mainly got inspired by different restaurants.

Now realizing that you have ties to Louisiana, I was about to say that it sounds like your cooking has a bit of influence from the New Orleans culture.

Actually, I love New Orleans. I go there two or three times a year.

Wow, so you definitely have picked a great amount of that flavor up in the time that you've traveled there, not to mention the roots that your family already had.

Yes, I'm very fortunate.

So how has all of that experience helped you in the MasterChef competition?

Well, it's been a bumpy ride. Obviously I've had some ups and downs. Being where I'm from and my background of cooking, I'm not exposed to a lot of things like Italian cooking and things like that. It's been an adventure trying to learn those new techniques, and that's what I love about the show. They take average home cooks (like what we are) and try to develop us into chefs.

So with the experience you've learned on the show, since your experience was mostly about going to restaurants and wanting recreate those dishes and cooking for your family and friends, would you say that you are now interested in pursuing a career in this?

Yeah, it's definitely a possibility. I have a great life and business, but the passion is definitely in cooking and if the opportunity ever arose to have my own place or to be a chef somewhere or to develop a menu then I think I would be very interested in looking into that.

Well, it definitely sounds like something that will at least stay a hobby if by chance that opportunity doesn't come up. Now with the show, what was your signature dish that wowed the producers and got you cast on the show?

The dish that I chose was a wild game inspired jambalaya. I'm actually a big hunter so I mixed venison, duck, and wild hog. Everything in the dish was something that I either hunted myself or bought locally from the farmer's market. So for me, the jambalaya was right at home in Beaumont

Wow, that's really cool that you are a fan of supporting the local community and then making sure you're using as fresh ingredients as possible in your food.

That's correct. I try to advocate that on Facebook and Twitter a lot. It's important to support local, and I will give shout outs every time I go to a restaurant that a local person owns. I try to broadcast that out so people will go support the local people.

So how different was that for you to have to go to L.A for MasterChef and then cook with their ingredients rather than the ingredients in your local community and that local flavor?

Like I said, it was an experience of a lifetime. We would walk into the pantry and I would see things I've never even seen before. Obviously as we've seen, Joe had let me know that my knowledge hasn't been where it should have been sometimes. It's just the little things you don't think about. I know what a caper is, but I didn't know where it came from. I've seen balsamic vinegar, but I didn't know how it was made. That point of the competition has been great to learn. That's what I think is the best thing about this competition, learning from these guys. The judges are amazing and it's been awesome to have them as teachers.

And I can imagine that even though it is a competition that you are still taking in and learning from the other competitors.

Everyday you sit there and bounce ideas off of each other, and you hear ideas from people about where they're from and the dishes they like. It works both ways, they listen to things I like and I tell them about plenty of foods from where I'm from.

So, they learned from you and you've learned about foods from their neck of the woods. I know I saw a lot of them were from the Northeast particularly around New York.

Yes. I've never been to New York so that was neat to listen to people like Christine and Elizabeth with what they knew. I loved learning from them.

So what were maybe some of the New York pieces of culture you were able to pick up and include in your cooking?

I'm kind of a pasta connoisseur now. I have learned to make pasta really well and learned how to cook risotto. They're things that I just never paid attention to. I've seen them in restaurants but never really given it the necessary attention.

Right, and something like just making pasta in the past may have been easier to just go to the grocery store and pick up the noodles you just put in a pot of boiling water rather than giving it the attention to make it from scratch.

Right, and I've even gotten to the point where I start infusing my pasta with herbs and other things like that.

So it sounds like we are seeing a little bit of the southern food that you are known for being combined with the Italian food you've learned.

Maybe so. You will have to see.

Where can people go to stay updated with you throughout the rest of the season and anything that might come out of the show?

You can follow me on Twitter @MC5Cutter. I'm also on Instagram @cutbrew80. Then I have a MasterChef Facebook page as well “Cutter Brewer – MasterChef”.

Tune in every Monday night at 8pm on FOX for new episodes of MasterChef. Next up in the series, we will begin talking with the contestants as they are eliminated. Stay tuned.