Episode 12

It's the last of the semi-finals, and the remaining six celebrity cooks continue to battle for the MasterChef title.

The first challenge is a brand new one – the MasterChef auction. In front of the judges are six cloches, each of which has a different ingredient hidden underneath it that the celebrities must bid for, using time as their currency. Each celebrity starts with 120 minutes on the clock, but how ruthless will they be to outbid their fellow competitors, and how much cooking time will they be prepared to gamble away to ensure they secure the ingredient they want?

To secure their place in finals week, the celebrities must produce a single dish of their own design for three of the country’s most-feared restaurant critics. Dining tonight will be MasterChef regulars Tom Parker Bowles and Leyla Kazim, and on his first ever visit to the MasterChef kitchen, content creator and Top Jaw host Jesse Burgess. Serving food to these masters of the dining room is a daunting task for even the most adept chefs, and the celebrities’ choice of dishes will matter more than ever.

Will their ingredients, flavours, and presentation be enough to impress, or will they fall short of the mark? At the end of the show, only the five best cooks will go through to finals week and take a step closer to being crowned 2026 Celebrity MasterChef champion.