Widow Of Masterchef’s Jock Zonfrillo Shares Emotional Update

The widow of celebrity chef Jock Zonfrillo, Lauren Fried, has posted an update to the former Masterchef judge’s Instagram account. The video coincides with the new season of Masterchef Australia, which began this week.

In a minute-long video captioned “An update. Loz”, the mother of Jock’s four children gets super candid about what’s been going on in her life, and her plans for keeping the chef’s memory alive.

“Next week it will be a year since we lost Jock,” she begins.

“I have no idea where that time went.”

Fried admits there were initially more plans to get his unpublished work out into the world.

But, quite fairly “somewhere between trying to find my feet as a solo parent and just going through long periods of time where I found it really hard to look at video and photos of Jock, the plan didn’t go to plan”.

Fried goes on to say that his legacy lives on “through his kids and his work” and that for the better part of the last year, she’s been focusing on the former.

But according to Fried, there is good news ahead, promising “hundreds and hundreds of hours of Jock cooking his favourite recipes” in the pipeline, as well as some behind-the-scenes content, interviews, and travel stuff.

On the newest season of MasterChef, three new judges have joined the fray with the only judge carrying over being former winner Andy Allen.

Allen is joined by beloved two-time contestant Poh Ling Yeow, food critic Sofia Levin and French chef and restauranteur Jean-Christophe Novelli.

Last year was a hard year for Allen, who was close friends with Jock Zonfrillo and a pallbearer at his funeral.

He said the decision to return to MasterChef after Zonfrillo’s death was difficult, but ultimately felt like the right thing to do.

“There is something special in the MasterChef Australia kitchen, and it feels right to come back to work with the amazing production team, and to play my role in seeing the contestants do as I have done,” he said in October last year.