MasterChef is all over — for the inaugural season at least (with a record 3.7 million people tuning in to watch, we know they’re going to milk this one for years).

Like any good reality TV show, MasterChef will undoubtedly start to cannibalise itself, trying to reheat the ingredients that made it successful (apologies, it takes more restraint than Crikey has to avoid the food puns); the praise will become over the top, the sentimentality cloying, the croquembouche towers higher and higher.

But until then, what people thought of the original recipe (sorry):

Talk of Julie’s rigged result just the elites sqwalking. The snobbish or conspiratorial nonsense on the sidelines over Julie’s victory is easily eclipsed by the dominant sense of joy and gratitude that such a genuine feel-good show went to air. It had none of the contrived schmaltz of other programs in this “family” category. It involved a group of people who were so genuinely nice that, as the finals heated up, even the contestants seemed just as interested in each other’s well-being as their own chances of victory. — DavidPenberthy, The Punch

Let’s call a shallot a shallot. Seriously can the first winner of MasterChef Australia be someone who could not identify a french shallot, and called it an onion? Look I really like Julie Goodwin, but I must confess tonight I was a tad disappointed when she won to become the series one winner of MasterChef Australia. — Reality Ravings

Oh really! I laughed merrily at Julie saying “I feel like I’ve climbed Mt Everest!” after serving the judges her chicken dish. I could almost hear Sir Edmund Hillary muttering “Bitch, please” from heaven — Jess McGuire, Defamer

Pity the other programming. Truly scorched was 60 Minutes, which paid about $200,000 to secure an interview with lost-and-found bushwalker Jamie Neale, in a failed effort to lure viewers from MasterChef. — Caroline Overington, The Australian

And on Twitter, some of the best comments:

@seeboundy In two & a half years never seen my boyfriend cry… Until julies family came on last night in #masterchef !

@paul_ricketts pressure test should have been blind-tasted, what a joke!

@1azylizzie Won’t watch masterchef until it becomes #vegan friendly.. I have no interest in watching the flesh of innocent creatures get cooked. YUK!

@arakha Dreamt that I was a contestant on Masterchef and another girl stole the last bag of peas, so that I couldn’t make my dish.