MasterChef Australia contestant Sav Perera

Savindri Perera’s Social Media Fame Before ‘MasterChef Australia’

“One of the things that I did actually when I started on MasterChef is I took my website offline, because I wanted to rebrand everything and relaunch everything post-MasterChef.”

Alicia Vrajlal
6–9 minutes
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There’s no question that Savindri Perera, aka Sav, has been a fan favourite on MasterChef Australia this season. Not only have avid viewers of the cooking show tuned in to watch her spectacular culinary creations, but also long-time supporters who’ve followed her work for years.

Some people may not know that Perera was already somewhat of a social media sensation, with more than 40,000 Instagram followers prior to her reality TV debut. It’s all thanks to her background in food blogging, and a website dedicated to recipes of authentic homemade Sri Lankan dishes. 

“One of the things that I did actually when I started on MasterChef is I took my website offline, because I wanted to rebrand everything and relaunch everything post-MasterChef,” Perera tells Draw Your Box. 

But it was only when those existing supporters noticed it had disappeared and started messaging her, that she realised just how powerful her impact has been. 

“I had to get to the point where I spent about two days pulling all the recipes from the archive of my website and putting it on the different reels that I have on my page and then telling people they’re actually on the videos now,” she explains. 

“It was just an eye opening moment for me really to just go ‘Well, there’s actually an impact here of people just learning to cook,’ because that’s how I started.”

Perera began food blogging in 2009 when she lived in Sri Lanka, but her journey of documenting plates of food on social media took a turn when the 30-year-old moved to Australia when she was 18. While she had always loved eating Sri Lankan food, she didn’t necessarily know how to make a lot of dishes. When she did start cooking them, she would take photos and share them online. 

“It was one of those things that slowly garnered attention,” she says.

Describing the recipes as “day-to-day Sri Lankan recipes”, Perera says she decided to create her food website to also help make Sri Lankan cooking more accessible in a place like Australia. She explains there are often some ingredients, like coconut for example, that aren’t always as readily available in foreign countries like they are in Sri Lanka. 

“I realised that a lot of the recipes that my mum gave me, I knew how to do, but no one’s quantified them,” she explains. “I quantified a lot of it and quantified in a way where someone who’s learning to cook it for the first time can.

“My chicken curry was the first thing that I shared and it still probably is the most popular recipe,” she adds. “The amount of people that constantly message me and then go, ‘That chicken recipe was bang on,’… because a lot of I don’t think a lot of recipes break it down quite the way that I’ve done it and I made it very traditional.” 

No doubt long-time fans are eagerly awaiting Perera’s relaunch of the website, but in the meantime they’ve had the opportunity to watch her whip up some of her favourite Sri Lankan recipes on MasterChef. Her first cook on national TV consisted of milk rice with keeri samba, snapper sauce, blackened coconut snapper, raw onion sambal, Sri Lankan treacle, crispy bits. A more recent dish she made was Lamprais, consisting of chicken bone stock ghee rice, lamprais curry with chicken & pork finished with fresh ground dark roast curry powder, seeni sambal, eggplant Pahi, twice cooked plantain, frikkadeller meatballs and toasted coconut belacan. And of course, she made her own version of her Ammi’s chicken curry. 

Sav Perera entered the MasterChef competition alongside 21 other home cooks for a chance to win $250,000 in prize money. They are Alex Crisp, Darrsh Clarke, David Tan, Gillian Dinh, Harry Butterfield, James Holmes, Jonathan Hooper, Josh Clarke, Josh Perry, Juan De La Cruz Torales Villarreal, Khristian Walker, Lachlan Whittle, Lily Davies, Lourdes Leschen, Mimi Wong, Nat Thaipun, Snezana Calic, Steph Griffen, Stephen Dennis, Sue Bazely and Sumeet Saigal.

She’s now in the semi-final alongside Thaipun and Josh aka Pezza. The judges this year are Andy Allen, Poh Ling Yeow, Sofia Levin and Jean-Christophe Novelli. 

MasterChef Australia continues tonight at 7:30pm on Channel 10 and 10 Play.

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