'MasterChef' Winner Reveals How They'll Spend $250,000 Prize

It was a tight race on the MasterChef season 13 finale with Jennifer Maune, Grant Gillon, and Kennedy Grace competing for the title, the trophy, the $250,000, a complete state-of-the-art kitchen from Viking, and a supply of kitchen gadgets and utensils from OXO.

Grant, the 32-year-old director of sales at Kinship Brewing Co. from Altoona, Iowa, and Kennedy, a 26-year-old festival vendor from Denver, were neck and neck going into the dessert portion of the three-course dinner. But Kennedy made a cooking faux pas with her dessert, which gave Jennifer, a 42-year-old lifestyle blogger from Little Rock, Arkansas, some headway as her dessert was her best course.

But at the end of the day, it was Grant, who had a slow and steady approach to MasterChef who took home the title and all that comes with it.

His winning three-course meal was:

Appetizer: Ravioli al’ Uovo with morelle cream sauce, truffle butter, and shaved truffles.

Entrée: Pork loin medallions with salmoriglio sauce, agrodolce, celery root purée and beer-braised fennel and onions.

Dessert: Torn stout cake with coffee stout mousse, chocolate pizzelle and coffee ice cream.

Related: MasterChef's Wayne Lewis: TV Villain or Just Cooking with Confidence?

Parade caught up with Grant for an interview just as his win was about to be revealed to the world and he couldn’t have been more excited. Following is our conversation.

What does it mean to you to win?

It means the absolute world to me. This is something that even unknowingly I’ve been training for for years, just cooking for friends and family. To have that push and the support from my family to go out and chase my dream like this, and then not only to move far and make the finale but to actually win, it’s just incredible. My goal at the beginning was like, if I can make it through [Top 10], I can come back home with my head held high and say, “Hey, I gave it my best shot.” And so, to get this far is just absolutely surreal and I’ll never forget.

You had some really tough competition in Jennifer and Kennedy, was that added pressure, or do you always just compete against yourself?

You really can only compete against yourself. I’m a golfer as well and so I know that very well. There’s nothing you can do to affect how the other person’s going to perform, so you just have to go out there, give 100 percent, give your A-game and focus on yourself, and that’s really what I did.

But you’re absolutely right, Jennifer and Kennedy are incredible cooks, both had tremendous menus that I thought were beautiful, and so that made the competition harder, especially after seeing the appetizers. I’m like, “All right, we’re coming in, we’re swinging, it is time.” It’s still so surreal that I was able to come out on top against those two incredible, strong cooks, and it feels amazing.

So, have you gone back to work at the brewery?

For now, I still am at the brewery.

Do you have plans to do something in the culinary field? The $250,000, might you use that to further that career?

Absolutely. So right now, I am still with the brewery, but the goal is to open a farm-to-table restaurant right here in my hometown in Iowa. It’s something I want to be able to give back to the people that have supported me my whole life. This is where I was born and raised. It would be great to put a stamp on the community for, hopefully, years to come. That is the goal right now, no timeline on it, but I am excited for the opportunity to bring that back home.

Let's talk about your menu. You’re known for your pasta. You started with ravioli al’ uovo. As much as you’re known for your pasta, you were struggling with it, what happened there?

The one thing with that dish is that you can overcook the egg yolk. If that egg yolk does not come out onto the plate, you messed up incredibly. And so, knowing that I had very thin pasta that was going to cook very quickly and there wasn’t going to be as much barrier with that egg yolk, I wanted to cook it just a little. I knew I had to finish it in that sauce and my hope was that the residual heat would finish everything without overcooking the egg, and that was wrong.

I’ve cooked in that kitchen, that area, all season, but there’s new intensity being in the finale and have Joe [Bastianich] staring at me as I’m making the pasta. So yeah, that was one where if that was my hiccup then that’s OK. I feel like I did everything for a reason, and I think they understood where I was at with that.

Related: Brynn Weaver Reveals the Nail in the Coffin of her MasterChef Dreams

You mentioned that the dough was so thin. Was that because you were on a time limit that you made it thinner than normal? Because it looked like you were having trouble getting the pasta over the egg.

No, not necessarily. No, that’s about as thin as I would normally roll out that dish with two pieces of pasta stacked on top for the ravioli. With a single-piece pasta I might do it a little thicker. I think I wasn’t ready to start the raviolis when we came up to the station and said, “Hey, let’s start your raviolis,” and so I think that just threw me for a little bit of a loop. Not an excuse. Not an excuse at all, but definitely got me on a different time frame and all of that, so that’s kind of the story on that one.

And then with the pork loin, wasn’t it Joe that said, “Oh, that might be too simple”?

Yeah, and that’s fair to an extent, I think. Pork loin is seen as an every person’s [protein], it’s an affordable cut, you can get it pretty much everywhere, but I think it still takes a lot of technique to be able to cook that not too well done. To get a pork loin at a medium or a medium rare—like you would on a lamb or steak—is very difficult. I don’t know how to cook rabbit, so I cannot liken it to Kennedy’s dish.

I get that it seems simple, but it means so much to me being from Iowa. Pork is our No. 1 livestock product here, we’re all about it, so I knew that had to be a part of the dish. But my thought was to bring the rest of my components into a different area that you’re not used to seeing served with a pork loin.

What was interesting was that the judges were so not convinced that stout belonged in a dessert, but you won them over and they especially liked your ice cream. That had to be scary to make because that was the first time you had used liquid nitrogen.

Absolutely. In my mind, I don’t know, I thought the stout worked really well. They obviously [had doubts]. I thought it made a lot of sense in conceptualization with who I am and what I do for a living. But yeah, that ice cream or gelato, whatever you want to call it, that was nerve-wracking. That was probably the most worried I ever was during the finale, was making that ice cream.

Already that dessert with four components, I had no time to mess around. I had to get everything down. I knew at eight minutes I had to have the cakes in the oven. So that was really fun, I nailed it. That ice cream was awesome. It was good, and so I’m glad they saw that the stout does work well in cake and that they all enjoyed that ice cream.

Related: MasterChef’s Lizzie Hartman Predicts the Winner of Season 13

How did you come to MasterChef in the first place. Have you been watching the show? Did you apply? Did they find you? People come all different ways.

I’ve been watching for forever basically. I didn’t see the beginning, but I’ve watched each season multiple times now, and I’m just a really big fan of the show. And yeah, I did it the old-fashioned way, I went to MasterChef casting, applied and went through the whole casting process that way.

It was really my wife who kept pushing me to do it because she knew it meant a lot to me. She thought I had what it took to be on the show. It was a big sacrifice for all of us; I had to be gone for a long time away from her and my son. But her unwavering support, she insisted I had to do it and I said, “All right, let’s do it.” So, that’s how we got on MasterChef.

Did you come in with a gameplan?

Yeah. The goal was to study as many classical sauce making and classic flavor pairings as I could execute. My goal for the first cooks, and I didn’t know how this would work because I didn’t know what was coming at us as far as challenges were, but for the first few cooks, I decided I was going to cook what I know I can execute really well. I’m not going to take a lot of risks in those first few episodes. I don’t want a target on my back from any of my other contestants and I don’t want to go home for messing up on something that I just tried to do that I had no idea how to do it.

And so, I think I did a good job of that. You didn’t see me a lot in the first few episodes outside of messing up mashed potatoes. My goal was to fly under the radar. It was just if I can just do what I can execute, get used to being in this kitchen, then I can start to come out of my shell a little bit. I think I did pretty well with that.

One of the prizes you get is a brand-new kitchen. Are you excited about that? Do you own your own home, so you have someplace to put it?

Yeah, it’s all the stuff they mentioned. I do, yeah, I’m excited to get the ovens. I have nice appliances now, but I’ll take the new ones from Viking for sure. And then we’ll see. That quarter of a million dollar check doesn’t hurt either, though. That’ll be for family, for my son. Actually, my wife and I are expecting in January, so we have a little one on the way as well, so start putting money away for that.

What was the most challenging aspect of it for you?

I think the hardest part for me was getting out of my head for conceptualized dishes. Reeling myself in, I think, was probably one of the more difficult things. Not panicking when I couldn’t think, but go back to basics, those things that I had learned or taught myself beforehand and really just use those things that I knew how to cook to elevate things. So, I would say, yeah, that conceptualization on the fly is definitely the hardest thing.

You and Wayne seemed to hit it off. Will you stay in touch with anybody?

Absolutely. I will stay in touch with everybody. Kolby and Brynn were definitely my two best friends in the season. We just got along. We saw eye to eye, had similar feelings on cooking and just who you are in general. They’re people that I could hang out with if they lived in my hometown, and they still are my friends so that’s really exciting. They’re actually coming out to the watch party.

MasterChef is currently accepting applications for Season 14.

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