Yearly on BBC One, the festive lead up to Christmas includes the high-grade culinary competition known as MasterChef: The Professionals. Featuring top fine dining chefs from around the UK—putting their reputations on the line to vie for the coveted title—the show is a smorgasbord of nerve-wracking skills tests, furious cooking in heats against the clock, painstaking platings, scrutinising tastings and weighty judging.

As the show’s host, Greg Wallace, and judges—Michelin-starred chefs Marcus Wareing and Anna Haugh—regularly remark, the competition puts chefs under a ton of pressure, and seems to bring out the best in the best of them. This is to say, the strongest chefs seem to thrive in these stressful conditions, honing their skills and pushing through to new levels of mastery, as they progress onwards and upwards to the highest rounds.

A fun line—encapsulating this intense process of refinement, so to speak—comes from Haugh in a recent episode trailer, in which Wareing declares, ‘Two massive challenges in front of our chefs. We are going to put them under a huge amount of pressure.’

Waugh replies, ‘Well, Marcus, you know what you get from pressure? Diamonds. It’s time to turn up the heat.’

A gem of an analogy.