MasterChef: The Professionals 2015: Chef Marcus Wareing demonstrates how to make a perfect watercress soup

As the current series of MasterChef: The Professionals continues, judges Marcus Wareing and Monica Galetti have devised another fiendish test to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Most daunting is the initial skills test, which offers a valuable chance to make a good first impression, but presents lots of opportunities for things to go wrong.

This time, Marcus Wareing sets the hopeful pro chefs a challenge to make watercress soup topped with a poached egg – which wouldn’t be so bad, if there wasn’t a 20-minute time limit.

That’s not to mention the fact that Wareing, Galetti, and Gregg Wallace will be watching closely to take note of any mistakes.

Showing his recipe, Wareing mixes chicken stock, cream, and potatoes as a base mixture, before adding piles of watercress to the pan.

“We want to taste that watercress,” Galetti explains. “We don’t want more potato than watercress - the potato here is a thickening agent.”