'Kitchen' star thinks women are better chefs

New Hell's Kitchen boss Marco Pierre White has claimed that women are better than men in the kitchen.

The chef split his ten celebrity contestants into male and female teams on the first day of filming for the ITV1 reality series, admitting that he wanted to discover which sex is better at cooking. However, the fiery 45-year-old already has his own opinions on the matter.

"Women in my opinion are better cooks than men in the sense that they have a better palette, because their sense of smell is more acute," Marco explained. "They don't take short cuts like men. They're not as fast as men on the whole so they tend to be more precise in what they do.

"The reason why they tend not to rise to the top like chefs in that 3-star world is because they're bullied.

"When you think, apart from them not being as physically as strong as a man, you look at a kitchen at a 3-star level, it might have 20 chefs in it, well 18 of them are men, two of them are girls. So they are the minority, let's not forget that, and so just the psychological approach - you've now walked into this man's world, you're already handicapped, so you tend to be pushed into pastry or into larder."

Hell's Kitchen airs at 9.00pm tonight on ITV1.