A Utah pastry chef is going on TV to show his baking skills and try to win $50,000

(Rob Pryce) Adalberto Diaz will appear on Season 1 of "The Ultimate Baking Championship."

On Food Network’s new show “The Ultimate Baking Championship,” which debuts Monday, 16 pastry chefs with serious skills will be going head-to-head for the chance to win $50,000. And a familiar Utah name is among the group.

For Adalberto Diaz — whose beautiful macarons and realistic fruit desserts can be tasted at his bakery, Fillings & Emulsions, at 1391 S. 300 West in Salt Lake City — this will be his sixth time appearing on TV in a baking competition.

Before “The Ultimate Baking Championship,” the James Beard Award-nominated chef competed on “Holiday Baking Championship,” “Sugar Showdown,” “Best Baker in America,” “Holiday Baking Championship: Runners Up Redemption” and “Bake You Rich,” which he won.

But he was ready to get back in the competition kitchen yet again.

To prepare for a baking competition, Diaz said that he will just “bake and bake and bake.” It’s impossible to feel completely prepared, he said, because you don’t know how much time you’ll have, or how big the bake will be.

“What you can do is practice recipes that you know you’re going to bring, so that you can be faster at them,” Diaz said.

For the premiere of “The Ultimate Baking Championship,” the 16 chefs were divided into two groups, and were tasked with making a dessert that featured a specific texture, and whose flavors play off one of the four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter or salty, according to a Food Network news release.

Each contestant had to bake an “elevated” plated dessert in their own style, inspired by the flavor profile assigned to them, the release said.

For the assignment, Diaz made a date pudding cake with passion fruit curd, mango gelee and hibiscus meringue.

After several contestants are eliminated, the remaining bakers will go on to the Master Challenge, where they must bake a dessert “inspired by the roots of their baking journey,” the release said.

Diaz said his baking journey started at age 9 in his native Cuba. He didn’t have access to an oven, he said, so the first thing he ever baked was a sponge cake in a pressure cooker.

Because the network discourages spoilers, Diaz couldn’t go into specifics about what he made on the rest of the show. The news release said that in upcoming episodes, contestants will take part in a science-inspired dessert battle and a 3D chocolate sculptural challenge, as they’re tested on core baking skills.

In the finale on May 4, the winner will be crowned Ultimate Baking Champion and win that hefty chunk of change.

Diaz said pastry chefs are “a special breed of people,” and that “it’s just fun to be around people that you can connect on the thing that you love doing for a living.”

Betsy Ayala, head of content and food for Food Network’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, said in the release that “the pastry chefs competing are the best of the best — they are true artists whose desserts are mind-blowingly beautiful and delicious.”

Diaz said it “felt very humbling” to be around so many talented chefs, and that the competition itself wasn’t cutthroat at all.

“We were all becoming really good friends,” Diaz said. “Everybody was cheering each other, and everybody was supporting each other. It was intense ... and everybody was trying to show their level of skills that they all had. But at the same time, nobody [was] trying to push anybody down. ...”

Diaz said the toughest part of the competition was baking in an unfamiliar environment. The kitchen was “beautiful,” he said, and came equipped with every sort of baking equipment the contestants could ever need.

But the place was “huge,” he said, so they were all “running around like a bunch of crazy ants without heads,” trying to manage their time while scrambling amid the ovens and freezers, the blast chillers and the tools.

Plus, Diaz said they would all be moved to different stations every episode, so as soon as they got used to one location, they’d have to adapt to being somewhere else.

After being on six baking competitions, Diaz said he has learned to pay extra attention to his fellow competitors.

“It is extremely important to be curious about everybody else’s skill level and point of view,” he said. “Missing that, it would be like a sin,” because you might see something you’ve never thought of before, or a method you’ve never tried, he said.

The other thing he’s learned is it’s important to know how resilient you are, and whether you can give yourself grace when things go wrong.

Diaz said it’s also important to know what your main goal is in competing. “Are you here to have a good time? What is the point of it all? From my perspective, I always say, ‘I bake. I come here to bake,’” he said.

The premiere of “The Ultimate Baking Championship” airs Monday at 7 or 10 p.m. Mountain time (depending on whether you have a satellite dish or cable) on Food Network. Episodes will stream the next day on HBO Max and Discovery+.