Samuel Stromberg’s adrenaline builds as the clock counts down. With mere seconds to complete his signature dish, Stromberg glances around the room and sees that all of his competitors have finished cooking. He then makes the split-second decision to alter the final steps for the finishing touch, saving himself from elimination.

Stromberg,a 12-year-old Greenbrae resident and a seventh grader, has made it to the final round of the show MasterChef Junior after competing against other young chefs for a month.

Stromberg will be competing against Logan Guleff of Memphis, Tennessee in the season finale today, Tuesday, Dec. 16, for the MasterChef trophy and the $100,000 prize.

The MasterChef Junior cooking competition is held for talented junior home cooks ages 8 to 13. They are put through a series of cooking challenges, including, among other individual and team cooking challenges, preparing restaurant-caliber meals. The show airs on Fox on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Celebrity chefs and restaurateurs Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich host and judge the show, which is in its second season.

Stromberg began teaching himself to cook about four years ago.

“I started watching TV and reading cookbooks. I just got really interested in it because there is always something new out there to discover.” Stromberg said. “I didn’t take classes. I started by watching other people make food, and from there I really learned how to cook food myself.”

He not only cooks other chefs’ recipes, but creates his own.

“I love making my own recipes because there’s always something new that you can learn about yourself when you make a recipe, or when you cook something that you’ve never done,” Stromberg said.

Stromberg said he likes to cook modernist cuisine and is always trying something new with in-season ingredients.

Stromberg said he is considering a career involving cooking.

“I would definitely look into [a career] with cooking. The only thing that would deter me is that executive chefs have really long days, and I’m not sure if I could handle that,” Stromberg said. “I think I would want to do something less intensive like open up a supper club or write cookbooks, but I’m not sure if I could handle up to 18 hours a day as an executive chef.”

Stromberg said that his favorite MasterChef Junior challenges were the pancake challenge from episode two and the egg challenge from episode four. In the pancake challenge, three contestants, including Stromberg, were paired with a judge who they would make as many pancakes for as they could in six minutes. Whomever was able to make the most pancakes won an advantage in the next challenge. In the egg challenge, the child chefs were asked to make as many sunny-side-up eggs as they could in ten minutes, and the amount of eggs they could successfully prepare directly correlated to the advantage they received in the next challenge.

“The challenges are something where it looks like you have a lot of time on screen, but its really not at all like that. You have very little time. I really thought it was fun because we were just running back and forth, and there wasn’t as much pressure. It wasn’t like we were competing against each other in that challenge, or in any challenge. We were all just having fun and cooking together,” Stromberg said.

“I think the most difficult challenge for me was the signature dish because I hadn’t anticipated the little slip-ups that I encountered,” Stromberg said. “I just wasn’t really prepared. Gordon [Ramsay] comes up and he starts talking to you, so you just really have to change your gameplay on the spot and you have to deal with talking to those judges.”