Masterchef FINALE Recap: Fruit of the Doom

In the dawn of days, when the world was new and the idea of coriander ice-cream had not yet been dreamed of, Masterchef 2017 began, and there was much rejoicing. Who knows when it will end? As is traditional, the Masterchef finale begins on a Monday night, and ends halfway through Boxing Day.

Two worthy adversaries meet in tonight’s finale: Diana, the feisty young accountant who traded tax returns for…some kind of food that sounds a bit like tax returns I guess; and Ben, who quit a promising career in retail to pursue his dream of turning everything on earth into ice-cream. Who will win?

Us. We will win. Is that not the truth? For are we not privileged to witness this extraordinary historic moment, to see the amazing food that this pair will cook, without being able to taste it or smell it, therefore making any opinions we might have absurd and pointless?

Yes we are.

After an opening sequence reminding us that this is a show about cooking and that there were some other people in it but now there’s not, Ben and Diana arrive in the kitchen. Diana says she couldn’t have done it without the support of her family and friends, by which she means she couldn’t have done it without the regular failure of her fellow contestants. Ben says he is proud to show his kids that they can achieve great things if they believe in themselves, a subtle slam on everyone watching from the balcony, who just didn’t believe in themselves enough.

But this finale won’t over-extend itself, so let’s get down to it. ROUND ONE

Round One sees Ben and Diana confronted with every mystery box from this year’s series: they may choose any one to cook with. The twist: they can cook only the box itself, not the contents.

OK, no that’s not true, but wouldn’t that be amazing? I wish they had the guts to do that.

The judges now describe each box, along with a flashback to the episode in which it featured. This takes a long time and did not need to happen — which is coincidentally the theme of the evening. It’s a good reminder though that when Curtis Stone set the mystery box, he made a pun about “thinking outside the box” that cemented his status as Australia’s biggest cockspank. Also, in Japan George said “How good is this ingredients?” and we shall never forget.

Ben chooses Elena’s mystery box, and I understand: I’ve got the hots for Elena too. Diana chooses Peter Gilmore’s box because she wants to use the garden. But what for? Her sick experiments? To exercise a horse? I guess we’ll find out.

They must use at least one ingredient from their mystery boxes: using half an ingredient, or three-quarters of an ingredient, simply won’t cut it tonight.

We are fifteen minutes into the finale. Only seven thousand minutes to go.

Ben knows Diana is “amazingly good in a short amount of time”, having come up dry trying to think of anything more specific to say about her. To overcome her powerful brevity, he has decided to make an ice-cream. There’s a turn-up for the books. Ben has moved into a sort of fugue state, where he is incapable of responding to any stimuli that is not ice-cream-related.

Meanwhile Diana wants to do something with Chinese broccoli that nobody has ever done before, but she quickly abandons this idea and decides to just cook it instead.

Gary asks Ben about his dish. He tells Ben that there a lot of elements in there, which is Gary Code for “You’re a big mental”. Ben ignores Gary’s warning, because if he’s learnt one thing during his time in Masterchef, it’s that professional chefs never know what they’re talking about. Ben then proceeds to savagely cut his own hand, which is a novel bit of strategy. But who’s to say that blood isn’t a great flavour for ice-cream? “Take a deep breath!” comes the mind-bogglingly useless cry from the balcony, then everyone claps as Ben, his artery temporarily staunched, gets back to building a huge pile of sugar to call his own.

“Come on Ben, you can do this, yeah? Dig deep, yeah?” says George. Is this what he says to his staff? Is this how he trains them? Does the Calombaris method of culinary instruction involve just constantly exhorting you to “come on”? No wonder nobody who works at his restaurants is worth paying a living wage.

Benita informs us that Diana’s cooking style has evolved, but how she knows this is anyone’s guess. Who asked Benita back anyway?

Ben checks on his crumb. He’s praying that it’s cooked perfectly, because he hasn’t a clue how to actually make this happen — it’s all blind luck to him. Then his hand starts bleeding again. As the medics bandage him again, we get a nice look at how unnaturally smooth Samuel’s hair has become since he left the competition. He looks like Tim Minchin scalped Jennifer Aniston.

Ben’s shortbread is still blonde, as is Tamara. All in all this is more of a problem for the shortbread. Also he has to quenelle his ice-cream one-handed — if you know what I mean.

I didn’t even see him make the ice-cream. I think at this stage he doesn’t really have to — when he needs ice-cream he just thinks it into existence.

Anyway time is up and the judges must taste the Round One dishes. Long story short: Diana’s is good and Ben’s is good also but not as good as Diana’s. Diana gets 30/30 and Ben gets 26/30 so it’s pretty clear who is the perfect cook and who is the guy who cut his hand open and made ice-cream.

Round Two requires the two finalists to do whatever they want. “There are no rules,” Matt tells them — they can take as long as they want, a few seconds or fifty years, they can make food or they can build a house, they can stay in the kitchen or they can leave the show completely and wander aimlessly into the desert. There are no rules, and what score they get depends only on what number the judges dream of while taking a nap.

Disappointingly, the above isn’t entirely true. After saying “there are no rules”, the judges reveal there are some very strict rules: they have 75 minutes, they have to plate up three identical plates of the dish they create, and it has to be edible.

“In this cook in Round Two, I’m giving it my absolute all,” says Ben, implying that he wasn’t giving his all in Round One, so god knows how many limbs he’ll sever this time. Ben decides to play to his strengths by making an ice-cream, just to create an interesting contrast to Round One, when he made an ice-cream.

Meanwhile Callan pops up to explain that Ben is four points behind Diana and if he scores better than Diana in Round Two he might not be four points behind Diana anymore. Glad to have that explained Callan.

Diana is drawing on her heritage in Round Two, which is a pretty devious move. I think Ben is drawing on his heritage too: either his heritage as a Dutchman or his heritage as a Ben and Jerry’s sales executive. “I’m going to make sure this ice-cream is the best ice-cream I’ve ever put up in the Masterchef kitchen,” he says, which is a tall order, given it has fifteen hundred other ice-creams to compete against.

Meanwhile Diana is crumbing prawns in oatmeal, presumably as some kind of complex revenge plot against a hidden enemy. Can’t imagine it being part of the whole Masterchef thing.

Diana explains that if she doesn’t cook her prawns perfectly, it could have the disastrous consequence of her serving not-perfectly-cooked prawns. The analysis is scintillating. She tries the prawns and finds they aren’t crunchy enough. “This is the worst nightmare ever,” says Diana, who has led a pretty comfortable life till now apparently. From the balcony a man calls, “Make ’em crunchy.” Another man calls, “Make ’em perfectly cooked.” I bet Diana is grateful for these interjections. I bet she doesn’t want to kick their balls off their bodies at all.

Dunno where the balcony people get the gall to call out advice of any kind, to be honest. There are two people in the room good enough to make the Masterchef final, and none of them are on the balcony, so you’d think they’d be too ashamed to be yelling out their empty orders. But no: they have no shame. They are hollow-eyed machines of pure distraction.

“THIRTY SECONDS!” George bellows in his best, “I’m taller than I look, honest” voice. “Ten seconds to go!” yells Gary, and Diana and Ben REALLY start to hurry — up till then they were kind of cruising.

Tamara opines that Ben has really stepped it up in the plating, though as usual in matters of plating, the difference is invisible to the naked eye.

In the judging room, Diana informs the judges that Malaysian food is about cooking from the heart. This is her way of letting them know that Ben does not cook from the heart, serving only cold, emotionless food that cares not for your human weakness.

When it’s Ben’s turn, George asks him, “Are you proud of what you’ve done?” in what seems like a really aggressive way. I think he’s accusing him of something awful.

Scoring time: Diana’s is good and Ben’s is slightly better. He gets 28 and Diana gets 27. This means Diana leads by 3 points overall and I know it’s hard to believe but it’s going to be close guys.

George now takes the opportunity to give an incredibly boring speech, and then the finalists’ families come into the kitchen and everyone makes a big noise and it kind of brings the whole show to a grinding halt. People on the balcony start crying, because having been eliminated they are no longer allowed any contact with their families, so it hurts to see what they have lost.

Now it’s time for Round Three, and as always Round Three is going to be some insanely complicated dessert that looks like something that it isn’t and in which taste is completely irrelevant. And sure enough in comes Kirsten Tibbles, who I believe is some kind of chocolate person. Not literally, not like a person made of chocolate. Although she might be. Who knows really.

Kirsten unveils fruit on a little tray, with a candle and a glass of brandy and a rose and some pinecones. “Put a frame around it, it could hang in an art gallery in Europe,” says George, which isn’t saying much. I mean put a rame around anything and it could hang in an art gallery. People paint all kinds of stuff.

Anyway, point is, they have to make an apple, a pear and a mandarin out of chocolate and jelly and mousse and stuff. The trick is to make them look real, and not get distracted by trying to make something that tastes good. Unfortunately they don’t have to make the tray and the pinecones and the glass of brandy out of chocolate — that would be a REAL challenge, right?

Kirsten explains exactly what’s in the fake fruit, just so Ben and Diana understand how stupidly hard it is to make them — indeed it is now clear that there is no rational justification for anyone making this dish at all. They have six hours to make the fruits, and it’s impossible to think of a worse way to spend six hours.

The challenge begins. Ben immediately starts reading the recipe extremely slowly. He hopes to have finished reading it by the fourth or fifth hour. Meanwhile Diana declares she needs to wipe out the people on the balcony but sadly she doesn’t mean it literally.

“This is so hard — I do not envy either of them,” says Karlie, lying more blatantly than anyone has ever lied. You don’t envy them Karlie? You didn’t make the final, but you don’t envy the people who did? Then what were you in the competition for in the FIRST PLACE?

Anyway.

There’s a lot of cooking stuff going on now. It’s not very interesting. There’s a lot of cinnamon and sugar and hazelnuts and milk and things.

The people on the balcony call Diana “Di-zy”. Interesting.

Ben is struggling to understand the recipe. “I hate following recipes,” he declares, and this is probably because most recipes aren’t for ice-cream. He starts burning some alcohol. The people on the balcony tell him he’s burning some alcohol. “It’s supposed to,” he says. Kirsten comes over to ask him why he’s burning alcohol. He looks at the recipe. He doesn’t know why he’s burning the alcohol. Apparently the part of the recipe that says, “don’t burn the alcohol” looked to him like “make sure you burn all the alcohol”. Maybe he hates reading recipes because they have words in them.

Meanwhile Diana is actually doing things right. But it’s still cooking stuff so it’s boring. Apparently it’s hard to gauge whether the sugar has dissolved. We’ve all been there.

Ben has to start his sugar syrup again because he set fire to it the first time. Gary and Kirsten come over to slow him down a bit more. Kirsten watches what Ben’s doing and once again asks him why he’s doing it. Ben once again doesn’t know. “Read the recipe,” Kirsten says. With any luck the tenth or eleventh time he’s told to read the recipe, he might try doing it.

Ben is upset. He is concerned that “with this attitude”, he won’t get his dish up. By “this attitude”, he means “the attitude of just randomly tossing some ingredients together and hoping they somehow turn into realistic chocolate fruit by themselves”. George comes over to ask what’s wrong and try to force him to cuddle him. Ben says he can’t beat Diana because she’s too good and she can read. George tells him it’s his mind playing tricks on him and wouldn’t he feel better if he spooned for a bit. Ben’s son interjects by yelling “I’m proud of you dad!” Suddenly Ben is galvanised and springs back into action. To be honest I think having a son shout that he’s proud of you is cheating. Diana doesn’t have an adorable child to shout poignant phrases at her — how is she supposed to get by?

More cooking now. The mandarin cream is very important. “This cook is a marathon,” says Diana, but she’s incorrect: it is a cook.

It is time for Diana to check her sugar-crusted liqueur, which is a tricky thing that takes a long time to do and at the end if it’s not right everything is fucked. And it’s not right, it’s not liquid like it should be, so everything is fucked. Kirsten tells Diana what she must have done wrong an hour and a half ago, because Kirsten lives for rubbing salt into people’s wounds. Diana now has a big decision to make: does she do the liqueur all over again and risk running out of time to make her fake apple; or does she use the bad ones to make sure she has an apple to plate up; or does she say, “This is stupid” and spit in Kirsten’s eye? She makes one of the two wrong choices, and does it over again.

Good news for Diana is that Ben’s liqueur is fucked as well — and he doesn’t have ingredients to make it again, so he just has to give up on it. Or spit in Kirsten’s eye, but he’s as cowardly as Diana it would seem.

Hey, even Diana’s boyfriend calls her Di-zy. Did he just pick that up today from being on the balcony? Wheels within wheels. Anyway, Diana is trying her sugar liqueur again and it doesn’t work again, which is pretty funny.

Diana feels defeated, but she shouldn’t, because that comes a bit later. “This is probably the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life — right now it’s all slipping away,” she says. But she needs to remember: Ben isn’t much good at this either. There’s always a chance when mutual incompetence is in play.

Luckily, just when Diana feels like giving up, a bunch of annoying people on a balcony shout at her, so everything is fine. “I know I have it in me, and I can’t stop,” she affirms. But she has to, because George is talking and we all have to stop and listen to his nonsense.

While Ben fumbles about with his pointless fruit, Diana can see light at the end of the tunnel, as many train crash victims have before her. “I need to show the judges that I can do this,” she says, grasping the premise of the show in the nick of time.

As the fake fruit begin to take shape, the sheer futility of the exercise really starts to hit home. Who wants these things? How is this helping anyone? What crucial cooking skills are these finalists neglecting due to a obsessive focus on making idiotically elaborate desserts that nobody actually wants to eat? Meanwhile everyone on the balcony is yelling in a really hostile fashion, angry as hell that Ben and Diana aren’t paying them enough attention. Jess screams her resentment at not being the star of the show. Ben’s family urges his son to “look at your dad”, because after six hours of this he’s understandably getting a little bored.

Time is up. Ben is proud of what he did today. Ben’s son is crying: it’s possible he hasn’t been allowed to go to the toilet. “Food is my life,” Ben says, and by food he means ice-cream.

Diana hugs her mother, who looks like she doesn’t think much of these public displays of emotion. “I was so determined to finish that I had to hide all my emotions,” says Diana, despite the fact she’s been sobbing and wailing and grimacing the whole way through.

When you think about it it’s amazing that this show is still going. I don’t even remember a time I wasn’t watching this finale.

Judging time, and George says some slightly creepy things to Diana, and then the judges taste. Dunno why, the whole point of this dish is how it looks — if taste mattered you wouldn’t need to drive innocent people to the point of total mental breakdown trying to make them look like real fruit.

Diana’s fake fruit are fine and that’s good I suppose.

In comes Ben and the judges tell him they are proud of him and that they are his real father. They then try his fake fruit. “How good does that look?” asks George, and Matt uses too many words to answer him. Gary says they look real but surprise twist: they do not. But let’s go along with this fiction shall we? “How good’s that mandarin?” George asks — why is he asking all these questions? Why doesn’t he taste for himself?

It is finally time for scoring. Gary makes a stirring speech about how far they’ve come, having started with twenty-three of the country’s best amateur cooks, plus Benita. And then the scores — Diana on 57, Ben on 54, forty more points available. Could this come…DOWN TO THE WIRE? Haha, imagine!

Ben gets 35, bringing his final score to 89. So Diana needs 33 to beat him. Or more than 33 if by some crazy coincidence somehow we ended up with a margin of more than one.

Oh wow, Diana got exactly 33, what a freakish coincidence, she wins by one point. Incredible.

Diana receives $250,000, a monthly column in Delicious magazine, and the right to evict a restaurateur of her choice from their premises and set up her own restaurant there. As runner-up, Ben receives his own ice-cream scoop and a coupon for $50 worth of pet supplies from Petland.

Tune in tomorrow, when some crap will be on.

Out now! Aussie Aussie Aussie! Take me home in paperback!