Masterchef Recap: I have to admit it’s getting Bretter
Previously, on Masterchef Australia, two of the competition’s best cooks found themselves facing elimination…
At least that’s what Mr Voiceover would have us believe, but obviously the fact they faced elimination proves they were actually two of the competition’s worst cooks. Such is the world of Masterchef, where up is down and black is white and mushrooms are pheasant.
Anyway today the invention test is the “recipe relay”, an extremely difficult challenge with no useful applications in the real world whatsoever. But before we get to that, we must of course face the Mystery Box, the most pointless piece of padding outside an 80s power suit.
Today’s Mystery Box contains a bunch of incredibly ugly things that apparently taste good if you believe Matt Preston, but does anyone? Things like monkfish, chicken livers, Moreton Bay bugs. The task is to cook something out of it that won’t make anyone vomit very much. Obviously the winner gets a HUUUUUUUUUUGE ADVANTAGE going in to the invention test, which obviously means they get a small advantage that won’t help them.
Anastasia decides to make a blue cheese parfait, because it’s 2016 and every contestant signed an agreement to make more than fifty parfaits each by the end of the season. “I really like the idea of making a savoury parfait,” she says, just spitting in the face of logic and reason and right-thinking people the world over who know, for a FACT, that making a savoury parfait is a repellent idea at the best of times, and an especially bad one this year, the Year of Obsessive-Compulsive Parfait Making.
Karmen really wants to make a dessert, for the very simple reason that she always wants to make a dessert, only knows how to make desserts, and has never in her life made anything but desserts.
Matt wanders over to Elena’s bench. Elena is using the horn melon, which causes Matt to say that she’s “the expert in horn melons”, which causes Elena to giggle nervously like a woman being hit on by her boyfriend’s uncle at a funeral. It’s an awkward moment not relieved at all by cutting to Theresa, who has not stopped talking since the beginning of the show, or indeed the beginning of her life. I don’t see why, just because Theresa suffers severely from verbal diarrhoea, that the producers have to put every excretion on screen.
Anastasia’s blue cheese parfait looks disgusting, but only because it’s disgusting. She realises she can’t serve it, so decides to change tack and make a chicken liver parfait. A CHICKEN LIVER PARFAIT. My GOD, what is wrong with these people? At this stage I am starting to suspect that Anastasia thinks parfait is the only form in which food comes.
Back to Theresa, who has her fingers crossed that her Moreton Bay bugs and monkfish cook properly, because she possesses no skill and pretty much just has to hope things turn out well.
Meanwhile Elena has a lot of different textures and tastes, usually a fatal error.
Karmen is making blue cheese ice cream cones, but God only knows why. At least ice cream isn’t a parfait. Just.
Theresa is second-guessing herself, but she’s got to make a decision, so she decides to keep crossing her fingers.
Some other people are cooking but are very unimportant, including Chloe and Harry and some others.
Karmen is running between her bench and the freezer. She has a massive problem: her tuiles are too thick, which is really art imitating life. She needs to make more tuiles but time is running out and it would all be pretty tense and dramatic if this wasn’t a mystery box challenge and therefore pointless.
Anastasia’s parfaits haven’t set. This is no less than just punishment for making parfaits. She’s failed to make two kinds of parfait today and she deserves the misery she has brought upon herself.
Meanwhile Karmen’s cones are falling apart. Surprisingly, she doesn’t try to whip up a parfait in the remaining thirty seconds.
The first dish the judges would like to taste belongs to Theresa, who is smug as hell. Her bug is undercooked, and also sick of listening to her. Everyone claps her anyway, but there’s a really sarcastic look on Elise’s face that is pretty hilarious.
The judges now call up Karmen, who is worried because her dish looks rubbish and tastes weird, two very good reasons to be worried. “Sorry George,” she says, noticeably not apologising to the other judges because George is the only one whose feelings she gives a shit about. “How are we supposed to eat it?” asks Matt, gazing at the deformed ice cream cones lying prostrate across the crappy little cakes.
“The winning element for me is the horn melon syrup,” says Gary, a sickening euphemism.
Next up, Elena, who has shaken off the earlier sexual harassment to make a buttered bug, which is basically a bug that has been buttered. Although this sounds like the sort of thing that the CIA force-feeds into terrorists’ anuses, apparently it’s fantastic and Matt wants to eat it with a sloppy smile on his face which is pretty creepy.
Naturally Elena wins for not being garbage, and she gets the HUUUUUUUUUGE ADVANTAGE of choosing between honey and lemon, bacon and maple, and orange and fennel. She chooses honey and lemon, cleverly avoiding the trap that has been set for her: anyone choosing orange and fennel is immediately sectioned.
Forty-five minutes into the episode we finally get to the bloody point: the relay. The rules of the relay are:
Three teams of four.
Only one member of each team cooks at any one time.
Each cook does not know until their turn what the dish being cooked is.
There is a 45-second handover period between contestants.
At some point, someone has to do something completely insane.
It’s an extremely difficult challenge, combining the difficulty of cooking food with the difficulty of not having any idea what’s going on, with the difficulty of trying to see the point.
So we begin, with Harry for the yellow team, Theresa for the blue team, and Matt the Amateur for the red team. The one thing that Matt the Amateur wants to establish is the protein. He wants us to be very clear that protein is present. He begins cutting up a chicken and placing it in a pressure cooker.
Meanwhile, five minutes in, Theresa is still walking aimlessly around the pantry. “I wish we’d been able to discuss what we were cooking,” she says, inadvertently stumbling upon the entire premise of the challenge. “I can’t afford to waste any more time…I’m going to start making a dessert,” she decides, having taken most of her cooking time up deciding to do what she wanted to do anyway. She’s going to make a prosecco and lemon jelly, but her demeanour suggests that she doesn’t really know what that is. She expresses a hope that her team has a better idea, which shouldn’t be hard.
Out in the garden, Brett is hoping that Harry has a solid idea, which may be a forlorn hope given that Harry is making a trifle. Meanwhile Matt the Amateur is trying to make a visual map on his benchtop, rather than doing the logical thing and writing the recipe down on with tomato sauce.
The first handover happens. The amateurs babble breathlessly for 45 seconds. Gary yells that time’s up. Harry keeps babbling. He should be disqualified but he’s not. Harry, Theresa and Matt the Amateur are led to a secure facility.
Trent is hoping to balance his flavours really well: a bold strategy. Heather has correctly identified the fact that Theresa has done basically nothing, and that her job is to try to make up for her teammate’s pathetic ineptitude.
“You don’t want to be in an elimination, do you?” shouts George, and the three amateurs, by now quite well-versed in the culinary arts, all answer correctly.
At this point, Brett makes a fateful decision. Possibly remembering how last year, a contestant completely changing the dish mid-relay destroyed his team’s chances, Brett has opted to completely change the dish. Because when you’ve got only one hour between four people to make something, the best thing you can do is completely throw away the first fifteen minutes’ work.
Brett is making pastry, after being told by Harry that the dish is a trifle. George asks him what he’s doing. “Harry’s left us with a few ideas,” says Brett, the most shameless bald-faced lie to ever be told on this show. He’s making a lemon meringue tart, the dessert of choice for those who find trifles too complex and don’t realise how long pastry takes to make.
Time for another handover, and Harry restrains himself admirably from beating Brett’s face into a bloody pulp. The other teams are still doing some things too, but we have to be honest: Brett’s brutal betrayal of Harry is what this show is all about right now. Anastasia is still trying to pull the blue team back from the brink of Theresa’s trainwreck start, and even that pales into comparison with the trials of the yellow team. Mimi is frantically trying to get Brett’s idiotic lemon meringue pie into shape, cursing the male ego with every second.
Time for the final handover, and Chloe is totally baffled by Anastasia’s rambling drunken anecdote about her ingredients. Elise is given the poisoned lemon meringue chalice. The red team is also probably doing something. Meanwhile in the viewing room Harry continues to ponder whether he could plead the charge down to manslaughter.
Chloe is busily putting elements together and tasting everything on the bench. She keeps tasting. She’s tasting everything. There is a real risk of Chloe eating the blue team’s entire dish.
George asks Elise where the invention is in her dish. She has no idea because Brett put the invention in the bin. George angrily storms off. Elise vows that one day Brett will pay for what he’s done.
The red team has been relatively calm and composed till now, but Karmen is now feeling the pressure, having to plate up a savoury dish: something she has never done before. She has forgotten about the carrots in the oven. Indeed she has forgotten about the existence of carrots in general, because carrots aren’t desserts. In the viewing room the red team screams at Karmen to get the carrots. She can’t hear them because they are in a different room to her. Eventually though she does get the carrots, but she doesn’t put them on the plate because they are overcooked because she forgot about them because she was thinking about parfait.
Time is up. Harry pretends to like the lemon meringue tart and that his teammates worked well and that he is not going to suffocate Brett in his sleep tonight. Karmen is haunted by the carrots. Chloe is full.
The red team’s dish is served first. Gary wonders where the carrots are. Karmen admits she forgot them and they were burnt and she didn’t know how to put them on the plate and she’s a bit slow. Nevertheless, the chicken is apparently quite tasty and at least they didn’t have Brett on their team.
But here is the yellow team, with its depressing tart. “What did you originally start with?” asks Matt, and Harry has to admit that at the start of the challenge, he hadn’t actually planned to hate Brett this much. George gives them credit because there is a pastry and there is honey and lemon and the yellow team has really shown its peerless ability to fulfil the bare minimum requirements of any task.
But maybe the yellows will do well, because the blue team claims to have made something called a “lemon honey cloud” and they may lose points for being wankers. They may also lose points for the judges not liking it, since the judges don’t like it.
In the least surprising event in the history of the world, the red team wins the challenge, benefiting from the unfair advantage of having no members who changed everything in the second leg, and no members who spent the first leg doing nothing.
The yellow team comes second because Gary says their tart was a triumph, which seems a bit of an overstatement. I mean it was just a tart. That means that the blue team is up for elimination and Theresa gets the chance to fail twice in one season.
Tune in tomorrow night, when a four-year-old enters the kitchen to hurl abuse at everyone.
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