Masterchef Recap: Alla Wrong Now
Only five amateurs remain:
- Matt the Amateur, who has used his long reach and well-researched earrings to achieve culinary OK-ness
- Elena, who is going to win
- Harry, whose hair is interesting and who knows how to use a blender
- Elise, who cannot pronounce most of the things she cooks
- Mimi
Today they are all standing next to a lake, and next to the lake is the Lake House, the restaurant of Alla Wolf-Tasker, whose story is inspiring to Elena, even though her story is just, “We built a restaurant and then we opened it.”
Each amateur will have to make one of Alla’s signature dishes, to be allocated in the traditional manner: by holding knives. Each dish will make up one course of a meal for forty people. Forty dishes, goodness that’s a lot of work. Although obviously the only people who matter are the judges, so really they only have to make their meals — the forty diners can go hungry, it won’t make any difference.
Gary warns them that Alla’s reputation is on the line, which is a blatant lie because everyone eating there today knows they’re eating Masterchef contestants’ cooking, so please don’t insult our intelligence, Gary. I mean, come on.
Harry is making the first course so he starts first, which seems logical. The first course is eel, the dish of choice for the person who feels like fish but finds ordinary fish doesn’t resemble snake enough. He says he’s excited about cooking eel, which I find extremely weird and off-putting. I think Harry’s lost a lot of fans here: nobody likes a man who gets excited about eels. He starts pulling the spines out of some eels and it looks a lot like a scene from Predator.
Next is Mimi, who is making a chicken thingummajig. I don’t know exactly what it is, but Alla says the dish worries her, making one wonder why she serves it. Mimi has to pick herbs, which is very unfair: she’s a cook, not a hunter-gatherer.
Elise is making kangaroo with kale puree. Alla speaks rather rudely to Elise about how she’s going to make her do it over and over again if she doesn’t do the kale puree right. You get the feeling Alla has no confidence in Elise’s ability to puree kale and she is judging her without giving her a chance.
Gary comes in to tell everyone their energy is too low, while Alla watches sourly beside him. Meanwhile Harry makes the shocking discovery that eels have bones in them and that he has to take them out.
This is a massive setback for Harry, who is quite rightly aggrieved that nobody told him about eels and their bones before he started. It’s so typical that he would get an eel dish on the one day that he didn’t read through his ichthyology textbook the night before. He solves the problem by cutting out the bit with the bones in it. This leaves very little eel meat to use, but luckily the dish he’s making is one of those stupid pretentious ones with hardly anything on the plate, so it should be fine.
Elena gets to work on her plums, while Matt the Amateur gets stuck into his berries. Alla tells Matt the Amateur that the berry dish is “one of our country rambles”, a special thing the Lake House does where you put a bunch of crap you found in a bush on the plate and charge a really high price for it.
Matt the Amateur is worried because he’s being forced once again to make a dessert, and desserts scare him because a dessert killed his parents. It seems so unfair that people who prefer savoury dishes keep getting forced to make desserts, and people who prefer desserts keep getting forced to make savoury dishes. It’s almost as if the competition is designed to test a variety of different culinary skills. Bastards.
Harry has his eel strips ready to go, but lacking sufficient eel for the job, his dish will contain less eel than is strictly correct. Luckily nobody wants to eat eel, so this will actually be an advantage.
Elise is just about to blanche her kale. Her kale needs to be “vibrant” and “fresh” and other words that people on Masterchef say without knowing what they mean. She also has to wrap her kangaroo loins, which is no job for a lady.
Meanwhile Matt the Amateur is tempering chocolate, which he will use to make twigs. This is part of the modern trend for people to eat things that resemble dirt and sticks out of some kind of deep-seated guilt.
With ten minutes till Harry’s first course goes out, George starts shouting at him about how heavily the customers are drinking, as if that’s his fault. Alla demands that Mimi tell her she’s doing well, which just goes to show that Alla is poorly-equipped for a position of command. Good leaders want honest feedback, Alla.
Anyway Mimi is quite flustered because there’s a lot to do, which has taken her completely by surprise. One of the things she has to do is reduce chicken stock for her jus gras, which she’s completely forgotten and now doesn’t have enough time to do. Mimi has only two options: make her dish badly, or chloroform Alla and run.
George comes into the kitchen for one of his famous ineffectual pep babbles. “Just put it in a pot and cook it!” he urges her, in what may be the least valuable piece of advice anyone has ever given anyone else throughout history. Mimi decides to follow George’s advice and simply trust her instincts, much like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, a movie which is not real.
Harry’s service is starting and Gary wants to know when he’s going to get something on the plates, even though frankly that’s none of his business.
Oh of course Harry’s dish has beetroot in it. Ugh.
He’s pretty happy with all his elements but he’s not sure about the eel, and so say all of us. As the plates go out among the diners, the diners look carefully at them in an attempt to discover where the food is. It’s somewhere there on the plate, but it’s damn hard to find.
The judges have a go at the eel. Gary is happy for Harry. George thinks it’s delicious. Matt, always the pedant, thinks there’s not enough eel. He believes there’s so little eel it’s become a beetroot dish, and it’s hard to say which sounds more revolting.
Meanwhile Elise is still doing the freaking kale puree. She asks Alla whether the colour is vibrant enough. Alla sort of shrugs: she doesn’t really care, she was just trying to scare Elise earlier.
It’s time for Mimi’s service to start and Mimi is not ready. “We really need to push now,” says Alla, as if a cook whose food isn’t ready can just “push” and that will somehow make uncooked food become cooked without going through any intervening process.
Gary is impressed that Mimi managed to get her dish plated up, because he’s always thought Mimi was a bit crap. After tasting, he says, “the wheels have fallen off the wagon”, although he admits the dish is actually very tasty — it’s just not much like Alla’s dish. But then, maybe Alla’s dish sucks. Let’s open our minds to the possibility that Alla isn’t all that, right?
In the kitchen Alla embraces Mimi and tells her it’s OK, shamelessly ignoring the fact that it’s her fault Mimi is in this state.
Elise hasn’t tasted her kale puree yet, probably because her kale puree looks like radioactive mucus and the human brain automatically rebels against the thought of allowing it inside the body. But then she does and apparently the kale puree not only looks awful, but tastes awful. Which as I understand it is a problem, as this is one of those rare Masterchef challenges involving tasting.
Elise is worried that the puree will overpower the entire dish with its nauseating bright green vomit taste. Luckily there’s not much puree on the plate. Unluckily, there’s not much of anything else on the plate. The Lake House is a restaurant extremely dedicated to showing its customers what the wide white expanses of its plates look like.
The tension is almost existent as Elena gets on with wrapping plum jelly around mousse, a task that no sane person would attempt. Meanwhile Matt the Amateur is making something called a pistachio sponge, god help us all.
Elena’s jelly isn’t rolling around the mousse. She thinks it’s too thick, but maybe it’s actually impossible. Maybe Alla has played us all for idiots. Maybe the entire competition is a goddamn lie. It seems more and more likely. I mean, jelly-wrapped mousse? Pretty far-fetched. Elena should’ve seen the signs, she’s a smart woman.
Elena gives up on wrapping the mousse and just drapes the jelly over it. What a failure. If not even Elena can summon the strength to carry on, what hope is there for any of us?
None. No hope. All hope is dead. Masterchef has killed the world’s soul.
Anyway the judges decide the jelly is too thick, which is hypocritical of them.
Meanwhile Alla is complimenting Matt the Amateur on how orderly his kitchen is in a sickening example of inappropriate workplace flirting. Matt the Amateur thinks he’s nailed the dessert, and is acting all smug and not even considering Elena’s feelings.
The judges love the last course blah blah blah. George says, “yummy” several times, which is somehow a really unsettling thing. Like imagine George whispering “yummy” in your ear. Imagine waking up in the night and he’s looming over you, saying, “yummy”. Think about how easy it is to imagine these things.
Anyway.
Matt the Amateur has dish of the day, and it’s probably churlish of me to find that as irritating as I do.
George tells Mimi and Elise that they both struggled today, but doesn’t make allowances for the fact that Alla’s dishes were dumb. It won’t help them: they’re through to elimination for their respective sins of runny jus and bitter mucus.
Joining them in elimination will be Harry, whose insufficient eel has lost out to Elena’s thick jelly. What a gross sentence.
And so it’s Harry versus Elise versus Mimi to see who will be turfed. The clash of the miniatures.
Tune in tomorrow to laugh at the funny little people making their silly dinners.
