Masterchef Recap: Butterfaces

Previously on Masterchef, the Top Ten received a massive reward: ten thousand dollars deposited direct from the bank accounts of George Calombaris’s employees. Tonight, the three worst cooks remaining are forced to plumb the depths of despair in a pressure test that brings new meaning to the phrase, “cooking is hard for some people”.

Look at how Ben sharpens those knives. I’d keep an eye on him.

We begin with Sarah doing her eyebrows. This is important as fifty percent of the points in pressure tests are awarded for precise cosmetic application. Jess declares that the more she does pressure tests, the more confident she feels, which is weird, because in fact repeatedly doing pressure tests is an indication that you’re not very good. Meanwhile Chloe says she will “do what I do in every elimination” — rely on blind luck.

“When you walk in here on pressure test day there’s only two things on your mind: hope or fear,” says Gary, who seems to have forgotten “food”.

“The best dishes aren’t always served in the poshest restaurants,” Matt lies, before introducing today’s guest chef, who that remark was clearly intended to subtly insult. It is Saransh Goila, who has come all the way from Mumbai to scoff at the sheer hopelessness of these pathetic amateurs.

The dish to be cooked is butter chicken. Not normal butter chicken though, fancypants butter chicken that is all complicated and hard. Jess is shattered as yet again her desire to be set a caramel sundae is shattered.

Saransh asks the amateurs to note that his butter chicken contains smoke, which requires extreme skill and the burning of human flesh to get just right. Sarah is panicking because Saransh is going to notice if she does something wrong — she had her fingers crossed that the guest chef would be extremely bad at noticing whether their dish was cooked well or not.

Saransh describes his dish carefully, manfully ignoring George’s unnecessary interjections. Having no idea what they’re doing, the amateurs retreat to their benches. “I’d love to read this recipe in full,” says Sarah, immediately signalling her intention to fuck the whole thing up royally.

Chloe attempts to debone the chicken. She has had trouble with chicken before, as chicken is technically food and that’s never been Chloe’s forte in the kitchen. Jess already has her chicken deboned and cut, the little swot.

Gary and Saransh visit Jess’s bench to make sure that she is well distracted from her task. Saransh tells her she has to make the “base gravy”. Jess has no idea what he’s talking about. Gary reveals that this means “sauce”. Jess is relieved, as she actually did know she had to make sauce. It was in the recipe, so Sarah may not know about it.

Sarah has noticed that Chloe and Jess are ahead of her. Reece notices that Sarah has put her chicken in the marinade with the skin on. Sashi hopes that she has read the recipe correctly, which is delusional of him: he knows she has’t read the recipe correctly. So does she, in fact: the first thing she said when she started was that she did not intend to read the recipe correctly.

“Make sure you’re reading that recipe, yeah?” says Kristen from the balcony. “Yeah,” says Sarah, pretty sarcastically, seeing no need to heed any warnings from the plebs on the balcony who were much better than her yesterday.

The soundtrack starts playing that creepy mental-hospital piano music as Jess works on her sauce, and then moves on to making the paper-thin roti, which she believes is the highlight of the dish against all glaringly obvious evidence.

The roti is blowing Chloe’s mind, which admittedly isn’t a major task. “It’s a very wet dough,” she says, as if this is interesting. Saransh visits her bench to let her in on a secret: time is running out and she sucks.

Speaking of sucking, Sarah is starting on her roti and Saransh has come around to remind her of her own inadequacies. “I have absolutely zero idea of how this mixture is supposed to look,” says Sarah, but surely she has some idea. She knows it’s not supposed to look like a steak.

Chloe prepares her chicken for the grill. Ben asks pointless questions from the balcony in a cunning attempt to ruin her life. Gary and Saransh make insulting insinuations about her competence, but move away so Gary can shout about smells.

Sarah is still behind and is trying to catch up on the bits of the recipe she missed. Gary and Saransh giggle behind their hands about how terrible she is. George pops by to question her about how far behind she is, thus causing her to fall further behind by wasting time answering his questions.

Reece believes Sarah has created too much smoke, but I wouldn’t take his word for it. Smoke is rising from Sarah’s grill in enormous billows a la Mount Doom in the cursed land of Mordor. There are clearly no smoke detectors in the Masterchef kitchen and the whole place is a horrific fire hazard. As several cast and crew pass out from smoke inhalation, Sarah comes to a stunning realisation: she was supposed to take the skin off.

As Sarah’s world goes up in smoke, Saransh is flirting with Jess. Jess is happy with how her sauce looks, but that’s a typically naive millennial attitude isn’t it. Ben continues to call out from the balcony to show how much he hates all these women.

Chloe is moving on to the chutney, as, eventually, must we all. “I have to be really careful with the consistency of this chutney,” she says in the weary tones of a woman who is frankly fed up with having to do these interminable interviews after the challenge pretending that they’re taking place during the challenge even though that is clearly impossible and everyone knows what’s going on.

Sarah’s chicken is cooked through, if a little bit dark, but she’s no racist. She finds a new burst of enthusiasm because she is now smoking some butter with some coal, and butter is apparently her favourite thing in the world. She’s a weird one. “That looks good,” says Saransh, the smooth-talking rascal.

Meanwhile Jess looks confused and can’t remember what Saransh’s sauce tasted like, memory loss being a common affliction of teens. Khanh has noticed that Jess hasn’t added her coal butter to the sauce, and hopes it doesn’t affect the flavour too much, but he’s smiling while he says it, so he’s probably actually really happy about the fuck-up. I guess he hates Jess.

The balcony-dwellers mockingly shout useless advice at Chloe while she struggles to make her dough thin enough, a vital element of this essentially fat-shaming dish.

“Fifteen minutes to go!” shouts Matt, who I had assumed had left the building hours ago. The judges ask Sarah what she’s worried about. She’s worried about being pestered by annoying judges, but she doesn’t say so. Meanwhile Chloe is flipping her dough, if you know what I mean.

“Come on Chloe, you’ve gotta move,” yells a complete dickhead from the balcony. Sarah is really happy that she got a dish up, which is the hallmark of the loser. Time is up and Jess tries to scream triumphantly but can’t because she’s quite shy.

“I’m quite proud of myself,” says Jess, “I did it, I made butter chicken.” Steady on Jess. I mean, even I’ve made butter chicken, and I’m basically a cretin.

Time for judging. “The question is, will someone nail it?” says Gary, incorrectly: the question is, how badly did Sarah fuck this up?

Chloe serves first. At first glance Saransh thinks she’s done a good job, but Chloe specialises in fooling people with looks. They taste her butter chicken and it’s basically perfect. “I can’t believe it, it looks like I have cooked this,” says Saransh, essentially admitting that the dish is not that difficult to cook and any idiot can do it.

Basically Chloe’s is fine.

Sarah serves next. She is extremely worried that her chicken is burnt, which I guess might stem from the massive inferno she caused earlier on. She says that if she goes home today she’ll keep working on her dream, which would seem to be tricky given her dream is to win Masterchef. But also she has a dream of making people eat on a farm or some weird thing.

Anyway. Sarah’s butter chicken is OK but not like Saransh’s dish and also it’s not really OK at all.

In comes Jess, who is hoping she has done enough to be better than Sarah the firebug. Her butter chicken is fine. But then after saying it’s fine the judges say it’s not actually fine at all. They can’t make up their frigging minds.

It is time to break a heart forever. But first they have to blow smoke up Chloe for a bit. Though not too much smoke, just enough to give it a lovely subtle flavour.

And then they get around to telling Sarah and Jess that they’re both shamefully awful cooks, but that Sarah is slightly more shameful, so she has to piss off and cook mud or whatever it is she wants to do. “Oh Sarah,” says George in that way that he always does to irritate us all.

Sarah bursts into tears and threatens to force Chloe and Jess to live with her. The epilogue informs us that Sarah is launching Wild, a pop-up restaurant in Tasmania, and hopes to open her own restaurant later in the year. Which isn’t saying much. I mean, we can all “hope” to open our own restaurants.

Tune in tomorrow when immunity etc.

Sarah’s dream is dead, but you can keep mine alive by donating to my Patreon.