Masterchef Recap: Celeriac Arrest

The great thing about dreams is that other people’s are sometimes destroyed. That’s what makes tonight so exciting — you know someone will be devastated beyond belief.

Do you remember Tim? There was some guy called Tim. Don’t remember him at all. He must’ve been fantastic.

Fireball.

Anyway.

It’s early morning and Chloe is dealing with the jarring, alien sensation of not being up for elimination. Lisa, however, is dealing with not not being up for elimination, and to prepare she puts on lipstick, which helps somehow. Meanwhile Hoda says it’s her nature not to give up, as if it’s up to her.

Sarah says she misses her husband and her kid every single day, and she’s been away from them for so long that she is willing to do anything to continue being away from them for as long as possible.

As Hoda notes, all three amateurs up for elimination are mums, which means that all three of them will be talking endlessly about their children to gain sympathy.

Gary welcomes them by saying that “you don’t win this competition without surviving a pressure test”, which is true unless you are actually good. Gary runs through the pressure tests that each woman has previously experienced, to make sure they are suitably panicked.

It is now time for Alla Wolf-Tasker, last of the warrior wolf-taskers who once ruled these lands with an iron fist on the backs of their work-oriented wolves, to enter with a cloche. Under the cloche is all the woes of mankind, and once released the world shall be doomed.

Alla tells the losers that the task she has set has many steps, but is theoretically possible to complete. The judges laugh at how impossible the challenge is and how terrified the women look. Alla lifts the cloche. On the plate is a bunch of brown and green and yellow things. If you were lost in the forest and on the brink of starvation, it would definitely be something you would be grateful to stumble across under a bush. Alla calls it “Autumn Harvest”, because it’s the kind of thing that might fall out of a tree. However, contrary to appearances, it’s actually insanely complicated and you can’t just make it by setting off a firecracker in a pantry. It has egg and duck and stuff in it, it just doesn’t seem worth it.

Whoever cooks the least impressive dish will be going home, Gary informs them, a twist in the rules that nobody saw coming.

“My strategy today is to stay super-focused,” says Sarah, who does not know the meaning of the word “strategy”.

“I look at the recipe and there is so many things to do,” says Hoda, who finds this surprising for some reason, “so I’m going to be focused.” Being focused is the theme of the day.

Meanwhile Lisa does a “quick scan” of the recipe and gets straight into making the dish without actually knowing how, which suggests a certain lack of focus, or at least of intelligence.

It’s time for Hoda to take the duck skin off the breasts — grooming is important even in the kitchen. Sarah warns of the perils of having too much fat, something that is much worse than having exactly the right amount of fat.

“Come on Lisa!” shout the balcony-dwellers, yet to learn the simple virtues of keeping your mouth shut.

Sarah reveals that she loves Alla’s food because of its earthy flavours — she specialises in cooking with dirt. We briefly cut to Sarah collecting sea cucumbers or something, and then cut back as the editor is jolted awake.

Khanh and Chloe share a joke about eggs as they watch Hoda make pasta, which hopefully is part of the dish, otherwise this will be a real misstep. Meanwhile Lisa is obsessing over her duck’s skin, rubbing lotion on its t-zone.

George and Alla visit Lisa’s bench, where Lisa reveals she has been putting holes in the skin — possibly she means the duck skin, but there’s no certainty in anyone’s mind. Alla asks Lisa if she’s read the recipe. Lisa, a culinary genius, admits she hasn’t. George and Alla advise her to read the recipe — this is the kind of thing the top chefs usually need to be told. Lisa discovers there is no point whatsoever to poking holes in the skin, and George and Alla walk away laughing at her.

Lisa is a bit stressed, and tries to calm herself by rubbing her hands in flour and egg, a meditative technique practised by the monks of Tibet. The balcony cheers for her, but they also cheer for Hoda, and for Sarah, so they are fickle shits whose views cannot be trusted in the least.

Hoda puts duck eggs into a sous vide machine at 63 degrees for an hour, and why not, after all. Sarah does the same, but she only puts in the yolk. George and Alla pop by to tell her that she, like Lisa, might benefit from reading the fucking recipe. She discovers that she was actually supposed to put the whole egg in. Everyone is learning so much today about cooking and food and how if you want to make the food that the recipe is for, reading the recipe is in some ways a positive first step.

Sarah takes her crispy duck skin out of the oven. “It’s nice and golden,” she says, as the camera zooms in on the duck skin which is clearly pink.

Hoda is working on chestnut, kale and sage, which are the parts of Alla’s dish that add the vital element of disgust that all fine dining needs.

“Everyone’s neck and neck,” says Reece to Sashi, who diffidently answers, “yeah”, hoping Reece will stop talking to him soon. Down on the floor everyone’s making pasta even though you can get it really cheap from Coles.

“What you probably need to be doing is folding it in and then put it through the same size roller,” says Alla to Hoda, for some reason giving advice on laundry now. Sarah has put her pasta in the fridge, which doesn’t sound right.

Now Sarah moves on to carrots. “I’m a little obsessed with carrots,” she says, not sounding anywhere near as ashamed of this as she should be. “Time’s moving on, I really need to get my carrots on,” she adds, probably referring to cooking but possibly, given her fixation, talking about making some kind of horrible vegetable jumpsuit.

Hoda hasn’t started her carrots, forcing Matt and Alla to publicly carrot-shame her. Aldo stares down at her, disgust at her carrot-tardiness written all over his face. In a panic, Hoda burns her hand on the pot of oil, causing her problems as she uses her hands quite a lot in her cooking. Ignoring the blinding agony of her horribly burnt hand, she keeps cooking, risking permanent disability for the sake of her veloute, like any good Masterchef would.

Gary is shouting at the losers because he wants them to lose focus, in his mischievous way. Sarah has moved on to her chestnut puree, a vital element of the Autumn Harvest as it’s the chestnut puree that provides that distinctive feeling that you are eating a tree.

Lisa is doing things with eggs that would be considered pretty perverted if she didn’t have a Masterchef apron on. Hoda is doing the same, only more awkwardly because she is nearly passing out from the pain in her hand. Meanwhile everyone on the balcony is asking Sarah about her eggs and she is pushed past her limit. “Stop telling me,” she snaps at them, making herself a hero to all viewers. Next time hopefully she will scream it and drop the c-word.

Lisa is nervous, possibly because Alla is hovering around her bench watching her every move, but also possibly because she knows she’s not good at this.

George expresses disbelief that Sarah hasn’t made her celeriac puree yet. Everyone watching expresses disbelief that anyone makes celeriac puree ever. Sarah decides to speed the process up by doing the puree in the microwave. I didn’t realise this was an option. Why doesn’t everyone do everything in the microwave? This show would run at a cracking pace if everyone used microwaves for everything. Idiots.

“You’ve gotta get it on the plate, love,” Kristen calls from the balcony. “Oh really, Kristen?” replies Sarah. “I had no idea that putting food on the plate was necessary in this process, thanks for letting me know, that’s a real obscure technical point I would never have thought of without your absolutely wise and valued advice, thank you so much.”

She didn’t say that, but she should have. “Gotta get it on the plate.” Fucking hell.

Lisa is trying to get as much as she can on the plate, crossing her fingers that some of what she puts on will end up being something from Alla’s recipe. “COME ON LISA!” someone screams orgasmically from the balcony, following it up with “COME ON SARAH” and making the “COME ON LISA” meaningless thereby.

The judges count down, and time is up. The losers hug each other while desperately hoping one of the others fails miserably. Lisa admits to being quite emotional because she feels she hasn’t done Alla’s dish justice — her dish looks like the forest after a bushfire instead of just before one.

Sarah has forgotten her chestnut puree, a disastrous development as a dish without chestnuts is like a night sky without the ghost of your father looking sternly at you.

Hoda serves her Autumn Harvest first. “Stubborn’s my middle name,” she tells the judges, who didn’t ask her what her middle name was. Weird little non sequitur there.

The judges taste Hoda’s thingummy. Her carrots are hard, demonstrating a depth of depravity few could have imagined. Otherwise it seems fine, but hard carrots are pretty immoral.

Lisa serves next. The judges don’t say, “What the fuck is this bullshit?” when they look at her dish, but they’re definitely thinking it. “I’m not ready to leave,” says Lisa. “Who’s waiting for you at home?” asks George, seemingly implying that there are assassins ready to ambush her.

Gary is extremely excited about how plump the egg yolk is. He needs to get laid. The judges taste Lisa’s whatsit. There’s too much puree. There’s too much sauce. It’s terrible. Everyone hates it. Everyone hates Lisa. Alla and the judges take out a photograph of her and spit on it.

Sarah comes in with her ugly dish. She cries as she relates the tragic tale of her chestnut puree and how there isn’t any on the plate. The judges find her lack of puree disturbing. They taste. Matt shrugs, as if coming to terms with the essential worthlessness of humanity. Alla claims she is not eating enough chestnut, always an issue for women of a certain age.

The judges have to decide what’s more important: flavour or missing ingredients. It’s a vexed issue, and if Wittgenstein and Descartes failed to reach a satisfactory conclusion I don’t see how these people stand a chance of untangling this thread.

In the end, though, they have a stab and decide the answer is that Lisa sucks and has to go home. Let this be a lesson to you all: go easy on the celeriac puree, or face oblivion.

And so it was that a surfeit of puree caused the most likeable loser to leave. Vale Lisa, good luck with the pop up you plan to open shortly to compete with the pop ups that every other Masterchef contestant is currently opening every damn day.

Tune in tomorrow when pins are on the line but not the good kind of pins, immunity pins.

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