Masterchef Recap: Cracking a Semi
So it’s all come down to this. Three ferocious competitors, battling with every ounce of strength they have, to turn raw ingredients into something that can technically be called food. The final battle will be long and arduous, and at the end one will stand triumphant, crowded Masterchef, Australia’s best amateur cook approximately. Meanwhile the other two, in accordance with tradition, will be set on fire as the cast and crew of the show spit on their screaming carcasses.
Who will win the day? Will it be Diana, who has overcome astonishing adversity to become a contestant that almost every Masterchef viewer recognises? Will it be Ben, who is now more creme anglaise than man? Or will it be Karlie, who has promised that if she wins Masterchef, she will for the first time in her life display visible emotion?
We begin with Ben gazing over a balcony, sipping a coffee and contemplating the fiery vengeance he plans to unleash upon the city once the competition grants him the resources.
Diana is in the kitchen making plans of her own. “Not so long ago I was just a home cook, and now here I am,” she says, as if this is a unique occurrence: every Masterchef finalist was a home cook a short time previously. That’s sort of the premise of the show.
Meanwhile Karlie makes notes and describes the “amazing feeling” of being a finalist. So apparently she does know what feelings are.
At the Masterchef kitchen, the eliminated amateurs are gathered on the balcony, with strict instructions to yell, hoot, badger and distract the final three at every opportunity. There are big cash bonuses on offer for amateurs who can throw off a finalist’s rhythm enough to cause them to burn something or sever a body part.
Gary informs the three that this is the last cook before the finale. This is confusing because I thought this was the finale. What’s going on? In what is apparently a semi-final, but not really because to be a semi-final there have to be two of them, the three must cook a main and a dessert for twenty people. Shannon Bennett, who lives in the pantry and is let out every five or six days to pester people, tells them, “you’re not contestants today — you’re chefs. We’re running a restaurant.” This is incorrect on all three counts: they actually ARE contestants; they are NOT chefs; and they’re definitely not running a restaurant. Has Shannon been hit on the head? He has no idea where he is.
The challenge for the trio will be to make both a main and a dessert, after having learnt over the course of the series that every dish should always be a dessert. Making something containing no ice-cream, sorbet, parfait or semifreddo will be a real mountain to climb, especially for Ben, who has made so many ice-creams the government now recognises the blast chiller as his common-law wife.
Up on the balcony, Sarah waxes lyrical about the three remaining contestants. “So talented, so creative,” she says, by which she means, “I’m better than all these fucking hacks, how the hell am I not down there?”
Meanwhile, Ben has become over-excited and spurted creme anglaise all over the place. Shannon tells him not to worry, it happens to all men at some point. Ben begins cutting up his pumpkins, in preparation for his dessert: a traditional Dutch dish called A Big Bunch of Pumpkin ’n’ Crap Like That. Ben tells Shannon that it’ll take half an hour to prepare the pumpkin — a claim that seems dubious more than an hour later as he continues to prepare his pumpkin.
With time ticking rapidly away, Shannon tells the contestants, “The time for mistakes is over!” Diana curses her poor planning: she hasn’t even STARTED on her mistakes yet. In the end she’ll just have to plate up a meal with no mistakes, and hope the flavours are enough to get her through.
Ben is still cutting up his pumpkin, as the contestants of Masterchef 2018 walk through the doors to begin their first mystery box challenge. He still hasn’t started his main, but then his philosophy is, “Main courses do not exist”, so it’s not a big worry.
Meanwhile Karlie is boiling some crayfish, out of sadism more than anything else. She’s going to make some kind of broth, which is the only kind of non-dessert that Masterchef contestants are now allowed to make.
Diana has her ribs in the oven, which is a wise move — the violent physical exertion of the kitchen can damage the ribs, so keeping them safely out of the way is sensible. Suddenly disaster strikes as her milk boils over while she’s not looking, but the good news is that in the broader scheme of things nothing any of us do as individuals has any importance.
The last of Ben’s galettes are in the oven. He moves on to his mascarpone mousse. “This is becoming more and more complicated,” says Shannon, ordering rewrites and hiring a new director. Ben knows he is running out of time, yet recklessly takes time out to tell a story about Dutch history. He is cooking tulip bulbs as a tribute to his grandmother and also a way to choke diners until they die. He also plans to set something on fire and frankly I’m with Shannon: it IS getting complicated. In fact I think Ben might be becoming a criminal madman before our eyes.
Diana is moving ahead with speed and efficiency. Eliza informs us that Diana is “exciting to watch”, which is helpful, because we would never have guessed that from watching her.
Meanwhile Shannon springs unsettlingly from behind an oven to tell Karlie that she doesn’t need to panic. Karlie laughs like a woman who learned how to laugh from a book, and tries to get Shannon to go away quietly. Shannon tastes her prawn oil and finds it bitter. Karlie asks Shannon how she can get rid of the bitterness, having become confused and thinking that Masterchef is actually a different show called Get A Professional Chef To Do Your Job For You. Karlie tells Shannon she’s beginning to doubt herself. “What do you mean you’re beginning to doubt yourself?” asks Shannon, who is quite slow.
Karlie’s prawn oil has burnt and she is doubting her own ability. Which, given that she burnt her prawn oil, she is probably right to do. “Press the reset button,” says Shannon, showing how his management style differs from George’s by not forcing Karlie into an awkward hug.
Karlie does some cooking stuff here which is pretty dull. With sugar or something.
“The last hour has flown by,” Shannon tells Gary. Gary chuckles, his standards for comedy being incredibly low.
Meanwhile, Ben’s tulip bulbs are boiling, but he still has a lot to do for his main: for example, putting actual food into it. “Why have I done this to myself?” he says, but there’s just no answer to that question. When a man reaches the point of feeding boiled tulip bulbs to strangers, there is simple nowhere to go.
“I fell in love with this dish, and I haven’t really thought through the practicalities,” says Ben, as he struggles to force a live horse into the sous vide machine. “I’m completely in the weeds,” he adds, walking through a field of weeds.
Ben is just about ready to give up, but then he looks at a picture of his children and realises that if he doesn’t win Masterchef, he won’t be able to afford a babysitter and will have to spend more time with him. This gives him a second wind, and he immediately begins working hard on his disgusting dishes.
It’s nearly time for service and Karlie is only just starting to pan fry her crayfish, like some kind of goddamn fool. She doesn’t think her crayfish is done. She doesn’t know how to know whether crayfish is done or not. She reflects ruefully on the catastrophic day when Man first decided to try eating the monstrous insects of the deep.
Meanwhile Ben pulls his beef out, so to speak, and finds that just as he had hoped, it looks like big bits of burnt wood. What could be more appetising than being given burnt wood to eat? Together with the inedible tulips, his plan for a meal that makes people feel like they are in World War Two is coming together beautifully.
Meanwhile Diana has done everything perfectly and is giggling on the inside at her dumb competitors.
Finally the time has come for the judges to taste the dishes — the part of the challenge that makes the whole “cook for twenty people” bit irrelevant. They eat Diana’s first, and Gary admits he was wrong to doubt Diana, and might be revising his opinion that women are mentally incapable of cooking altogether.
“It’s like going three rounds with Muhammad Ali with flavour-packed boxing gloves,” says Matt, who is too old and too rich to bother trying to make sense anymore.
They taste Ben’s main next, and are instantly transported to the Third Reich. They particularly enjoy the part where the food is set on fire, creating a lovely arson-y ambience. They like the food too. “I love it because there’s not much on the plate,” says George, for god knows what reason. “It’s not as multi-sensory as Diana’s,” says Gary, fondly remembering the way Diana rubbed her meat on his face and blew an airhorn in his ear, but he concedes that even food that only appeals to the sense of taste can sometimes be OK.
Karlie has still not finished cooking, which probably won’t matter much. Shannon keeps shouting at her, which is pretty intimidating or at least would be if it wasn’t Shannon. “I feel like I started off my cook so well, and then everything started unravelling,” says Karlie. This is an accurate summation of the facts. From the balcony that old woman who was eliminated about seventy years ago smiles smugly, enjoying the sight of her betters in emotional distress.
Several weeks later, Karlie is putting the finishing touches to her crayfish. “Come on Karlie!” the balcony-dwellers yell pointlessly, repeating the phrase fifty times just in case Karlie doesn’t realise that they do in fact want her to come on.
The judges taste Karlie’s dish, with the cook suffering no penalty whatsoever for not having it ready in time. Obviously the judges love it because if they said they didn’t it would make them look like idiots for having let a bad cook get this far.
It’s now time for the cooks to finish their desserts. Karlie knows her syrup isn’t right. It’s been off its food and at night it moans in the darkness.
Diana does some cooking stuff and describes it to us and I black out for a few minutes until something interesting happens. When it does, the judges taste Diana’s dessert and string a series of words together with a fairly tenuous connection to each other. The upshot seems to be that they enjoyed it, but it’s hard to tell because they are quite quite mad.
Meanwhile Ben checks on his pumpkin galettes, which you’ll remember as the thing he spent most of the last year making. “These galettes are the hero to my dessert,” he says, following a warning from Ten executives that if the word hero is not used more often in this episode the show will be axed before the finale. Ben is struggling to remove his galettes from their tray, which is just like galettes, isn’t it. If only he hadn’t strayed outside his lane. If only he had remembered that the only thing you should ever make is ice-cream.
“You haven’t got time to stuff around,” Shannon tells Ben, rather cruelly. Over the other side, Karlie needs to zest some mandarins. She can’t explain why, it’s just this weird thing, helps her feel calm. It’s time for the judges to taste her dessert. “What I love: the look of it,” says Gary, which presumably means he hates the other things, like, you know, the taste. “There’s something that’s not quite right about it,” he goes on, the pot calling the kettle black if ever I saw it. But then George and Matt say it’s great and Gary’s all “It’s a very clever dessert,” the little crawler. Given nobody is willing, this late in the competition, to admit any dish is actually bad, you can be sure that Karlie’s was practically fatal.
Ben is the last dessert-presenter, and so bangs on about his heritage a bit more in case we haven’t got the message from the last fifty speeches he’s given about his Oma and the Netherlands and the Nazis. The judges taste the dessert. “I love this, I think it’s delicious,” says Gary. The decade Ben spent cutting those pumpkins has worked, but is it as CLEVER as Karlie’s gross garbage?
Judgment time. Shannon tells the three they should be proud of themselves. I don’t believe he means that. I think he despises them as he despises us all. Anyway.
Diana is first through to the finale, and Matt creams his jeans for several minutes over her dishes. After we’ve all purged, time to find out who’s a big fat loser. Karlie starts to think through her cook. She let the pressure get to her, but she’s proud of what she put up, which really shows what a terrible judge she is. Then again, the three judges are also terrible judges, so she’s in with a chance.
The music ramps up to unprecedented levels of fevered intrusiveness, as Gary does what he does best: take too long to get to the point. But eventually he reveals that the mandarin syrup in Karlie’s dessert was too bitter, and that pretty soon, she will be as well. She’s gone, and she tries to stop herself from crying in case she rusts.
Tune in tomorrow, when the show refuses to ever end while Ben and Diana are forced to make a full-scale model of Vietnamese parliament out of sugar and porridge.
