Masterchef Recap: Such A Winter’s Day
It’s hard to believe we’ve already come to the end of California Week — it’s over even before we started caring about it.
Do you ever wonder about the Masterchef voiceover guy? Who is he? Is this the life he wanted for himself? I like to think he’s a man who has all his life longed for a career in the culinary arts, but was tragically born without tastebuds, so he found another way to make his dreams come true.
Anyway our bittersweet narrator relates the tale of the food truck challenge, wherein Matt the Amateur overcame the handicap of cooking with a gigantic erection brought on by being allowed to be inside a food truck to defeat the red team, and condemn Mimi, Harry and Brett to a fight for their Masterchef lives.
Mimi informs us that waking up to an elimination challenge is not a great feeling, which comes as a bit of a shock as I had always assumed it was pretty much the most fun anyone could possibly have. She also says that she’s up against two amazing cooks, which is a bit of a stretch.
Brett claims that he is not going to be eliminated today, which coincidentally is what people who are eliminated usually say right before they are eliminated. So I hope he doesn’t think that saying it is going to help him.
The challenge takes the form of “putting your dream on a plate”. The amateurs must cook something that symbolises what they are going to after Masterchef. This is a particularly tricky challenge because it is quite difficult to cook a sauce bottle label with your face on it. There’s an added degree of difficulty because they have to do it in Curtis Stone’s restaurant, which means Curtis Stone is going to be nearby, ruining everyone’s mood.
Brett’s dream is apparently to have a gastro pub where he buys meat from someone over the railway tracks and forces his children into indentured servitude. Mimi’s dream is to make desserts…that’s all really, just desserts. Harry’s dream presumably involves his hair.
At Curtis’s restaurant, he reveals that he has achieved his own dream: being incredibly pretentious on TV. His restaurant is small but allows him to use seasonal produce and blah blah blah you know what everyone says about produce. “It doesn’t make us rich, but it makes us very happy,” he says, which is a very easy thing for someone who is very very rich to say.
Brett feels a powerful connection with Curtis, because he is seriously deluded.
The amateurs begin cooking. They have ninety minutes to make a misguided attempt at making something that takes more than ninety minutes to make, and Mimi throws herself into the task with the gusto of the truly clueless. Curtis advises her that she is out of her freaking mind, which makes no impression on Mimi at all.
Curtis asks Brett about his food dream. Brett tells him. “You’re talking my language,” says Curtis, because he’s a boring person too. Brett bangs on about meat and three veg, to really emphasise how devoted he is to lacking imagination. But at least he’s using the sous vide machine, showing that he’s not just about uninspired dishes, he’s also about the slavish aping of trends.
Thirty minutes into the challenge, Mimi is putting air bubbles in her mousse in a shining example of the unrestrained decadence that will soon bring western civilisation crashing into an abyss of its own making. “I’ve just made my chocolate aero mousse, and it’s not right,” she wails, and she’s right: it is not right that this is happening. None of it is right.
The judges are now seen applauding for no reason.
We now have to see Brett talking about meat and three veg again. With his pork sitting in the sous vide machine, it’s time to puree the carrot and sweet Jesus this is dull. A lot of people might think that the dream of owning a country pub is a little tedious, but they vastly underestimate it.
Meanwhile Harry is doing something mysterious with a lobster, but we spend very little time on seeing exactly what it is, because clearly his dish is going to be neither incredibly good nor incredibly bad, so he’s safe.
Brett says “meat and three veg” for the eighty-sixth time in the last ten minutes, and then reveals that “Brussels sprouts are a big thing for me”. There’s your gourmet visionary, Australia. Brussels sprouts are a big thing for him.
Oh here’s Harry, let’s find out about what he’s doing. It’s called a lobster crudo. Or is it a lobster crudeau? Or a lobster krudau? A lobster Trudeau?
Anyway it’s a lobster thing, but Gary is worried about the burnt lemon puree, and who can blame him? How many lives have been ruined by burnt lemon puree in the past? Hundreds, probably.
Mimi has her jelly and mousse in the freezer, and her ice cream in the churner, and is getting to work making her honeycomb. Joke’s on her — humans can’t make honeycomb, only bees can. And Mimi has forgotten to bring her bees with her!
Brett goes to grab some bones from the pantry. He finds the pantry has no bones in it. This is unsurprising because it’s a pantry for people, not dogs. But his jus depends on bones. He will have to go out and commit some murders.
Brett notices some chicken stock, and sees no other option: he’s going to drown himself. Oh wait, no, he’s going to use the chicken stock in his jus. Coming up with obvious yet poor solutions to problems created by a lack of planning: that’s Brett to a tee!
Meanwhile Mimi is really excited by how her caramel sauce tastes. At least I think she’s really excited. The words she uses indicate enthusiasm, but it’s Mimi, so her voice remains at that same “I am reading the White Pages aloud” level it always is.
Harry is worried that his dish is too simple and decides to take it up a notch. This he does by saying “fresh” over and over again. The judges should be impressed by his commitment to the concept of freshness.
Brett is busy making soil, which is a thing that cooks do when they lose the ability to tell the difference between food and dirt. His soil is going to be green, so I don’t know in what way it’s soil. It doesn’t taste or look like soil, so it seems a total exercise in futility, but then that is the theme of the day.
George visits Harry to let him know how unimpressive he finds him. Harry is breaking down his lobster and learning some fascinating things about crustacean biology. “Remember why you’re doing this,” George instructs the amateurs. “You don’t want to let it slip.” And yet, obviously, someone will let it slip no matter how hard they try. Masterchef is an object lesson in just how little hard work and determination matter.
Mimi has opened the freezer and discovered that the freezer is not cold and her mousse, jelly and ice cream have not set. She puts them in the deep freeze that Curtis installed for dead bodies: ironically Brett never checked the deep freeze to find bones.
Meanwhile Brett’s pork is undercooked, if you know what I mean. As he attempts to rectify this, Gary strolls past and tells him that his sauce is going to be crap. He doesn’t have time to fix both his pork and his sauce. “It’s a real Catch-22: pork or sauce?” Brett muses, and isn’t that the dilemma we all deal with in our lives? We’ve been wrestling with it for millennia.
If Mimi can’t get her elements set, she won’t have a dish: will her non-dish be enough to defeat Brett’s bad dish? And then there’s Harry, I guess. Theoretically.
Time to plate up. The judges are still all standing up in the dining room. They haven’t been standing this whole time, have they? Bet they haven’t.
Somehow, Mimi’s dish is all set. Somehow, Brett’s pork is cooked. Somehow, Harry’s hair is beautifully styled.
“Guys, I hate to say it: thirty seconds!” yells George, but I don’t know why he hates to say it. I mean it’s a useful bit of information really.
And then, all of a sudden, or not really all of a sudden but after a long protracted lead-up, time is up. Brett says he’s happy, but his eyes are calling him a liar. He didn’t get time to finish his sauce, but luckily his food dream is opening a country pub where the sauces are bad, so it all fits.
The judges sit down to taste and to gloat about the massive emotional stress they have placed the amateurs under. Harry serves first, explaining how he took inspiration from the reef where he grew up, in an exhausted, defeated tone that speaks volumes about how much he has grown to loathe his life since this competition started. Harry is panicking because he didn’t taste his burnt lemon puree, but as the old saying goes, better to not taste your burnt lemon puree than to be Brett.
“I’m really excited to try this,” says Curtis, the pervert. Harry’s dish looks weird and sickening, but I don’t know what a lobster croodoo is supposed to look like so maybe it’s great.
Yep, turns out it’s great. Or maybe not. Curtis thinks it’s great but Gary and Matt think the burnt lemon puree is dumb. Haha, Harry, your obsession with not tasting burnt lemon puree has tripped you up yet again! On the other hand, they all agree that Harry’s dream — making stuff out of lobsters and ruining it with burnt lemon puree — is very clear.
Now it is Brett’s turn, and he talks about meat and three veg again and we’re all so goddamn sick of it. He says “meat and three veg” and then he says it AGAIN and he talks about his mum and how her life was a thankless trudge through a valley of pain, and he says “seasonal produce” and on and on he goes about his children and his pub and for fuck’s sake.
Anyway the judges eat it and Matt says there’s no escaping how the carrot puree leaps off the plate, which is such a disturbing image. Curtis is concerned because Brett’s sauce isn’t jam or something, I dunno, Curtis talks a lot of wank. Matt thinks Brett has “sold us his dream”, but again, the dream he’s sold seems to heavily revolve around some really awful sauce, so it’s a bit iffy.
Here comes Mimi. Gary asks her what she’ll do if she gets sent home. She says she’ll keep working. “So you’ll work in a kitchen?” asks George, who can’t believe anyone would ever hate themselves enough to purposely choose that life. He tells Mimi that if she comes to work for him she will start at the bottom, because as a business owner he always completely ignores prior knowledge when making decisions. Mimi promises she’s willing to start at the bottom because she just wants to get the hell out of the room and hopes that by agreeing to whatever crap George is spouting she’ll be able to.
Mimi’s dish looks beautiful and tastes beautiful and the soundtrack guy plays some triumphant music using the Strings button on his Casio. “The dessert of this year so far,” Matt and Gary agree, and Curtis says that if Mimi came in through his back door and made that dish he would hire her on the spot, which is an irresponsible thing to say because now heaps of psychos are going to be coming through his back door demanding that he eat their mousse and give them a job and it will probably lead to a hostage situation. But it’s a nice thing to say about Mimi. The other judges agree that to have Mimi washing pots in a kitchen would be a waste of her talent, completely undermining George’s speech about “starting at the bottom” from thirty seconds ago and making him look like a complete idiot.
Judging time, and Mimi is told immediately she’s through to finals week because some things are too obvious to deny. Harry and Brett are told that they both made dishes that beautifully encapsulated their dreams, but only inasmuch as their dreams are themselves deeply flawed and disappointing. Harry’s broth was great but puree was awful, and the judges loved “the tang of the carrot puree” — yeah I don’t know either — but his sauce was garbage. And so the prophecy came to pass, and Brett was eliminated.
“Oh Brett,” says George, his voice full of regret, either over the fact that Brett lost or the fact he ever met Brett in the first place. It’s a sad moment, but not all that much because it’s not like Elena or Elise has been eliminated, so we’re all pretty chipper really.
Brett reaffirms his determination to make his dreams come true. He says he knows he has to “get out there and rattle some pans”, but he might have gotten his food dreams mixed up with his dreams to form a Bill Haley and the Comets tribute band. A postscript informs us that he has returned to his day job as a pilot, but still plans to open a gastro pub with his daughters. Apparently he hasn’t gotten around to the pan-rattling yet. There is still some hope that he will realise that being an airline pilot is an awesome job and he should stay in it. Only time will tell.
Tune in next week, when Finals Week will finally crush the souls of losers and massively overinflate the bloated ego of one winner.
If you’d like to inflate MY ego, buy Error Australis right NOW.
