Masterchef Recap: Everywhere You Look
It’s San Francisco, baby! Yes, this is California Week, when the amateurs travel to the city most famous for acting as the setting for hit sitcom Full House. Which is appropriate, because as on Full House, everyone on Masterchef is less funny than they think they are, and every episode ends with a lesson learned to the strains of emotionally manipulative music.
The episode begins with an informative short film about the wonders of Qantas. Did you know that the Qantas Business Lounge is luxurious and a great way to relax before your flight? Why not stop for a refreshing beverage? Once on the plane, you’ll find Qantas Business Class is everything you’ve ever dreamed it would be. Enjoy a delicious meal, sleep soundly on the soft, comfortable seats with complimentary eyemasks. Qantas’s friendly staff is always available to service your every need with enthusiasm and a winning smile. Qantas — making the world your oyster. Also, here are some close-ups of Qantas tickets and the tail of the Qantas plane, and some shots of the plane taking off, and of the plane landing, and some more close-ups of the Qantas logo. The flying kangaroo, eh. So iconic.
On an unrelated note, I do wonder how Channel Ten pays for the trip to San Francisco. Must be expensive. Bit of a mystery, really.
Anyway, there they are in San Francisco, and there’s the famous Golden Gate bridge, along which the Tanner family drove in the Full House opening credits, on their way to find a doctor to fix Michelle.
The first task for the amateurs is to travel around the city, go to local businesses, and pretend the meetings haven’t been organised beforehand. At these businesses they will select items to include in the California Week mystery box. Harry and Brett visit a fish shop, where they sample the wares courtesy of the owner, who is played by the late Robert Loggia. Meanwhile Trent and Elise visit the filthy hippies at a local farmers’ market, where they select some fresh, parasite-infested produce. Matt the Amateur finds some Ecuadorean chocolate, which is richer and more bitter and generally more disgusting than proper chocolate, so he grabs some of that. Elena pops into the Fatted Calf charcuterie, the emporium dedicated to foods for people who resent their younger brothers.
Also Mimi does something, I presume.
Back on the docks, the contents of the Mystery Box are revealed. Turns out Mimi picked short ribs, while nobody was looking, which is how she likes to do most things. Elena selected fennel pollen, apparently in the belief that they will be preparing a dish for bees. Brett, who is definitely the Joey of the show, has selected goat’s cheese like the unimaginative hack that he is. Harry has brought a gigantic crab as a tribute to his sexual history. Trent got tangelos, presumably by accident, and Elise picked “golden beets”, which I don’t think are really a thing. And of course there is Matt the Amateur and his horrible chocolate, originally created in Ecuador as a punishment for disobedient children.
The cook starts. In fact, all the cooks start. Matt the Amateur informs us that San Francisco is known for its street-style food, which is of course incorrect: San Francisco is actually known for its thrilling car chases. I think Matt the Amateur is the Danny Tanner of the show.
Trent is making a chocolate mousse. He explains in detail how to make a chocolate mousse, and interestingly it turns out that making a chocolate mousse is an incredibly boring process. He runs into trouble because 100% chocolate doesn’t melt like proper chocolate does, and his chocolate is still too hard as the minutes tick away. Gary and George pop by his bench to be very unhelpful, and then it’s time for a quick break to find out about Qantas’s affordable flights to California.
By the Frisco Bay, Trent is struggling with the consequences of his bad decisions, making him the DJ of Masterchef. He even looks a bit like Candace Cameron. Suddenly, he finds a solution: pour some milk in. That was easy. God everyone’s such a drama queen on this show.
Mimi, much like Stephanie on Full House, is still there even though we all forgot about her. On the other hand, Elena, much like Stephanie on Full House, is a lot more talented than anyone else, so it’s hard to say who’s the Stephanie.
Matt the Amateur is still banging on about food trucks. He says he’s based his dish on the theory, “who says good food needs a knife and fork?” That’s not a theory, though, it’s just a question. And it’s a pretty stupid question, because nobody says that and nobody has ever claimed that anybody says that ever. Much like Danny in his role as co-host of Wake Up San Francisco, Matt the Amateur has no idea what he’s doing.
(Did you know in one episode of Full House, Danny said he leaves home at 7.48 every morning? To be the host of a MORNING SHOW? Shouldn’t people making a TV show have some vague idea of how TV shows are made? Anyway.)
Matt the Amateur is grating chocolate over his beef, which is objectively gross. A crowd of locals has gathered to watch, hoping that an episode of Hell’s Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay is being filmed on the docks, only to be profoundly disappointed.
Elise is crying because she isn’t very good at making food. We’re supposed to feel sorry for her when she pulls a sad face, so I guess she’s Michelle. Luckily an ad for Qantas comes along to cheer us all up, but then we’re back to Elise’s tears and how funny they are.
George comes along to give Elise one of his famous pointless pep talks. He points out to Elise that just because she’s fucked up this task horribly doesn’t mean she’s allowed to just go home and get on with her life, because she has a contract. Elise agrees that continuing to fight a losing battle against her own limitations is definitely the way to go, and she gets on with making her sorbet: the failure to not make it a parfait a definite tactical error.
With two minutes to go, Trent has decided he has enough time to make a sponge. Surely that’s not right. Is it? What sorcery is this? The sponge turns out to be crap, so I guess any amount of time is enough to make crap. That’s the real lesson of Masterchef.
Matt the Amateur finishes his street food and says “street food” several more times so we are aware that he has made street food. Meanwhile George yells “Two minutes to go”, which he already did two minutes ago. I think an editor go confused.
Elise is feeling better about herself, which is a trap many Masterchef contestants fall into, especially after having George breathe heavily into their ear and squeeze their shoulders.
Time is up, and the crowd applauds for they know not what. There’s a guy in the crowd dressed as Batman. Full-on Batman outfit. Not a realistic one: it’s like the kind you get for a five-year-old going to a birthday party, but adult-size. Kudos to that guy. That’s the spirit of San Francisco right there.
Anyway Elena serves her food and the judges love it because Elena is better than everyone else at everything. She’s definitely Stephanie, or at least Stephanie in the first three seasons when she was still cute.
Elise serves her golden beet and tangelo sorbet, seasoned with her tears. Gary tells her it’s “OK”, which is as depressing a judgment as you could ever hear. He adds that it isn’t a disaster, and George tells Elise to “get it together” and appreciate the scenery, so the judges have pretty much given up on Elise. I think George was hoping that Elise would hug him again, but she just wanders off.
Next is Trent, who has made something yellow and brown with white bits. His last-second sponge has ruined it, proving once again that Trent’s instincts are terrible. Gary tells Trent that he hasn’t found his identity in the competition, which means that he must be a pretty damn good cook to have made it this far. But Trent takes it as a criticism.
Mimi serves her food extremely briefly.
Brett’s ravioli is served with that irritating grin. He has allowed his crab to be dominated by his cheese, and walks away in shame.
Harry, who cares too much about his hair and is therefore the Jesse Katsopolis of the group, has made a crab eggs benedict, which Gary thinks is a brilliant idea. Gary thinks it’s clever, and fun, and funky, and honestly what the frig is he talking about.
As Matt the Amateur comes up and says “street food” again, he worries that his dish is not refined enough, because he deliberately made it that way. It’s heartbreaking the way Matt the Amateur’s explicit intentions keep getting in the way of his goals. The judges, though, love his street food, to the extent that George forces some of the crowd to eat it against their will. Matt the judge says the dish is “California yippie-aye-yay tasty tucker”, so I guess he’s had a stroke.
And now, the judging, for the least important challenge of the week. The winner of the Mystery Box challenge is Matt the Amateur, which is slightly unfair to Elena who we all know was actually better, don’t we.
Suddenly a bunch of farmers walk onto the docks carrying big boxes of food. Trent finds this sight amazing, because I guess he’s had a pretty dull life till now. But the arrival of the farmers provides Matt with an excellent opportunity to name a long string of sponsors in a very loud voice. The best produce in California that can be acquired for free is arranged on the dock, causing the amateurs to applaud enthusiastically and Elena to claim that the farmers are “so passionate about what they do”, an assertion for which she has absolutely no evidence.
Matt the Amateur’s advantage for winning the Mystery Box is getting to choose the core ingredient for the invention test, which isn’t much of an advantage, but it never is. He chooses beef, thus further lessening his advantage by selecting an ingredient that everyone wants to cook with.
The winner of the invention test gets entry to the “fast track to finals” challenge later in the week, the winner of that challenge to go straight to finals week. It’s a bit convoluted, I know.
Elena has a huge respect for fresh produce, which is ironic because fresh produce views her with utter contempt. She is going to make a borscht-inspired sauce, as a tribute to her grandmother and to the fact that everyone this year has to put fucking beetroot in fucking everything.
Matt the Amateur also wants to respect the produce, so he’s making beef carpaccio. Apparently to Matt the Amateur, “respect the produce” means “don’t cook the produce”, but in my view it is actually acceptable for a cook to cook things. To Matt the Amateur, the most exciting thing about carpaccio is “all the little bits you cook around it”, but it should be remembered that “the most exciting thing about carpaccio”, as a phrase, is a bit like “the most intelligent thing about Pete Evans”.
After a quick detour into some footage of Trent throwing some hay around a field, Gary and George come over to Elise’s bench to see if she’s OK and for George to try to get her to touch him. Elise is using beetroots too, goddammit.
Mimi continues to be present.
Matt the Amateur declares that the first thing he has to do is prepare his beef, and it’s hard to argue with that. He begins hitting the beef with a hammer, because the important thing with carpaccio is that it should be “paper-thin”, to make sure the diner gets a meal that is not only raw, but insubstantial.
Gary and George ask Elena what the hell she thinks she’s playing at. She explains that she’s making a weird borschty thing that isn’t borscht but kind of is a bit but not. Gary and George tell her that her sauce is dirty and they suspect her of being a witch.
Harry thinks he has beautiful ingredients and that he therefore shouldn’t do much to them, carrying on the proud tradition of Masterchef contestants not really understanding the purpose of cooking. But he is going to use a sous vide machine, so at least he’s not letting his commitment to minimalism prevent him from mindlessly following vapid fads.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard George misquote the Fresh Prince, but as he yells “boom boom, shake the room!” we are reminded of just why we hate him so much.
Mimi explains that she is covering her meat with walnuts, which I suppose is nice but it’s hard to concentrate due to the shock of seeing Mimi on screen for more than three consecutive seconds.
The judges get together to discuss how superior they are to all the amateurs and how badly everyone is stuffing everything up. They laugh at the feeble losers before them and gloat over their own vast knowledge of food which contrasts so powerfully with the pathetic ignorance of the contestants.
Trent confides that he wants all of his elements cooked one hundred percent, a brave move given how much people love half-cooked food. Meanwhile Elise is struggling to cover a bowl with glad-wrap, having decided to focus on achievable goals.
“There’s a lot at stake here!” yells Matt. It’s possible this is a pun, but then again there is genuinely a lot at stake and that’s a pretty good way to convey the fact.
Mimi is worried she’s left her steak in the oven too long. She can tell it’s not right just from touching it, a feeling familiar to anyone who’s ever been hugged by George. She cuts her beef. It’s not medium-rare, it’s medium. “So what?” say all the rational people on earth. But apparently it’s a huge awful catastrophic thing and Mimi’s life is basically over. She works on making her walnut elements impressive, but it’s a fool’s errand: walnut elements are never impressive.
Oh Brett is still around. He’s chucked his steak on the grill, and seems disproportionately impressed with how a steak sounds when you chuck it on a grill. All meat sizzles, Brett, no need to sound so pleased with yourself.
Meanwhile Elena is happy with her gross beetrooty muck, but shouldn’t be.
Trent reaffirms his belief that getting his dish one hundred percent right is desirable. Nobody has the nerve to contradict him. “This dish is definitely me on a plate,” he claims, and it is true that it’s a big slab of meat with some green stuff on top, so well done I guess.
Elise loves fine dining and therefore wants her dish to look like fine dining, and I guess if you’re incapable of producing fine food, producing something that looks like fine food is an OK ambition.
Matt the Amateur has smoked his egg yolks, which is a euphemism for something I think, and is now arranging little bits of rubbish on top of his nasty raw beef to disguise the fact that the nasty raw beef exists. The art of carpaccio is indeed the camouflaging of the carpaccio’s existence.
Time is up, and everyone embraces more out of habit than anything else. For the second time today, Gary says, “what a great cook” without justification.
First up, Elise. The crowd, made up of San Francisco’s huge genuinely-have-nothing-going-on-in-their-lives community, whoops and hollers for want of anything better to do. “You really want to get into finals week, don’t you?” asks Gary. Elise admits that she does, her deepest and most secret shame. Her dish is very good apparently, and she has redeemed herself after the nauseating offence to God that was the Mystery Box.
Next up, Trent, who has shown his identity via the means of a boring and uninspired hunk of basic flesh. “I know it’s a big genuine portion,” he says. I think he means “generous”, but who knows, really. The judges are extremely excited by Trent’s juiciness. “All you’ve done is use heat to improve those ingredients,” says Matt, wanting Trent to fully comprehend how this whole “cook” thing works.
Elena is hoping her sauce intrigues the judges, and it does — they are fascinated by how a person could so horribly misjudge everything. The meat doesn’t go with the sauce: if only she’d served just one or the other.
Next up, Harry, and then Brett, who come and go with the speed of the truly uninteresting.
Here comes Mimi, as night falls on San Francisco and, simultaneously, on our souls. The judges enjoy Mimi’s overcooked beef, which is bad news for Matt the Amateur — looks like the fashion of the day is applying heat to meat rather than leaving it raw and hitting it with a hammer.
The judges look at the dish and decide it’s absolutely fantastic without even tasting it, showing that no matter how skilfully you prepare food, there is no substitute for being a teacher’s pet. “I love it,” says Gary in the least convincing voice I’ve ever heard. George babbles on about “respect” like a halfwit. Only Matt has the guts to tell the truth: putting an egg yolk on it was weird and Matt the Amateur should feel bad about himself.
Elise is told her dish is magnificent, mostly for narrative reasons. Everyone claps — only the people on the show, because everyone in San Francisco has gone to bed. Trent is also congratulated on his brave lack of imagination. But one dish, according to George, heroed the hero ingredient in a more heroic way, causing its maker to be the hero of this heroing challenge, and the hero is Trent. Heroay!
And so, in scenes reminiscent of the time the Tanner family got to sing backup for the Beach Boys for extremely dubious reasons, Trent leaves the docks in triumph.
Tune in tomorrow, when someone I’ve never heard of makes everyone dress in white.
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