Masterchef Recap: Just Desserts
We’re now definitely getting towards the pointy end of the competition, and you can tell from how gruff the judges are trying to make their voices sound.
Tonight it’s Elena, Chloe, Mimi and Matt the Amateur competing to avoid the dreadful fate of having to see their family again. Matt the Amateur begins the episode by trying to convince us he entered Masterchef for his family, but when he talks about how he left his new wife for the show before the honeymoon, you can tell just how much he hopes he can stave off his horrible life for a few more days.
Chloe confides that she and her husband would love to own a restaurant on a block of land, which is indeed the best place to own a restaurant. It seems a noble dream to be chasing, but then she reveals that it’s a block of land they already own. Landowners in their mid-20s? Go to hell Chloe, no sympathy for you anymore.
When the amateurs arrive at the kitchen, they discover that it’s time for the “Masterchef auction”, the day on which contestants must bid for various ingredients and suffer horrendous buyer’s remorse while cooking. Each amateur starts with 120 minutes, and they bid for the ingredients using those minutes — the more they spend on food, the less time they have to cook. It is a tense and dramatic part of the Masterchef ordeal, and one of those elements that makes this show one of the most entertaining examples of psychological torture currently airing.
Protein is first to be auctioned off. Mimi and Elena get in a bidding war over the beef, resulting in the all-time classic line from Elena, “Mimi makes a play for the beef”. I might make that my ringtone. In the end Mimi gets the beef, spending 25 minutes, which seems like a hell of a lot when you’ve only got two hours. A horrible suspicion grows that Mimi might plan to make that most disgusting of all dishes, steak tartare.
Next, Matt the Amateur goes up against Elena for the duck. It’s a battle of the obtrusive earrings, and Elena bids Matt the Amateur up to 35 minutes before leaving him stranded with just 85 minutes left and what suddenly looks like a pathetically inadequate duck.
Now eggs. Chloe wants the eggs because she is hoping to do a dessert. Jesus Christ she’s going to make a fucking parfait isn’t she. Jesus CHRIST. Chloe gets the eggs for just 15 minutes, which seems cheap but then, they’re just freaking eggs. Elena gets her protein for free, which is great, but she has to cook with red mullet, which sucks.
Next, fruit and veg. If they were sensible they wouldn’t bother bidding, but off they go. Matt the amateur goes for the root vegetables, justifying his nickname “Rootrat”. Mimi bids against him. Chloe bids up to 15, having some great ideas for how to use root vegetables in a dessert, although “great ideas” is her phrasing: obviously they are definitely terrible ideas. But then Mimi swoops in with a bid of 20! She has the roots, and she’s down to 75 minutes. Her dish is going to be raw. It’ll be awful.
Next are the “nightshades”, which I’m pretty sure are poisonous, but they all seem very keen. Also the nightshades seem to include potatoes, which I’m pretty sure are root vegetables. But maybe it’s actually just a potato-resembling nightshade, or maybe potatoes don’t count as root vegetables when they’re poisoned. Anyway Elena gets them for 20.
Next Matt the Amateur gets his hands on the “alliums”, or at least something that sounds like that…onions and garlic and shit. Matt the Amateur spends only five minutes on them, which still feels like a rip-off. This leaves Chloe with citrus, which she thinks will work beautifully with the stupid dessert she’s going to make. Which will be parfait, won’t it. Ugh.
Lastly is the most exciting category of all: “miscellaneous”. Matt the Amateur only has 80 minutes to cook his duck, thanks to his recklessness. Of course Mimi has only 75 with her beef, but does have the option of serving raw beef like some kind of pervert, whereas I don’t think ducks can be served raw, can they? Sounds pretty gross, but then so does raw beef. But I think raw beef is “pretentious wankers like this” gross, whereas raw duck is “everyone is going to die” gross, so Mimi has the upper hand there. Meanwhile Elena is feeling confident on 100 minutes, and Chloe has a whopping 105 minutes but, being Chloe, remains on edge and stricken by bladder discomfort.
Anyway, to miscellaneous. Elena really wants the herbs, due to her Jamaican heritage. But Matt the Amateur wants them too. “The possibilities are endless with herbs,” he says, incorrectly. “Matt wants the herbs, but I want them too,” says Elena, who has been paying close attention to the proceedings of her own life. The bid goes up to 20 minutes, and Matt the Amateur has become terrified of running out of time, but also terrified of having to put peanut butter on a duck — a recurring nightmare for many of us.
Matt the Amateur is in a dilemma. A herb dilemma. He decides to pull out, because 55 minutes ain’t enough for a decent duck. So Elena grabs the herbs and finishes on 80 minutes, long enough for a game of rugby or possibly to cook a red mullet.
Next, the sauces. Mimi doesn’t want to bid because she only has 75, and Chloe doesn’t want to bid because sauces are useless in her crappy dessert. So Matt the Amateur gets the sauces for his duck and god knows what he was even worried about, the silly old woman. He finishes on 75. And so does Mimi, who flatly refuses to bid in the final round.
So Chloe picks up the spreads — aka the Loser’s Lot — for five minutes and has a whole 100 minutes for her dumb dessert that I already hate. That’s 20 minutes more than anyone else, which won’t be enough to stop me hating what she makes. Elena is on 80 with her weird fish.
Chloe begins to prepare her stupid dessert. Everyone is looking at her, including Harry, who is stalking around the balcony like a hyena circling a wounded giraffe. It’s pretty creepy. Chloe, who at the best of times has the demeanour of a rabbit at a fireworks display, is flustered and she hasn’t even begun her garbage dish.
Chloe begins making a mousse. She would normally use a setting agent, but she doesn’t have one, so she decides to make something else. Haha, just kidding, she decides to go ahead and make the mousse anyway, fully aware that she has no setting agent. Gary comes over and notes that she has no setting agent. It’s pretty obvious that he thinks making a mousse without a setting agent is a dumb idea, but Chloe, thrown out of whack by the predatory behaviour of Harry, ploughs on with her terrible idea anyway.
Before long the other amateurs are getting stuck into it, feeling very confident no doubt after seeing how badly Chloe is stuffing it up already. Mimi is going to season and oil her beef and wrap it up in clingfilm, and fair enough, a girl’s got to have a hobby.
Meanwhile, Matt the Amateur needs to break down the duck, so he begins using targeted noise and sleep deprivation techniques. He breaks out some char siu to use in his sauce, and dilutes it with water. Or at least what he says is water — what comes out of the tap looks startlingly blue and more like a blowtorch flame, but being charitable I will assume it’s a lighting problem on the crew’s part and Matt the Amateur is not actually welding his char siu.
The judges chat over how hilarious it is watching the amateurs have nervous breakdowns. George notes that Chloe has some nice allaments in her mousse. Remember how George says “elements” like “allaments”? Yeah he still does that apparently.
Matt wanders over to Matt the Amateur’s bench. He tastes Matt the Amateur’s sauce. “Does that taste like it’s been made in the Masterchef kitchen?” he asks, passive-aggressively. Given that his sauce does not taste like a parfait, Matt the Amateur cannot honestly answer in the affirmative, and he begins to panic, meaning Matt can walk away satisfied with a job well done. Matt the Amateur had thought that his sauce had good depth to it, but the judge’s visit has made it quite clear that if he serves that sauce as it is, he will never be fulfilled as a man.
Elena has taken 35 minutes to fillet her fish, which is just overkill if we’re being honest. She really wants to hero the nightshades in her dish, which is an incredibly stupid thing to say and has almost certainly made her family ashamed of her. Imagine if it was your child or sibling unironically saying “I want to hero the nightshades”. You’d change your name.
Chloe, who had more time than anyone, doesn’t have time to do what she wanted to do. The audience begins to suspect that maybe Chloe has made some bad decisions. And not just today. She needs to whisk her curd and stop her sauce from burning and also probably go to the toilet a few times. Up on the balcony the others clap and mutter in a very unhelpful and unenthusiastic way. “Come on Chloe,” says Trent, but he doesn’t try to hide the fact that he doesn’t give a shit what she does.
Matt the Amateur, nearing the point of self-harm over what Matt said about his sauce, decides to add some burnt butter to it. It’ll take more than burnt butter to redeem your blighted soul, Matt the Amateur.
And, uh, I think Mimi is still doing stuff I guess.
Elena is making sauce out of fish bones, which probably looks good to someone who likes fish bone sauce better than I do. Meanwhile Chloe has decided to make a wafer, having never heard the phrase “Your reach exceeds your grasp”. Gary and George ask to see her mousse in the fridge, because they enjoy the sight of humans in pain, and it is discovered the mousse is extremely soft. “I can’t believe this is happening,” whines Chloe, even though she knew it would happen and she was warned it would happen and it was obvious to literally everyone watching that it would happen. Nothing in her life has ever been as predictable as this happening, but she claims she can’t believe it.
She should’ve made a parfait.
With less than 20 minutes to go, she needs to find a way to make her mousse set. She decides to put it in the blast chiller, because I guess freezing is kind of like setting. In that same kind of family, you know? That’s her thinking, anyway. If “thinking” is the right word.
Meanwhile Matt the Amateur is sighing heavily as he describes what he’s doing to his duck while simultaneously wondering just what went wrong in his goddamn life to reach this point.
Of course Elena is feeling absolutely on top of everything and just incredibly smug about how well she’s managed her time. She flips her mullets and assures us that they look beautiful, though I couldn’t tell myself. It’s just bits of fish, you know?
And Mimi continues to be present. Doing something beetroot. Yuck.
It’s time to plate up, and Chloe blowtorches her nougat because she just doesn’t care anymore. Her curd isn’t the right consistency, a trait it apparently learned from its creator. “At this point it all comes down to my mousse,” she says, which is ominous as hell given what we’ve seen so far.
Matt the Amateur’s sauce has reduced right down, just like our patience. He hopes the judges like what he’s done with it and it now tastes like it was made in the Masterchef kitchen, although personally I’d be aiming a bit higher.
Chloe gets out her mousse and it’s all hard and gross and not really a mousse, which is what you’d expect from something that’s been in the blast chiller, and the latest in a long line of very predictable things to happen to Chloe.
Time is up. Matt the Amateur is nervous, because he doesn’t know how awful Chloe’s dish is. He’s worried about his sauce, and maybe there’s something in that, because Matt the judge looks disappointed with him before he even puts the plate down. “Why do you think you’ve had this wobble?” Matt asks, and Matt the Amateur rather chivalrously doesn’t blame his cretinous teammate from the day before.
The judges think the duck looks great, but Matt is worried about the sauce but oh god Matt, stop obsessing over the sauce like you’re fucking Manu or something.
George hacks the duck up like Captain Caveman and comment is made on the potent juiciness. George and Gary discuss how beautiful the duck is while Matt sulks off to the side, only cheering up when Gary lets him bitch about the sauce. The duck would’ve been better without the sauce, but at least it’s not Chloe’s.
Elena steps up with her “mullet and nightshade sauce”, which genuinely sounds dangerous to human life. George compliments Elena’s culinary progress by belittling the teaching profession. Elena agrees that it’s unbelievable that here she is cooking fish when a few months ago she was only a stinking teacher. Everyone loves the fish, as you’d expect because Elena can actually cook. “I can’t fault it,” says Gary, betraying his lack of imagination.
Mimi is really proud of her dish, whatever it is. She walks in, and then walks out, and the judges eat it, and it’s fine. That’s Mimi.
Chloe enters, shaking like the jelly she couldn’t have made because she had no setting agent. She claims she has never been this nervous since being in this competition, and that’s saying something because she has been one loud noise away from a cardiac arrest throughout. It doesn’t help her nerves that nobody, including her, knows what her dish is. “Is that a mousse, is that an ice cream or is that a parfait?” Matt asks.
Obviously Chloe should answer “parfait”, and she’ll avoid elimination in accordance with the 2016 Parfait Clause. She fluffs her lines. “I think it’s a mousse,” she says, with all the self-possessed certainty of Sarah Palin delivering an astrophysics lecture. Unwilling to take her word for it, the judges taste it.
“What a shame,” says Gary, which is rarely a glowing testimonial. “Can’t sugarcoat this one.” Although obviously Chloe should, in fact, have sugarcoated it, because it might have diverted attention from how irredeemably awful her whole dish was. She’s failed on an epic scale, and it is heartwarming to see this season’s dessert fixation get what it deserves.
There is no suspense in the judging at all, and they don’t even bother trying to generate any. Elena is told she’s made the dish of the day, and Chloe is given the swift and savage boot. On the upside, she can finally get home to her husband and enormous cabinet full of Valium. She cries tears of relief: the nightmare is over.
“I think the person who came into the competition was Chloe who was scared and not confident and nervous,” says Chloe, apparently under the impression that a different person has left the competition. The postscript informs us that she plans to launch “Bowles Family Sauces”, how original of her.
There is one more piece of business. After Chloe leaves, the judges reveal that next week the amateurs will be going on a trip, to San Francisco… “WITH QANTAS!” Matt roars, knowing full well that his promotional bonus depends on him reaching a previously-agreed decibel level.
Tune in next week, when large groups of Californians are paid to pretend they have any interest in Masterchef whatever, and the amateurs spend some time getting to know the Qantas logo.
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