Masterchef Recap: Kiss Kiss Meringue Bang

Previously on Masterchef: Legends Week began with that rarest of creatures: a Masterchef guest chef who anyone has heard of. Rick Stein, the world’s oldest living chef, challenged the amateurs to make something that wouldn’t make him vomit all over a small child. Some failed to do so, and so tonight must don the black apron and attempt to purge themselves of sin.

We open with Derek pumping iron in what is apparently the Masterchef gym. Lifting weights gives him the strength to cook, but runs the risk of him accidentally crushing his utensils in his mighty grip.

Jess says she’s becoming more confident with every cook, which raises the question of why she is up for elimination. Is it possible that Jess is one of those people who would benefit from less confidence? Like Meghan Trainor?

Derek, Jess and Leah enter the Masterchef kitchen clad all in black and desperately hoping they can against all odds prove themselves once again fit for a place in human society.

“When it comes to legends, few measure up to this great chef,” says George, a surefire sign that nobody has ever heard of her. It’s a person called Clare Smyth, who catered Harry and Meghan’s wedding (not Meghan Trainor) and has two Michelin stars, yet still feels the gnawing emptiness inside that can only be filled by a guest appearance on Australian Masterchef.

Matt welcomes Clare and mentions that she compared working for Gordon Ramsay to being in the SAS. I too can compared working for Gordon Ramsay to being in the SAS: working for Gordon Ramsay is nothing like being in the SAS.

Clare unveils the dish the losers must make. It is a small round white thing with lots of little green and white things on top of it. Apparently it is called a “pear and lemon verbena vacherin”, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything, so we’ll gloss over that.

“Now I’m getting a little bit worried,” says Derek, who wasn’t paying attention until now. Clare warns them against not making their round thing even, because it will crack. But surely that could never happen. Not here. Not in the Masterchef kitchen.

They have four hours. “Your time starts now,” says Clare. Everyone on the balcony screams like a dying warthog. The contestants clutch at their ears in agony.

Leah and Jess are both stunned by the size of the recipe. They were apparently expecting a one-paragraph job, but hey, guess what? Pressure tests are hard. Meanwhile Derek is worried he won’t be able to focus for four hours. If that’s a major concern for him, maybe he should drop out now, as cooking may not be for him.

Clare asks Derek how the meringue is going, a question rich with subtext. Derek tells her it’s going well, with a significant look. The heat is palpable.

Leah takes time out for a brief flashback to happy times at home, making desserts and feeding them to the army of obese children she keeps chained in her cellar. “I love molecular gastronomy,” she says, having heard viewers are still unsure as to whether she is a wanker or not.

Leah has her meringues in the oven, and is frankly much prouder of that fact than it objectively merits. From the balcony comes the call for her to “keep motoring”, which is fairly empty advice even by Masterchef standards.

Clare tells Jess she needs to get her meringues in in the next two minutes. Jess doesn’t need this harassment: she feels bullied by Clare. Clare is so obsessed with how FAST Jess is doing her meringues: why can’t she focus instead on how WELL Jess is doing her meringues? Which is, it turns out, not very well at all. They absolutely suck. “Go, Jess, go,” comes a call from the balcony in a flat emotionless monotone.

Jess now has a flashback, to the time she was in hospital. Frankly a less photogenic flashback than Leah’s, but definitely more emotionally manipulative. “I had to have a tumour removed” wins a lot more backstory points than “I like to make desserts”.

Derek has yet to have a flashback, but he did get a workout montage, so it all evens out. Anushka believes that Derek is “unstoppable”, but with all due respect to Anushka, so fucking what?

George shouts that there are only two and a half hours to go: if this were his restaurant that would be almost ten dollars in wages. Jess feels that she is “not too far behind”: she is just behind enough. To lose. She is making pear pearls with a scoop. I hope that’s in the recipe, because otherwise this is disturbingly obsessive behaviour. Clare tells her her pearls must be done within the next fifteen minutes. God, Clare, could you be more of a clock fascist?

Leah is feeling really good, which suggests she’s on some kind of mood-elevating substance, because she is in an objectively awful situation and should have very sore feet.

Derek may have missed a step. The balcony thinks so anyway. He forgot to get his jelly out of the blast chiller, and now it’s frozen, proving the old aphorism “putting things in freezers sometimes freezes them”. “I could be going home today,” he says with dread, as he has no gym at home.

Derek asks Clare whether he can melt his frozen jelly. Clare struggles to vocalise her intense and growing hatred for Derek. “You can try,” says George, in the manner of Satan urging Jesus to jump off a cliff.

Clare asks Jess what’s next. Some kind of adult education course, just to keep her mind active, presumably. But Jess interprets it as a question about the dessert that she is taking far too long to make. What’s next is colouring in lemons with a green texta or something probably.

Leah places a bag in a water bath. Why? Who knows? Who can fathom the endless depths of a woman’s heart? Leah has come to a momentous decision: she is going to use gellan in her puree. This is it: no going back. Once you decide to use gellan in your puree, there are only two outcomes: a delicious dessert, or a bloody death.

Derek is falling slightly behind, which is humiliating given one of his competitors is Jess. “What stage you at now?” Matt asks. “Clinical depression,” Derek replies. He’s made his puree and he’s happy with it, as it does indeed look like bland mush, as puree should.

Jess is running aimlessly back and forth between the bench and the freezer, like a zoo animal driven mad by captivity. She surely cannot cling to sanity much longer.

Meanwhile Derek is making something called a…creme diplomat? That can’t be right, can it? Surely there isn’t a food called a “diplomat”. What the hell is going?

Steph is looking at Jess’s creme pat, but it doesn’t seem to be getting thick, no matter how much Jess stirs or regurgitates semi-digested beef into it. Steph is worried, but on the upside, she doesn’t care what happens to Jess.

The people on the balcony are bored out of their skulls. They never knew it could be this tedious watching three people making pear puree. Occasionally they bark flatly, “Come on Derek”, but you can tell they’d rather be on Twitter.

Leah has missed something. Clare urges her to figure out what she’s missed. Leah can’t figure it out. She stares at the strange symbols on the menu, wishing that her parents had let her attend school. Finally she realises she hasn’t added water, making the sea monkey element of the dessert almost non-existent. She quickly pours a bunch of water into her mush, turning it to watery mush.

Leah is also making a creme diplomat. This is mental.

Clare seems genuinely worried about the contestants’ progress. It is going to crush her if any of them fail to make the insanely complex dessert that even professional chefs would probably fail at. Yet she has set herself up for this disappointment. Clare curses her predisposition to self-sabotage.

The balcony calls out that there is not much time left and that Leah should “come on”. “Fuck off, shitheads,” Leah says under her breath probably.

Derek gets his meringues out of the oven. He’s quite happy with them, but his standards have never been high. He tries to release the meringue from the mold. He prays they don’t crack. In conclusive proof of the existene of God, they don’t crack.

Leah is also getting her meringues out of their molds. She does not pray, but they don’t crack anyway, possibly because she prayed last night for it.

Jess must now try to remove the meringue domes. The first one cracks because God hates her. The second one cracks because she has not repented. The third one cracks because she simply refuses to get the message. The fourth one cracks mainly for comedic value. But the fifth one…explodes in a ball of fire.

Oh it’s the ad break.

Back we come, and Jess’s fifth meringue…does not crack! That’s disappointing, just when we had her on the edge of complete despair.

Time is up, and the three losers hug Clare, showing no respect for her personal boundaries.

First to plate up is Derek, who claims to have “loved every bit” of the cook, which is incredibly disturbing, because a lot of it was stressful and unpleasant and exhausting, so how the hell did he love it? Psychosis, that’s how.

This is one of those dumb dishes where the contestant puts it together in front of the judges. They have ten minutes to do so. Derek does so. It is not great television.

The judges taste. “When it’s right, you know it’s right,” says George pointlessly. Clare says Derek’s thingy is a “really precise piece of work”, like it’s a watch or something. She looks a bit sad as she says it though. I think maybe she’s not enjoying the Masterchef judges’ personal hygiene.

Leah plates up next. She has ten minutes and etc.

They taste Leah’s whatsit. It seems to take a lot longer than Derek’s did. The editor must’ve thought they ate it in a much more compelling way. Gary and George think the texture isn’t much chop. Clare thinks the discs are thick and the pears are thin, but sorrowfully admits that it tastes technically like food.

Finally Jess plates up, her face streaked with culinary tears. She makes a valiant stab at claiming to be a big fan of Clare. Clare compliments her on her determination. “Nothing was going to beat you,” she says, demonstrating an impressive grasp of dramatic irony. Jess says her mantra is “competent, calm and capable”, thus proving that having a mantra is no substitute for actually being the things your mantra says.

Jess puts her dessert together. It collapses. Matt puts his face in his hands: he can’t believe these goddamn hacks. Jess is as shattered as her structurally unsound meringue.

The judges taste Jess’s dish, in the hopes that maybe it gives them all spontaneous orgasms to make up for its horrible garbage appearance. “I like the sorbet,” says Gary, like a man complimenting a bucket of vomit on its shiny handle. It’s all over. They can’t even pretend there’s a difficult decision here.

The three losers come in to be judged. Gary notes that earlier he said it was often the little things that let contestants down: little things like your entire dish falling apart in front of your eyes. Such tiny details have come back to bite Jess. “You can walk out with your head held high,” says Clare, but she is strongly implying that she shouldn’t.

Jess tells the judges that she is proud of her growth as a person: that and four bucks will buy you a coffee from McDonald’s. She believes her time on Masterchef has proven she is more resilient and competent than she gives herself credit for, and also that she’s shit at meringues.

Jess is now working at a place called Firedoor, which luckily has no desserts on the menu, and is about to launch a range of cultured compound butter, which sounds absolutely insane.

Tune in tomorrow, when the guy from Masterchef who looks like Jez from Peep Show will stare disconcertingly at everyone.

Help me live my recapping dream by supporting my Patreon — the warm inner glow you get will be well worth it. For more hot takes on Masterchef, check out the Washing Up podcast, Australia’s foremost Mastercheffy audio extravaganza.