Masterchef Recap: Save Ferris
It’s Heston Week, and you know what that means! At least I hope you know what that means. If you don’t know what that means, the fresh hell about to descend upon us all will come as quite a shock.
Basically Heston Week means a week spent in the company of Heston Blumenthal, which translates to a week spent in the company of the wankiest, most pointlessly complicated portions of utterly stupid food that you’ve ever seen, unless you’ve seen Heston Blumenthal on TV before, in which case you already know how lame this week is going to be.
We begin with Harry admitting that he can’t believe he’s got this far, and he’s not the only one. The amateurs are in a rooftop carpark near the Melbourne Star ferris wheel, so you can see where this is going. Gary informs them that this week they will be creating four different pop-up restaurants, the first of which will be in the Melbourne Star, a task both daunting and oddly irritating.
Matt announces that there is a special guest coming and everyone laughs like they’re on nitrous oxide and covers their face with their hands as if they’ve just broken their nose. Matt says “Heston Blumenthal” and everyone screams in the manner of 1960s teens upon seeing the Beatles, except that the teens had a good reason. “Are you crazy?” asks Theresa, but I’m not sure what she’s getting at. I don’t even know who the “you” in her question is. Is she asking me? Am I crazy? I don’t know why she has to bring me into this.
Heston immediately starts wanking on in his usual manner, talking about the Big Bang and how the atoms from stars form communities and that this is why he wants to start a restaurant in a ferris wheel.
“Stars, planets, things going around the sun. I mean how good is that?” says George, and you’ve got to feel a little bit embarrassed for him, because he has even less idea of what he’s talking about than usual. He seems to be asking the amateurs for their assessment of how good it is to describe celestial objects in basic terms. None of them answer him. He will never find out how good stars, planets and things going around the sun are.
Today’s task is quite difficult one, because the Melbourne Star, against all predictions at the time it was built, moves, meaning each team of two must serve their pod before it moves on. Obviously this is a skill that anyone hoping to work in the food industry has to have.
Harry suggests to Chloe that they should make Anna’s Mess, which you may remember from the Anna’s Mess challenge, AKA the Day The Music Died. Chloe thinks Harry is a bit mental.
Gary asks if Heston has any ideas. Heston suggests imagining the surface of Mars. I don’t think this guy even knows what food is.
Theresa understands the baffling Heston mindset: she is making something called a “Black Hole”, in which one combines fruit and sugar to create a reckless uncosted election promise. “I might be foolish,” she says, unnecessarily hedging her bets.
Heather informs us that she and Trent are making something called “Daytime Nighttime”, but she says it with a look on her face that says, “I do not know why we are doing this.” Trent is concerned about all the duck breasts he needs to cook in the time allotted, but like dozens of amateurs before him, he chooses to blunder onwards rather than try something more realistic.
Elena and Mimi are being rather clever and building their menu around the theme of the undersea universe, rather than outer space, throwing into sharp relief just how dumb this whole exercise is.
Meanwhile Matt the Amateur feels like he’s done nothing, both in the challenge and in life.
Brett is faintly grumpy because Heston ain’t his kind of guy. Brett is more of a gastro pub guy, and it’s true that you can easily imagine Brett running a pub that gives everyone gastro. But his own failings aside, let’s all get on board with Brett’s rejection of the Heston “let’s make everything look like another thing” philosophy.
Gary is not on board. Brett has said the word “moon”, and you’d think that’d be enough to get Gary off your back, but no, he keeps whining at Brett to tell him what it “means”. Dammit this is Heston Week. It’s not about meaning. In fact it is actively opposed to meaning.
Brett’s partner is making chocolate domes, having been inspired by how many people have failed to make chocolate domes before.
Over at the maroon team, Heather and Trent are making a dessert called “the nighttime comet” and honestly how much of this crap are we expected to take. It’s just food, everyone. It’s just FOOD.
“My lime juice for my orbs are ready,” says Theresa, and good for her. Gary asks he how it’s going, which is a huge mistake because it causes Theresa to start talking at him, and god only knows when she’ll stop. “Gary loves the idea of the black hole,” she tells the camera, but there’s no need to delve into his private life in this way. Meanwhile Theresa’s teammate Matt the Amateur is hacking sullenly at some chickens like a man whose dreams have died.
Harry is working on his “big bang”, which he describes as “a take on Anna’s Mess”, demonstrating his ability to browbeat a teammate into doing what he wants yet again. It’s an interesting mentality, that when faced with a high-pressure, time-sensitive challenge in an unfamiliar environment, goes straight to the most difficult and complicated dish they have ever made for inspiration. At moments like these, Harry’s hairdo becomes powerfully representative of his mind.
“The wheels of time are turning,” says Gary, and I get it.
Elise’s chocolate is too thick and it’s setting in the moulds and she can’t tip the chocolate out and this, combined with Brett’s innate hatred of everything Heston stands for, is auguring ill for the green team. We’re halfway through the challenge and Elise is starting over again.
Let this be a lesson to any youngsters watching: never temper chocolate.
“Start picking up the pace,” Gary roars, visibly salivating at the thought of seeing the amateurs fail.
Blue team Elena and Mimi are well on the way to pleasing Gary, as he observes they are only just starting their dessert with fifty minutes to go. They promise him they’ll be able to finish, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they. Elena’s idea is to present grapes in a variety of different ways, which is a boring idea and she should be ashamed of herself.
Gary pops over to lecture Heather on the physics of cocoa, and Heather mournfully tries again to make something that doesn’t suck: the Holy Grail of Heston Week.
Harry tells Gary about his Big Bang dessert. Gary tells Harry his beef is problematic. Chloe tells Gary she gets him. Harry looks confused. Chloe believes she has to push herself. She tells Harry she could dehydrate some olives, which is accurate enough — I mean any of us COULD dehydrate some olives, if we felt the urge. Harry thinks dehydrated olives are a great idea. “That sort of roughness you get in space,” he says, cryptically: has Harry been to space? And what sort of roughness did he encounter there?
Gary shouts that there are fifteen minutes left, and “that is still time to make good decisions!” What Gary doesn’t realise is that the problem with these people has never been lacking the time to make good decisions.
Gary explains everyone’s dishes to the other judges. Heston is vaguely interested. George nods as if he understands what’s going on. It is agreed that the important thing is to connect the idea to the dish, flying in the face of what might be called the saner hypothesis: that the important thing is to make food that is good.
Outside a crowd has gathered at the foot of the Star to scream at Heston. “Congratulations for getting here,” says Heston, which seems a very low threshold for congratulating people.
Back in the kitchen Gary is doing that egomaniacal chef thing of yelling obvious facts at everyone and then getting pissy when they don’t shout “YES GARY” back at him. He storms over to the red team and demands to know why Chloe is putting her meat in the oven. Chloe has buggered up her beef: she thought ovens and meat were a winning combination, but she has ruined the meat with her demented fixation on applying heat to animal flesh.
Meanwhile Elise has covered herself in chocolate in a provocative new art installation. Gary suggests that she should wash herself, but that is not how Elise rolls. Elise needs to put her chocolate aside and help Brett, who is by now having a major molecular breakdown.
The soundtrack goes all action-movie as plating-time looms. “Hurry up!” barks Gary, fed up with the banality of modern life.
Service starts. The red team must serve the first pod. They do so. The yellow team must serve the second pod. They are not ready. Matt the Amateur is slicing his chicken as the seconds tick away. He and Theresa race to the pod and just make it. The green team must serve the third pod, and…they do. This is actually getting a bit repetitive. I hope someone stuffs up or this will be incredibly boring.
Wonderful news! Trent’s duck breast is overdone! He has no time to do whatever you do to an overdone duck breast — reverse the cooking process? — and simply serves up his dry, unpleasant breasts. The duck, I mean.
And so it goes on. The wheel turns, much like the great wheel of life itself, which inexorably grinds us all to dust. As the wheel turns, the teams rush their dishes to the pods, and the people in the pods laugh and chat merrily, not knowing the misery and despair that has gone into their meals. Gary is filled with an intense hatred of all humankind as he spits venomously at the amateurs.
The yellow team is struggling. Their pod has arrived and they are still finishing their plating. Gary is yapping at them that there is no time. The pod is leaving…
And they make it. Bugger.
Oh the judges are trying the dishes. I’m not sure what the point of serving to the pods even is, really. Heston, Matt and George eat the yellows’ main. George and Matt enjoy the potatoes. Heston can see some pretty clouds, which he for some reason attributes to the yellow team’s cooking skill. Will every team be judged on how attractive the sky looks at the time of eating?
The green team’s dish looks rushed, because they’ve been rushing. It’s not the vision that Brett had in his head, which could be a blessing in disguise given what we know about Brett’s head. Heston wouldn’t associate the greens’ main with a crater. In the normal world, not associating your food with a crater would be desirable, but this is Ridiculous Heston World, so food that does not resemble a crater is a big no-no. Heston looks deeply disappointed that he isn’t getting to eat a crater tonight.
Trent and Heather’s duck breast arrives at the judges’ pod. Matt wants to know if Heston can sense the daytime-nighttime theme of the dish. Heston just doesn’t know. The overcooked duck is a problem, which is a surprise, because I didn’t know the judges were even paying attention to what the food was like to eat.
The blue team, with their Enchantment Under The Sea theme, serve up to the judges, and Matt is delighted with the dish’s wetness. George loves how there are round things on his plate. Heston is excited by the plate’s energy. “I just want to hold hands,” says George. Yep, they’ve lost their minds. Terror stalks the sky.
Heather is making her dessert. Gary tastes her mascarpone cream. The cream has split, and I don’t blame it. The maroon team is floundering.
We get a few brief shots of the punters dining in their pods, as if anyone cares. They seem to like the food, but they don’t look like people with particularly high standards, if you know what I mean. After all, look at the lengths they’ll go to for a free meal.
Harry and Chloe have worked out a brilliant system, which consists of placing the ingredients of their dish onto the plate one after another. Harry seems extremely proud of this system. The judges are really impressed with Harry and Chloe’s main, which resembles objects floating randomly through space, meaning, as far as I can determine, that it’s just a bunch of stuff chucked on a plate with no organisation whatsoever. So kudos on that I guess.
It’s time for dessert now, and already this episode has been going for fifteen hours. Elise’s chocolate is thicker than she wanted, as is her partner Brett.
Meanwhile Mimi is extremely excited about putting “space junk” on her plate, which I think means a lot of little bits of things and really isn’t all that exciting, but Mimi hasn’t had much screen time tonight so let’s let her have her moment.
Theresa wants to surprise the judges. She could do this effectively by staying quiet for two minutes, but instead she’s doing it via food. She is serving her “black hole”, a dessert so dense that light cannot escape it. Heston likes the look of it. George likes the taste of it. Matt keeps rambling on about things being sucked into holes. Collectively they are trying to put the unpleasant “let’s hold hands” episode of earlier in the evening behind them.
The maroon team serves their “nighttime comet”. Matt thinks there’s something “crazy and comety about it” and he’s not even bothering to attempt coherence anymore. The cake in the dish is extremely heavy, which the judges don’t approve of, but how do they know it’s not deliberate? Do you know how heavy a comet is? Why can’t the heaviness be part of the theme?
Also, I think they’re calling the cake a “financier”, but that can’t be right, can it?
Elise still has chocolate all over her arms as the green team serves up their dessert, but she is very proud of herself, which I think we’re being invited to consider sadly ironic. Heston cracks Elise’s chocolate sphere open and declares her dessert attractive but too heavy — he’s like a broken record with this “heavy” stuff.
The blue team’s “shooting star” is next to be judged, causing George to make a weird joke about Heston eating pop rocks. It seems to be another attempt to convince Heston that they are best friends, but I don’t think it’s working. I think Heston is, understandably, repulsed. I think Heston is about to jump out of his pod.
The red team serves dessert. Chloe’s only concern is that she doesn’t know whether the dome will smash on the plate. “If it doesn’t smash on the plate, it’s not a big bang,” she says, but given a “big bang” is something they literally just made up earlier that day, that doesn’t feel like such a serious worry.
In their pod, the judges chuck their big bangs around and all shout with boyish joy at the amazing sight of a chocolate ball breaking when dropped on a plate. They are easily impressed and have abandoned all dignity.
It’s time for the judges to reveal which teams have succeeded at this ridiculous challenge and which teams have failed miserably to satisfy Heston Blumenthal’s capricious whims.
The yellow, blue and red teams have each provided a top-notch dish, causing Elise to smile at Theresa with hatred burning in her eyes. It’s the maroon team that’s stuffed up big time — Trent and Heather are into elimination. They also don’t get to cook for the remaining three Heston pop-ups, which seems like a reward more than anything, but Heather is oddly gloomy about this slice of luck.
George urges Trent and Heather to keep their heads held high, even though clearly they have no reason to and have earned nothing but shame with their efforts.
Tune in tomorrow night when Heston makes the amateurs make savoury ice cream because he is awful.
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