Masterchef Recap: Slam Dunkeld
Previously, on Masterchef, Jess got ideas above her station, but forced to labour under the non-inspiration of Shannon Bennett rather than the actually helpful Gordon Ramsay, she couldn’t get that pin. The undeserving shall bear the weight of their failure, as the Bible says.
Tonight, shouting!
As Chloe runs frantically into the kitchen, Samira blindly sprinkles flour and Gina is startled by the presence of spaghetti, we strap ourselves in for a bumpy ride. Clouds are drifting, ducks are swimming and the judges are standing in a garden waiting for the amateurs, who jog like the low-level grunts they are toward their doom. “It’s going to be a cracking day no matter what happens,” says Ben, a man bereft of imagination.
“A few of you are going to be heading off into the wide blue yonder,” says Gary. Yes, that’s right, they’re being deported. Suddenly a helicopter hoves into view, and the amateurs applaud, giving due credit to the principles of aerodynamics first explored by Leonard Da Vinci.
“How good is that? A chopper,” says George unnecessarily. He then makes everyone grope around in his sack in order to choose teams. Matt informs the amateurs they’ll be recreating recipes from one of Australia’s least interesting regional restaurants, Wickens at the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld.
“Oh my god,” the amateurs gasp, having never heard of Wickens, the Royal Mail Hotel, or Dunkeld before. The captain and vice-captain of each team must travel by pointless chopper to the restaurant, memorise the dishes, and come back to instruct their teams. Each team must then cook for thirty people.
The teams pick captains and vice-captains On the blue team, Jess attempts to pretend she doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, Aldo decides that she’d be great and Jess finds herself wishing she’d learnt the concept of saying no at some point in her life. On the red team Lisa puts her hand up because in her job she has to memorise things, which is a portent of catastrophe if ever I heard one.
The red team has picked Reece and Lisa, the blue tea Sarah and Jess. They pile into the official Masterchef Vic Morrow Memorial Helicopter, and set off for Dunkeld, voted Victoria’s most average country town eight years running. As soon as they arrive, the chef at the restaurant starts teaching them how to make some food. They watch him make the food. They can’t take any notes, which means they have to rely entirely on their feeble, atrophied brains.
Basically, what the Royal Mail people teach the amateurs is that in order to make the dishes, what you have to do is take a bunch of ingredients and put them together in the correct way, and then apply heat to them via the appropriate procedure.
Back at the Masterchef kitchen, everyone’s been sitting around with their thumbs up their butts for hours. But here come the captains and vice-captains to give them hilariously incorrect direction. They immediately begin writing down everything they remember on butcher’s paper a la Kevin Rudd’s famous 2020 Summit. What a great weekend that was.
Reece tells Samira he wants her to do the crumb, and Hoda to do the apricot. They instantly take a dislike to his dictatorial style and begin plotting a violent coup. Meanwhile Jess and Sarah are fifteen minutes into their creative writing assignment while the rest of the blue team stands around looking constipated. The red team has already started, but the blue team looks certain to win the essay portion of the challenge.
Sarah knows that they’re falling behind, but now that she has started writing, she finds that it is her true passion and cannot stop. The blue team finally begins moving and Jess starts babbling about pressure points and ordering Jenny to pit cherries. Jess has gone mad with power and seeks to break her minions’ will.
“Me and Reece went out to the Royal Mail Hotel and that was amazing,” says Lisa to an unseen interlocutor, obviously someone whose alarm didn’t go off and had to be caught up on events in the middle of prep time. They will get the wrong impression anyway though, as it wasn’t that amazing at all. It was just kitchens.
Sarah is instructing the blue team on how to make the blue eye, blue mussel, blue devil, a dish which has no blue elements whatsoever, so what the fuck, you know? “I’m gonna get you on a consomme,” says Sarah, to…someone? An imaginary friend, possibly.
While the amateurs cook, Gary tells the judges that he is quite interested in the show and what is happening on it. “Mm,” they agree.
The main element that Reece wants to work on is the mousse. He forces his underlings to perform shameful, menial tasks while he basks in the glory of mousse-work. “I want to make it really hard for the judges to decide which one’s David’s and which one’s mine,” he smirks. Reece…they’re going to know.
The blue team is playing with brambles, having succumbed to mass hysteria. These brambles, which are not blue in any way, are “blue devil”. “It’s a thistle,” Sarah tells Brendan. He stares at her, bewildered, having no idea what a thistle is.
“We need all the cherries we can get,” says Jess, revealing a surprisingly filthy sense of humour. She then moves on to stressing Aldo out by making him make ice cream in a way he doesn’t usually make ice cream. God it’s hard being Aldo.
“We need to get the ice cream into the mixer,” says Jess, making a clever reference to the well-worn Masterchef catchphrase. As always ice cream means stress, and the blue team is cracking under the pressure. “Oh shit,” says Jess, embarrassing her parents.
Jenny and Kanh laugh as they pit the cherries, showing just how little they care for Jess’s feelings. Jess does not dwell on their disrespect, running to the ice cream machine to tell Aldo what to do in the tones of a mother instructing her child how to wipe itself.
Meanwhile Sarah is cutting up carrots, goddammit can she just get over the fucking carrots already? The red team is sous videing something or other, as is the way of their people. “Everyone is definitely pulling their weight,” says Lisa in an oblique reference to the obesity rampant within her team.
Sarah wishes us to know that the most crucial part of this dish is getting the consomme right — it is important that it looks exactly like dirty dishwater. Thirty minutes to go and George is telling everyone they need to work harder, the editor cleverly cutting out the bit where he tells them they need to work for lower wages.
“I’ve never smoked anything before in my life,” says Jenny as she and Kanh slip out back for some herbal relaxation.
Meanwhile Ben has to get the fish cooked and it’s got to be cooked perfectly. Everyone is always obsessed with cooking fish perfectly in this show. Would it kill them to serve one imperfect fish once in a while? Get a grip, you know? It’s just fish. Who cares? All this is so unimportant.
It’s five minutes till service, and Sarah’s consomme is clear. I know this because she says it’s clear — just going by the evidence of my own eyes I would say it looks like the urine of a quite unhealthy animal.
Speaking of disgusting bodily fluids, Genene has made a bowl of bright green mucus. As zero hour approaches, there is a distinct possibility that either or both teams might serve something edible.
Lisa’s biggest concern is making the plating look the same as the chef from Dunkeld. Her biggest concern should be not making anyone vomit, but Masterchef fucks your priorities up something chronic.
Lisa serves her main to the judges and the guest chefs. They look amused at her pathetic attempts to join their world. Robin the chef loves the colour of the puree — ie green — but he says it with no real enthusiasm. This might be because he says nothing with enthusiasm. He is a man who is tired of this world.
Gary thinks the dish is quite nice but also some bits of it aren’t quite nice. George thinks the problem is ratio which doesn’t matter. George doesn’t give a shit about standards.
For a second I think Sarah says “This dish is a piece of poo” but actually she said “This dish is a piece of blue eyed cod”. The blue team’s main is indeed a piece of blue eyed cod — a tiny tiny piece, with a tiny tiny blob of carrot puree, and some tiny tiny vegetables on top, and then green cordial poured all over it. Oh wait, that’s the consomme.
“I think it’s unbelievable what they’ve done,” says Matt, subtly accusing the blue team of cheating. The judges taste the dish. Gary says he’s really impressed with how the fish is cooked. Robin nods and agrees in an exhausted, defeated way.
It’s time for dessert, and one thing is for sure: the portions will remain insultingly small. “Samira’s on the cluster,” says Reece, rudely and invasively. We just don’t need to know this. Something is wrong with the red team’s dessert. There are too many ingredients. It doesn’t look right. Reece, trusting his memory more than the other bit of his memory, barrels ahead anyway.
Meanwhile on the blue team, Jess is describing the dish for the eighth time tonight. She is extremely nervous, but not as nervous as Reece, who has fucked up his crumb and almost given up hope. “I reckon we should…” he says, but he doesn’t finish. “We need to make a new batch and we need to make it now,” he says for the benefit of viewers who had assumed he could come back next week to serve dessert.
On the blue side, Jess is yelling angrily at everyone in the style of R. Lee Ermey, making them cry even as they quinelle. Sarah serves the dessert to the judges, who eat it with an air of bitterness and resentment. George pulls a disgusted face, or possibly just looks like himself. David the chef thinks it’s amazing they’ve pulled it all together and got it on the plate, meaning that it’s pretty awful.
The red team, several hours later, serves their dessert. “It looks like a Reece dessert,” says Matt, noting how the ice cream is full of stubble and wearing glasses. The judges taste it, wishing they were at home in bed. Robin says “I think it’s awesome” despite the fact he looks like he has just been forced to euthanase his favourite horse. “A big highlight for me is those apricots,” says George, a depressing sentiment in any context.
“It’s close, there’s no question about it,” says George to disguise the fact that it is not close.
The amateurs gather for judgment. The blue team’s main was better than the red team. The blue team hugs each other, vastly prematurely. The red team’s dessert was perfect and the blue team’s was a smoking crater filled with owl shit. So who will win? The tension is almost noticeable.
The red team wins. The blue team will be up for elimination. Reece is super happy and says he’s proud to be surrounded by the people he’s with, which is an odd thing to say because the only reason he’s surrounded by those people is that they pulled the red thingy out of George’s sack — it’s not an achievement. Jess says she’s proud of her team, which is even odder because they are failures.
Anyway, tune in tomorrow when someone’s life is ruined.
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