Masterchef Recap: The Fish of Wrath
So Japan Week comes to a close. We will miss you, Japan, as you now fade once more into obscurity, never to be mentioned again. So many precious memories from this week: remember the squid? Remember the mountain, and the field? Remember the time a Japanese woman ate some food and smiled? Ah, a magical time was had by all.
This is the big elimination, of course, and the question on everyone’s lips is: why is House Rules so popular?
The question on a certain number of people’s lips though is: Will Sarah use her immunity pin? There are many complex issues at play here, in particular the question of is she fricking INSANE? Of COURSE she should play it. That’s what it’s FOR. Imagine if you got eliminated by bloody CALLAN, when you could’ve saved yourself. Come on, woman, play that damn pin!
Of course she doesn’t play the pin. For fuck’s sake. God damn these people and their imaginary senses of honour. Doesn’t she realise there are people sitting at home watching this whose happiness depends on her not being eliminated? So selfish.
Anyway, the task is to cook something personal to themselves, taking something they love and doing something new with it. Immediately Tamara decides to make dumplings, because as a child she was raised by a family of wild dumplings. And Callan decides to make a sushi dessert, because he is very personally invested in the concept of being a lunatic.
Meanwhile Sarah is making something called “Steamboat”. Or “Steambo”. I dunno, but it involves cooking pork belly as per her contract with the Pork Belly Marketing Board, that specifies she must cook pork belly in public at least four times every day from now until 2028.
Apparently it’s definitely a risk to steam pork belly, but since Sarah has abandoned her opportunity to survive this elimination and everything is on the line, it seems the perfect time to take a risk. It’s not that much of a risk, of course, because Callan is making ice cream with sushi and the only way he is not going home is if the judges just decide to lie about how disgusting his dish is.
“These need to be the best goddamn dumplings I’ve ever made,” says Tamara, lapsing into an unfortunate burst of obscenity under the pressure. She keeps talking about her “husband”, who we’ve never heard of before. Suspicious. What’s going on here? Also, we just saw a photo of her and her “husband”, but in the photo she had brown hair. Just how many Tamaras are there? How deep does this go?
George and Gary pop by to interfere in Sarah’s process. She explains to them what she’s doing. Gary pulls a Gary-face. George and Gary tell Sarah how much they despise her for her hubris, and move on.
Tamara believes Chinese food is all about texture. She tears the skin off a chicken, a hobby that always relaxes her.
Meanwhile Callan is feeling pretty good about himself, despite all available evidence. Gary and George pop by his station to note that a sweet fish dessert is a stupid idea and Callan is out of his mind. “I love it!” says George, by which he means, “you’re a dickhead”.
Gary and George have a chat. “Some interesting dishes,” says Gary, meaning, “Callan is a weirdo, eh?” George observes that the dishes are representative of the challenge, which is a bizarre coincidence, one of those eerie things where you ask people to do something and by pure chance they do the thing you asked them to.
The spectators won’t stop calling out questions to Sarah, and Sarah won’t stop cursing their existence under her breath. They’re not as loud as when they’re on the balcony, but they’re a lot closer, so it’s hard to say which is more annoying really.
Tamara expresses a wish to make soy quail eggs. I don’t know where young people today get these absurd ideas. The spectators call out to her to “hustle”. They sound kind of bored.
Ben tells Callan to keep an eye on his oven, vainly hoping he will notice the big label on the oven reading “WHATEVER YOU DO, NEVER MAKE A FISH DESSERT”. Gary also has a look in his oven, fighting with every fibre in his being to restrain his natural impulse to slap Callan’s face and ask him who the hell he thinks he is.
Tamara has her fingers crossed that her dumplings will cook in time. A lot of finger-crossing happens on Masterchef. Contestants are always saying, “I just have to hope the flavours are all there”, “I just hope it’s cooked all the way through” and so on. It never seems to occur to anyone that it’s the cook’s job to actually make these things happen: everyone just leaves it up to fate.
Sarah slices into her pork and finds that it’s perfect. As it should be: since she’s cooked pork every day for the last six months, you’d hope she’d know how to do it by now.
Callan says the taste of his dessert is “mind-bending”, which he probably thinks is a good thing, but to everyone else is more likely to mean some kind of mad cow situation. Not that you can even trust Callan’s opinion of flavour: if his taste buds worked, he wouldn’t cook the stuff he cooks in the first place.
Tamara takes out her dumplings. Literally, I mean — it’s not a euphemism. She wants her dumplings to be next-level, and I think they are — oh wait, I said not a euphemism, didn’t I? Anyway let’s see.
Time is up and everyone cheers for no reason because for all they know it’s all shit. Callan is pleased with himself because he is that much closer to poisoning several famous food identities.
Sarah serves her “steamboat” first. Having goaded her to not use her pin, the judges now make snide comments about how risky it is to not use a pin. Jerks. They taste the steamboat. “That’s not a dish for the fainthearted, is it?” says Gary, blown away by Sarah’s inclusion of gelignite and a small ghost train within the dish. The judges love Sarah’s dish, but it still has to be better than Tamara’s and Callan’s, but the upside is it will definitely be.
OR WILL IT?
Yeah I reckon.
Tamara serves her dumplings with quail eggs, in a deliberate insult to the quail community with whom she has been feuding for years. “Take THAT, fuckers,” she whispers as she places her plate on the table.
“That is just delicious!” says Matt of Tamara’s dish, going on to say a number of words denoting goodness of food in a taste sense.
“You know what?” says George. “We’ve tasted Sarah’s dish. We’ve tasted Tamara’s dish.” “I agree with you, George,” says Matt, apparently thinking he was just making a catalogue of recent events. In fact what he goes on to say is that Tamara’s is better than Sarah’s, and Sarah might be going home with her pin. This is a clever way of conning us into thinking this is a moment of high drama, before inevitably deciding that Callan’s dish is worse than both of them.
Finally, Callan steps up. Matt compliments Callan’s dish as “one of the bravest we’ve ever seen on Masterchef”, because it is undeniably brave to deliberately cook something disgusting in a cooking contest.
The judges taste Callan’s sushi ice cream and die in agony.
Not really. They taste and they giggle and Gary pulls a Gary-face. Then they all pretend that it tastes good, which it doesn’t. We know it doesn’t. They are lying.
The judges gather the three contestants and butter them up with meaningless flattery, the coward’s truth, the lies we tell each other to avoid facing up to the lies we tell ourselves, the lubricant of society that permits the violent penetration of humanity. It is a revolting sight and we lose all respect for them. Anyway they tell them their dishes were all nice. And then Callan gets eliminated because OBVIOUSLY.
Gary makes up a cover story about toasted rice so he doesn’t have to tell the truth: Callan’s idea was revolting and his dish an offence against God and Man.
A postscript informs us that Callan is working on a musical pop-up restaurant, which can only mean one thing: Callan is dressing up as a music-box doll a la Dick van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and throwing muffins at passersby.
Tune in next week, when everyone agrees never to speak of Japan again.
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