Masterchef Recap: The Led Zeppelin Challenge
Previously on Masterchef, Peter Gilmore, as is his wont, fucked everyone up. As punishment, Callan, Nicole and Arum must put on black aprons and engage in acts of wanton immoral cooking.
The three losers wake up in the Masterchef house at 5.30, which seems like reckless behaviour. Nicole did not sleep well last night, always a danger for a chef because if you fall asleep while cooking your face might fall in a terrine. Nicole is crying already, so god knows how she’ll cope with the actual challenge.
Arum is feeling confident because unlike Callan and Nicole he has been in several pressure tests before, even though this means that he has shown himself previously to be a poor cook and should therefore be less confident. But Masterchef has always been a house of lies, and the lies we tell ourselves are always the most potent.
The guest chef today is someone called Paul Carmichael, who has spectacular dreadlocks and makes Caribbean food. Callan has never made Caribbean food, but as long as it involves liquid nitrogen and fondant I’m sure he’ll be fine.
Carmichael presents three dishes: charred pumpkin and salted cod; black pudding and pickled cucumber; and Bajan fish fry, which seems to be a snapper wearing a dress made of cornflakes. The fish has been deboned in a complex way where you take all the bones out but leave one side of the fish intact, and everyone is extremely intimidated. The three contestants immediately start calculating the odds of just leaving the bones in and hoping the judges don’t notice.
The contestants begin the cooking process by reading the recipe: Masterchef experience tells them that only after reading the recipe thoroughly can you move on to ignoring the recipe.
It’s only just starting to sink in to Callan that he could be going home today, and like all teenagers, going home is his worst nightmare. From the balcony someone tells him he has to go faster, which is a good way for people on the balcony to sabotage contestants they don’t like. Another call to hurry comes — the balcony dwellers really hate Callan. He is deboning his fish with stunning ineptitude: the spectators’ plan is working perfectly. Paul pops by his bench to laugh at how rubbish he is. The whole kitchen basks in the glow of his failure. “Take a deep breath, keep going,” says Paul, wanting to see more of this travesty.
“There’s no saving it,” says Callan, gazing at his mutilated fish and crying that an innocent animal had to suffer like this.
Meanwhile Gary is getting the sense that things have slowed down a bit. “I’m getting the sense that things have slowed down a bit,” he says, to emphasise this. He tells the losers that they can’t afford to slow down, but that’s not really true — Arum and Nicole can afford to do all sorts of dumb stuff when you consider how badly Callan’s going.
Arum covers his black pudding in glad wrap: black pudding must always be well wrapped so as to deprive it of oxygen and induce a sense of panic in the pudding, which gives it is flavour.
Callan feels he’s caught up. “Good to see your smile back Cal,” a balcony dweller lies. Little do they know his smile represents his growing madness.
Meanwhile Nicole keeps forgetting how much of everything she needs to put in. “She’s not following her instincts,” says Eliza, which could be a problem, but not as big a problem as if she doesn’t follow the recipe, so I’d say put the instincts on the backburner and keep checking the paper. As she frantically tries to catch up, she opens a door to hell and the flames of Satan belch forth their fury. The devil has exacted a terrible vengeance on Nicole’s black pudding. Her clingfilm has collapsed. She doesn’t know why, but hers is not to reason why, her is but to do and wrap her pudding again.
Nicole is so angry she’s venting her rage by attacking a pumpkin with a huge knife. The pumpkin needs to be prepared by putting it in a bag filled with brown liquid — harder than it sounds, I’m sure. Nicole would like to read the recipe to check what to do with the pumpkin, but she doesn’t have time, so she trusts her instinct and feeds it to a passing goat. Whether she’s right to do this only time will tell.
Frankly, a lot more time is being spent on pumpkin than I can in good conscience approve of.
Speaking of disapproving of things, George comes to Arum’s bench to tell him not to worry about the recipe. This is also the approach George takes to industrial relations law.
Nicole has returned to her first love: reading. “STOP READING!” Paul bellows at her — if there’s one thing he hates, it’s someone who reads his recipes. He knows they’re awful and holds anyone who reads them in contempt.
Over at Arum’s bench, Arum has ruined his fish. “It’s dead, may it rest in peace,” he says grimly, but what he doesn’t realise is that fish is SUPPOSED to be dead before you eat it: that’s the difference between fish and cockroaches. Silly Arum! The ironic thing is that he said earlier, “I want to make sure I cook this fish properly”, and then he DIDN’T cook it properly! How we laughed.
With Arum’s fish sticking to the grill and Callan’s fish being cut to ribbons and Nicole on the verge of spontaneous combustion, it’s one of the most entertaining challenges the judges have ever seen.
Callan feels his fish is pretty well cooked, but we all know where Callan’s feelings have got him in the past. People on the balcony are screaming at all three losers, their hatred coming out in terrifying fashion. Nicole says she feels like she’s run a marathon, proving once and for all the truth of the popular fan theory: that Nicole has never run a marathon.
Callan bursts into tears, his tender heart breaking for the poor fish who had to die for this sickening exhibition. George takes him aside for one of his famous Pointless Pep Talks. In true Calombaris form, he tells Callan nothing that is useful or even coherent, and then forces him to hug him. This is the only way George can get other humans to touch him.
The judges ask Callan why the competition means so much to him. “People have given up so much to be in this competition, and I don’t want to let them down,” he replies. This makes no sense whatsoever, but they let it slide because he’s had a hard day. Tasting his dish they find the cucumber is too hot, the pumpkin is undercooked, and the salted cod is on the non-existent side. However, the snapper, which he savaged so brutally with his knife, tastes vaguely OK, so everyone agrees that it’s amazing that a man as young and as incompetent as Callan managed to not kill anyone.
Moving on to Arum, the judges peer with interest at the pathetic shambles he calls a “dish”. He tells the judges he’s quite disappointed in himself, as he would’ve preferred to serve something that didn’t look at home in a pig’s trough, but on the other hand, he notes, he got everything on the plate — “not like SOME people” he doesn’t add with a significant head nod in Callan’s direction.
The judges try Arum’s Eton mess of fish. “Arum may not have got the look of all three dishes right, but I think he got the spirit of them right,” says Matt, directly insulting Paul’s culture. Arum’s dish tastes excellent, but as we know this is Masterchef and on Masterchef taste is worth less than nothing.
Like Callan, Nicole is not ready to go home. Like Callan, Nicole has left some things off the plate, so nobody gives a shit how ready she is. Asked if this is the toughest day she’s had in the kitchen, Nicole replies this is the toughest day she’s had “in any kitchen”. What kitchens are in the running for that title? Do her in-laws put an unusual amount of pressure on her at Sunday lunch?
Paul finds a bone in Nicole’s fish, so she’s screwed. “As good a job as she did deboning the fish, there are some residual bones,” he says, which is like saying, “As good a job as she did performing the heart transplant, the heart is not actually inside the patient”. All she can hope for is that Callan’s dish was so horrific it cancels out actual bones.
Nah, it wasn’t. Nicole is going home. We’ll remember her as one of the people who was on this series of Masterchef and who we almost recognised on several occasions. The epilogue informs us that Nicole dreams of her own Vietnamese fusion restaurant, so it’s nice to know she’s getting a good night’s sleep.
Tune in tomorrow when the judges demand their every hole be filled.
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