Masterchef Recap: Voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?
It’s a big night, as for the first time the mystery box will contain ingredients chosen by Masterchef viewers, as part of Channel Ten’s much-hyped “Sunday Night Block of Bad Ideas”. The really disappointing thing is that the viewers didn’t seize their opportunity to really mess everyone up, by choosing live frogs and lightbulbs etc.
Anyway, the evening begins with Mimi explaining that with mystery boxes, “you never know what’s under those boxes”. So you can rest assured that Mimi understands the premise. The contestants enter the kitchen. “Who know what’s under the lid?” asks Gary, who still doesn’t get it: you DON’T know what’s under the lid, Gary! Come on, catch up!
Matt explains that the viewers have chosen the mystery box ingredients and everyone laughs and claps as if he’s just performed the mirror routine from Duck Soup. The amateurs lift their lids and discover just how thoroughly the viewers have screwed them. It’s pretty bad: there’s cauliflower. And a squid. And something called “lemon myrtle” that the viewers made up.
Naturally, the judges will only taste the best five dishes of the day. And as usual, that does constitute an insoluble paradox.
What can one make with cauliflower, squid, maple syrup and a coconut? Tropical Canadian caulimari is one answer, but unfortunately not one that makes sense. I think the best option would be to put the cauliflower and squid in a bowl and pour maple syrup over them until their flavours are completely obliterated, but nobody ever thinks strategically on this show.
“We’re looking for courageous, creative cooking!” yells Gary, and nobody knows what that means. I guess courageous cooking is when you cook over an open fire or while standing inside a sperm whale’s mouth or whatever.
Con reflects on last week, when he feels he let himself down, but what he doesn’t appreciate is that he also let everyone he loves down. This week he’s going to keep everything very simple: he’s just going to rest the coconut on a pancake and serve it. Con hits a snag early when he realises his custard will take a while: if Con has a flaw it is that he tends to start making things without knowing what the things actually are.
Chloe opines that mystery boxes are exciting because at the end nobody goes home, even though this is actually a very good reason why mystery boxes are the opposite of exciting. As indeed is Chloe, except when she says “I need to nail it if I want to get tasted”, which is a VERY exciting sentence if taken out of context.
Anastasia reveals her childhood in eastern Europe, where she learnt to place vegetables in baskets and sniff green things. Frankly her backstory needs work. She tells George and Gary she’s making torched cauliflower. George wants to know why. Anastasia doesn’t know how to answer: if these people knew why they did things, they wouldn’t be on Masterchef in the first place.
Chloe’s nougat is looking good…if you know what I mean.
“Be brave! Be bold!” shouts George, redundantly. This is of little use to Con, who is being as brave and bold as he can but can’t get his custard to work. He walks over to Olivia and asks for her advice. She advises him to have a little cry.
After a break in which Malcolm Turnbull assures us that his plan will deliver a strong economy, we return to Con, who explains that the judges will only taste the five best dishes, which we already knew but is probably a welcome revelation for those who had their memories erased during the break. George and Gary come to Con’s bench and ask him why he’s such a useless splodge of failure. Con says he has been wrestling with custard all his life and now wishes only for death. George and Gary shrug and walk away.
We now get the backstory of Karmen, who is a burglar who got caught up in the competition while trying to rob the Masterchef building. She explains that she is extremely shy and illustrates this with a scene of her eating dinner with her family in tense, icy silence. She is hoping Masterchef will help her come out of her shell and escape the desperate purgatory of her home life. We may or may not ever see Karmen again.
Anastasia is torching her calamari, gazing with guileless lust into the beautiful dancing heart of the flame, revelling in the electricity jolting her senses into life, that ability to feel that she can only gain from the Bright Emperor Fire.
Matt, 27, has been cooking really well for the last two weeks, but in private, not letting anyone know about it. Matt the judge comes over to tell him that if he tries really hard he could get really tall, and Matt the amateur cook is right chuffed.
Heather talks a bit about her squid, and it becomes quite evident that the producers think Heather is far more interesting than she really is.
Meanwhile Karmen’s parfait is in a cylindrical shape, the mad fool.
Also Con’s custard has not set, but he still believes he has a chance to be tasted, although really tasting his food at this stage would be cruelty: it’s the act of a bully to deliberately give a man false hope.
The judges yell thirty seconds to go. Chloe lets us know that she hears the judges yell thirty seconds to go, so we have verification that this did indeed happen. She runs to the freezer, trips over and bursts into flames.
But after a quick break…she’s OK! Although in another sense…she’s in a terrible way because she didn’t get to the freezer in time and all she has to serve is a depressing looking butter cake.
The first dish the judges want to taste is Karmen’s, even though she’s not technically a contestant. “I’m very happy,” she tells the judges in a tone suggestive of someone who has recently buried their favourite horse. The judges enjoy her dish very much, and Karmen for the first time truly believes she may be able to find a way out of the prison of her family.
Next the judges choose to taste Con’s dish, which is damn brave of them. “Con well done on getting into the top five,” says George, meaning, “Con, why not consider climbing onto the roof and jumping?” His foam is disgusting, which probably means exactly what you think.
Next, Heather, who is a surprise choice after being onscreen for approximately eighty six percent of the show thus far. Her fried squid and cauliflower is, obviously, utterly revolting, but the judges are pretentious so they lie about it being wonderful. “Welcome to Masterchef,” says George, which gives Heather validation because up to now she hadn’t known the name of the show she was on.
Actually that’s the second person they’ve welcomed to Masterchef tonight. Pretty weird, two weeks in. It seems likely that most of the people here tonight weren’t there at the beginning and there has been a high attrition rate in the early rounds, in terms of nervous collapse and salmonella.
Next is Matt and, I dunno, whatever. Squid etc. “Chasing the perfect dish is like chasing the perfect wave,” he muses, referring to the dampness and the muscle strains and the way your mouth keeps filling with saltwater and the constant threat of shark attack that every chef knows so well.
Next Anastasia and…hey! The people chosen to taste are the same ones they were showing talking throughout the challenge! That’s a bit suss! Anyway Anastasia, squid, hooray, subtle flavours, maple syrup, etc. Gary says “sweetness of the cauliflower” so I think he doesn’t know what cauliflower is.
Time to announce the mystery box winner. “This is going to be a tough decision,” says Gary, “except for Con, who obviously sucked, hahahaha!” He didn’t actually say that last bit but he strongly implied it.
The music tries to make us believe this is a very suspenseful moment but it’s not because it’s a mystery box and nobody cares about mystery boxes. It’s the most anticlimactic forty-five minutes every to be shown on Australian television.
The winner of the mystery box challenge, of course, gets a big advantage in the invention test which will turn out to be no advantage at all, so it’s all very exciting and Anastasia wins and she chooses marmalade over vegemite or peanut butter, probably because it’s a cooking challenge, not a spreading things on toast challenge.
Running into the pantry, the amateurs talk amongst themselves, asking each other, “what is marmalade?”
Chloe is hoping to get her dish right, after her tripping mishap. Presumably if she hadn’t fallen over earlier, she would be hoping to fuck it right up. She is doing a twist on marmalade on toast which is literally the most boring thing she could do. Well, the second most boring thing: the most boring thing would be to yell, “don’t SPREAD yourself too thin!” which coincidentally is what Matt does at this moment.
More than one contestant is cooking quail, once again raising that eternal question: where does Masterchef get all these quail from? I never see quail around the place, but they have an endless supply. It’s disturbing if you ask me.
Miles is finding that deboning a quail takes longer than he thought. It appears likely that he will end up serving a raw boneless quail. Which may or may not be good enough to win him this challenge.
Meanwhile Chloe decides to puree her rice pudding in a blender, because she’s an idiot. Five seconds into the pureeing process, she realises that she is an idiot and is stricken with puree-er’s remorse. “Hang on,” she thinks, “rice pudding pureed is going to be complete garbage, which most ex-Masterchef contestants say is a bad thing to serve to the judges”. It’s a real teachable moment.
“Desserts are really my forte,” says Matt, star of Endless Summer IV. I presume he means, “I have a vastly over-inflated sense of my ability and no friends”. I mean that’s what everyone else who’s ever said “desserts are my forte” on TV has meant.
George and Gary approach Karmen, ostensibly to ask her what she’s making, but actually so that Gary can say “putting all your eggs in one basket” and then grin like a lunatic to indicate he thinks it’s a joke. He’s so happy with it that he says it again. Karmen has no idea what he’s on about.
Meanwhile Miles has deboned his quail…if you know what I mean.
Con is making a thyme and orange blossom panna cotta, if for some reason you still give a damn about what Con does.
Nicolette has moved on to her gels. It’s good to know she’s found closure.
The contestants can’t believe how quickly time is passing, funnily enough the opposite of the scenario faced by viewers. The drama ratchets up as Karmen finds her custard refuses to cooperate, and is then destroyed by a fireball.
Has Julia Morris been paying attention? Channel Ten informs us there’s only one way to find out. But frankly it doesn’t sound worth the effort.
Anyway back in the kitchen Karmen doesn’t have time for this shit. Into the blast chiller goes the custard, and down the drain goes her confidence. Meanwhile Anastasia is not only cooking her quail, she’s paying attention to it, which is a bold move indeed.
Tragedy strikes the kitchen as Chloe realises her quantities of agar are completely wrong, much like the Australian cricket selectors in 2013. Coming hot on the heels of her pureed rice pudding, it’s enough to make Chloe think maybe she has no cooking ability whatsoever, and to make us think that yes this is true.
Karmen spills her custard and rues the day she ever thought that leaving the house might be a good idea. Everywhere, dreams are going up in flames. Nicolette, however, is happy with her cake, but since this is the first time I’ve ever seen her, I can’t really feel happy for her. I relate much more to Olivia, who is clearly cognisant of the objectively miserable nature of the world.
Time is up, and all around the kitchen people are hugging total strangers in their delirium.
It is now time for the judges to taste heaps and heaps of dishes and it goes on forever and is pretty dull. The highlights of the tasting are:
- Karmen being incredibly embarrassed by her inadequacy as a human being.
- Con using the phrase “my take on marmalade” as if that’s actually a thing that a mentally healthy human being would say.
- Gary telling Olivia, “You’ve got some problems” and Olivia reacting with zero surprise whatsoever.
- Miles serving what appears to be the entrails of a possum.
- An ad for Gogglebox.
After everyone’s been tasted, George says there’s nothing more exciting for a cook than making a dish from something like marmalade which is one of the worst lies George has ever told because obviously there are millions of more exciting things for a cook than this fairly unexciting thing.
The top three are Anastasia, Con and Nicolette, who will cook off for immunity, resulting in one of them competing against a professional chef and being utterly thrashed but having the judges inflate their scores to make it look close.
The bottom three, who must compete to avoid elimination, are Karmen, Chloe and Olivia. George tells them “tomorrow is about warm hearts but very cool heads”, sticking to his long-standing tradition of giving meaningless advice.
Tomorrow night, former Masterchef contestant Reynold forces the bottom three to make a plate of mold.
