Masterchef Recap: Where Is Fancy Bread?

It’s Monday night, and you know what that means: a dull montage of previous events on the show.

Followed by a dull montage of events yet to come, described by the voiceover guy as “the biggest surprises in Masterchef history”, which is an interesting way to characterise things that we are being shown happening in advance.

Anyway, leaving aside what’s already happened, and what’s going to happen, we move on to the mystery box. “What’s in your mystery box today can be found in almost every kitchen in Australia,” says Matt. Yes, it’s a live mouse.

Actually, it’s a loaf of bread. Ben is excited. “I love bread,” he says, which pretty much sums him up as a person. He describes the vast range of possibilities that bread presents: toast, sandwiches, putting Vegemite on it…and that’s it. So there it is: bread.

In sixty minutes, the amateurs must make something good with bread. The judges will taste the three most impressive-looking dishes and the best one will go straight through to the immunity challenge.

Obviously, the smart thing to do here is make a really, really good cheese sandwich. With butter and everything. This bunch of idiots have no idea, though: they start doing all kinds of ridiculous non-cheese-sandwichy crap.

Lisa is making a bread tuile. Or twill? Tuill? Twile? She’s making a bread thing. Reece is making ice cream, FOR FUCK’S SAKE. “Ah, the ice cream machine, the mixer,” says Gary, having completely run out of things to say and having to resort to simply naming objects in his direct eyeline.

“No excuses today,” Matt says to Gary, delivering an ultimatum regarding their relationship. Gary is thinking about apple charlotte. Matt is thinking about summer pudding. Nobody is thinking about cheese sandwiches.

“To make a schnitzel sounds quite easy,” says Gina, although pronouncing it correctly is apparently much harder. She’s right though: it does sound quite easy, so the fact she’s already making excuses by whining about how hard it is is very revealing. Gary comes by Gina’s bench to point out that she’s a mad, mad fool. Gina smiles.

Aldo is making his nonna’s meatballs, inviting an intellectual property lawsuit as always. He says he wants his meatballs to be “fluffy”, which suggests his nonna didn’t know what meatballs are. Traditionally you remove the fur from the animal before you make meatballs out of it.

Ben is making crumbed lamb cutlets, without any Vegemite at all. Matt visits and tells Ben, rather flirtatiously, that he likes how he shakes his blender. He says that Ben’s crumbed cutlets better be the best crumbed cutlets he’s ever seen, which shouldn’t be hard because crumbed cutlets are very boring and nobody’s ever seen any that are very good.

Gary accuses Samira of being pleased to get bread. Samira agrees that she is a big fan of bread. Gary nods understandingly. The editor forgets to cut this conversation out of the final version.

Jess is reminiscing about cooking with her father again. It’s a close race as to whether Jess’s father or Aldo’s nonna are having more of their ideas stolen tonight. Meanwhile Sarah is roasting capsicums for want of anything to do, using words like “bold” and “punchy” to descibe some gross thing.

Reece is running around the kitchen like a lunatic, but suddenly realises that his toast, which was infusing in his anglaise prepatory to making his dumb ice cream, has soaked up too much of the liquid. Reece had completely forgotten that bread is absorbent, because he never studied physics at uni. He’s so panicked about the minuscule amount of anglaise that he has left that he can’t even take time to notice how revolting it all looks anyway.

Meanwhile Gina is still droning on about how hard it is to make a “snitzel”, and Hoda just dropped her mixer. We haven’t seen Hoda until now, so there’s no way she’s getting tasted anyway. Aldo continues saying “my nonna”, hoping that will give him the edge.

Disaster strikes as Jess says that she is going to trust her instincts: the worst mistake anyone on Masterchef can ever make. Meanwhile Lisa explains her idea to Matt, who tries to disguise his revulsion. Khanh is there, too — hi Khanh!

Back to Ben and his lamb cutlets. “I know the judges have had probably hundreds of lamb cutlets before,” he admits, but he’s wrong: the judges actually had quite a light breakfast this morning.

Matt’s lack of enthusiasm about Lisa’s tuile is in stark contrast to the multiple orgasms he has over Jess’s whatever the hell they are. He even tastes them at the bench, which seems kind of like match-fixing to me. Something unfair, anyway. He basically tells Jess that she’s already won. Someone’s gotten to him.

Gina is talking angrily to herself in Italian, which can’t be good. Aldo feels a chill run down his spine, convinced his nonna has broken into the kitchen. With under ten minutes to go, Gina doesn’t know if her schnitzel will be perfectly cooked — a great example of dramatic irony, because the audience definitely knows whether her schnitzel will be perfectly cooked.

Back at James’s bench, he has enough ice cream for one single quinelle, although it looks more like he’s made some cement.

“Make sure your dish is the best thing since sliced bread,” says Gary, the basic bitch.

Aldo is incredibly happy with his meatballs. His nonna, watching from home, scoffs that she could’ve done better. Meanwhile Gina says she needs to get the schnitzel out and onto the plate, as if this is an incredibly complex task that will push her to the very limits of human endurance. Actually, it just involves picking the schnitzel up and then putting it down again.

It is time now for the judges to choose the three dishes they will taste, based purely on appearance in a woefully unjust process. The first dish they taste is Aldo’s meatballs, using his nonna’s recipe AKA cheating. “You know what looks nice about it?” asks Gary. Duh! Of course Aldo knows what looks nice about it, it’s his NONNA’S RECIPE.

So the meatballs are fine.

The next dish they taste is Gina’s mispronounced schnitzel. “I’m really happy with this dish,” Gina says, as if anyone gives a shit about her opinion. “I’m hoping the judges will think like I do,” she adds, but sadly nobody thinks like she does. Gary and Matt note that it’s OK for a dish to be simple if it tastes good, apparently just to give themselves the chance to hammer home repeatedly to Gina that her dish is incredibly simple.

The schnitzel is fine.

The final dish they taste is Ben’s dull cutlets, meaning Matt has pulled a real swifty on Jess, getting her to feed him without even choosing her dish. Matt cuts open a cutlet, pulls a face, and then explodes in a fireball.

The cutlets look overcooked. “Which is a shame,” says Gary — a shame that will haunt Ben and his descendants for centuries hence.

Apart from that the cutlets are fine. “If we tasted that dish without knowing who cooked it, we’d know it was you,” says Matt, which I guess means Ben is the guy who overcooks everything.

“Three fantastic dishes,” Matt lies, before announcing that Gina has won the mystery box challenge, allowing her to stop looking depressed for a bit. She heads up to the balcony to laugh and spit on everyone.

On to the invention test, where the recently disgraced strive to achieve redemption. Their task will be to do something interesting with spaghetti bolognaise, with one condition: it has to involve cooking. Basically they must take the ingredients of spaghetti bolognaise and make something that isn’t spaghetti bolognaise. What a waste.

Every contestant immediately starts babbling about how much they love spag bol. Kristen says it’s “very reminiscent”. Ben says he likes it cold on toast. Bolognaise is universally beloved and nobody seems able to stop talking about it.

Jess declares her intent to do something creative and unexpected, like building a wicker man out of spaghetti and burning a gerbil to death inside it. Gina shouts advice to Jess from the balcony. Jess smiles and pretend she doesn’t hate this.

“Reece, are you going savoury or sweet?” Gina, stricken by victory-induced verbal diarrhoea, calls out. She’s asking whether the dish he’s making out of spaghetti bolognaise ingredients will be savoury or sweet. Reece, having an IQ of over forty, says, “savoury”.

Meanwhile, Lisa has a mental block, despite loving spaghetti bolognaise. Maybe…she loves it TOO much. Wow. Ironic. “I think I have tunnel vision,” she says, making herself vulnerable to attacks from the flanks.

Sarah is going to make an onion puree and a tomato tea, proving herself once again to be one of history’s greatest monsters.

Sashi is on the show tonight, which comes as quite a shock. He is making pan-fried rump, if you know what I mean. Wink. From the balcony Gina keeps giving advice, and may be drunk with power. “You can do this! Work fast,” she tells Sashi. It is really annoying.

Reece says everything is working well at the moment, but his statement lacks conviction. It’s entirely possible everything isn’t working well. “I’ve got my jus on,” he says, but this is no time to be discussing fashion.

Lisa has come up with a bold plan. “I would love this dish to be tasty,” she says, shocking observers. Matt comes by to ask why her carrot noodles aren’t orange. “I didn’t want them to be too carroty,” she says, and she’s right, because carrot isn’t very good. Matt advises her to make them more carroty, because he delights in sabotage. “Go Lisa,” says Gina, unnecessarily.

Ben has vegies in the oven roasting. “A classic Ben dish,” says Matt, in the sort of tone in which one might say, “A classic burning bag of camel dung”.

Gary asks Sarah what she’s making. Sarah says she’s making a tomato tea. Gary admirably refrains from vomiting. He tells her that tomato tea is a stupid idea. Sarah, looking honestly in the mirror for the first time, can’t help but agree. “Gary’s worried that the tomato tea won’t go with the rump,” she says, in a reckless accusation of sexual harassment. She decides to go ahead with the tomato tea despite the objective fact that it is madness — life and death no longer have meaning for Sarah.

Khanh is happy with his dumplings. Big fucking deal, you know?

While Lisa tries to get as much flavour into her terrible dish as fast as she can, Kristen is busily being almost completely ignored by the director. Suddenly Reece appears, naming ingredients willy-nilly. Time ticks down and is UP!

The amateurs high five and hug as if they’ve achieved something. “I love the dish,” says Sarah, like the mother of an extremely ugly child. Jess feels like she might have a chance today — guess what Jess, “feelings” mean NOTHING here.

Three worst dishes go into the pressure test. Three best dishes go into the immunity challenge against newly-minted megalomaniac Gina.

First is Reece with some little bits of meat scattered amongst some mushed-up carrot and green urine. Gary loves it.

Next up, Lisa. “I’m not happy with the dish,” she says, and it turns out she is right to not be.

Next up, Sarah, with her weird gross tomato tea thing. “I know that flavour is such an important thing,” she says, brilliantly. Her tomato tea manages to outdo even Reece in its urine-ness. “I still don’t get the beef and tomato tea,” says Gary, trying to hold in his anger at her for disobeying him. Sarah has failed and her dish is awful. Let this be a lesson to us all: when a judge tells you you’re doing the wrong thing, try not to be a dickhead for once in your life.

Next is Sashi, whose rump is delicious and whose dish is pretty good too.

Next is Ben, whose rump is so fine it convinces Matt to tell him he’s “turning into a really good cook”. The metamorphosis is terrifying to watch.

Next is Hoda, who knows how to cook a piece of meat without making a big thing out of it. Gary calls her garnish “irrelevant”, which is pretty judgmental of him. Matt calls her dish “the difficult third album”, which is confusing.

Next is Jess, whose dish is fine.

Next is Chloe, who is SOMEHOW still in the competition. Her dish is fine.

Next is Aldo, whose dish is fine.

Now Samira, whose dish is pretty stupid.

Next up, Khanh, who is proud of what he’s presenting to the judges, which may or may not include the food he made. Matt pulls a face like he’s having a cyst removed without anaesthetic but then says it’s fine, the little trickster.

The judges announce that the three best dishes were Reece’s scraps of nothing, Sashi’s saucy rump, and Khanh’s weird pork. They are now faced with the awesome task of being better than Gina.

The three worst dishes, cooked by the three worst and most unethical people, are Hoda’s irrelevant garnish, Lisa’s unhappy spaghetti, and Sarah’s piss-poor tea.

Tune in tomorrow, when life becomes meaningless for one lucky amateur.

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