Masterchef S12 E7 Recap: Suffer In Their Jock’s

The wages of sin are death, and the wages of poorly-prepared meat are pressure tests. Tonight, the unhappy erstwhile members of the yellow team will pay for their hubris by being forced to cook three dishes from Jock Zonfrillo’s restaurant. But the challenge is even harder than it sounds: not only will they have to cook the dishes, they’ll also have to put all the ingredients together in the right amounts before cooking them. It’s a tough ask, because Jock’s restaurant is award-winning, and apparently has three hats, left behind by cooks who Jock worked to death.

“This is really cool,” says Khanh, forgetting to pretend that he cares whether he wins or not.

“There is one thing you don’t know,” says Jock, causing sphincters to tighten across the kitchen. “It’s a two-round pressure test,” says Jock, causing a vague sense of anti-climax.

Chris says he’s not prepared for a two-round pressure test, but as we know, Chris isn’t ready to slice pork evenly, so nothing he says can be taken too seriously.

Jock presents the dishes to be cooked: a prawn thing, custard in a little pot, and crumpets. It all looks extremely easy, but I suppose we have to go along with the whole “this is super difficult” narrative they’ve got going here. “I want people to pick up that head and suck the mustard out of it,” says Jock, causing an awkward moment before the cooks realise that he means the prawns. He goes on to point out that his crumpets have “beautiful holes”, and there is no longer any doubt that Jock is committing sexual harassment in the Masterchef kitchen.

The three worst cooks will go into the second round, where they will be forced to cook something even less impressive looking.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” says Brendan, and he’s right: the pressure is so great that Reece instantly forgets how to turn on an oven. Meanwhile Courtney hasn’t done anything, and is proud of it.

Andy, thinking himself pretty clever, asks Jock whether chefs at his restaurant would find this task difficult. Jock, refusing to play his little game, tells him that no, of course they wouldn’t, this is what they do for a living, every single night, obviously they would find it incredibly easy. Andy is crushed, and makes a mental note to never go with his instincts ever again.

“Thirty minutes has evaporated,” says Melissa, using bad grammar and opaque metaphor simultaneously…