PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: The first team challenge for Season 2018 took the gang to the MCG, tasking them with feeding a gaggle of hungry of hungry Melbourne Football Club players all ravenous from setting the footy world ablaze with their incredibly milquetoast play.
This episode also marks the first, and probably only, time the word “tostada” has been used inside the walls of the MCC.
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT.
A big team challenge means a big team…
Actually before we begin, here’s something that’s been eating away at me for a few episodes now.
What in the blue hell Reece doing in his intro clip?
Is he trying on his best LeBron James impression?
Did someone tell him they were going to edit flour into the shot in post-production and then they just… forgot to do it?
Has he performed some sort of mythical Puppetry of the Penis-style dick trick just below shot and is now presenting it to the world?
Who bloody knows.
‘Course it’s not the most baffling of the intro clips. This year, that honour belongs to Adele.
Somehow she’s gotten more salt on the waffles than she has the chook. You’ve heard of Salt Bae, but this is Salt Shame.
Yeah look, that gag needs workshopping.
So back to last night.
A big team challenge means a big elimination, and as such we have a whopping eleven cooks wearing black: Aldo, Adele, Tim, Denise, Brendan, Genene, Gina, Jo, Reece, Lisa, and Jenny. Leaving the other half of the group to ogle on from the blessed gantry.
For the second episode in a row, there’s no Matt Preston. Poor Gary and George are clearly struggling in his absence.
Where the hell is he? Gary explains it by saying he “can’t be with us.” What’s he doing? Did he chuck a sickie? Is he having a personal day? Did he fake a croaky voice on the phone but really he’s spent the day instead down at the pokes nursing a Beam & Dry while throwing a few pineapples into the fruit machine?
Self care. It’s important, mates.
Tonight’s elimination challenge is a 75-minute cook with another infuriatingly vague theme; they must cook a dish that draws on their past and links to something that “made them fall in love with food.”
See for me, that’s a scalding hot pie and a saveloy in bread that’s fallen apart into six different bits bought from the old canteen at York Park on a bitterly cold July day while North Launceston and Clarence bash the living piss out of each other for top spot on the TFL ladder. And yet if I served that up they’ll say I’m “not taking this seriously,” and the food is “so hot it burnt our tongues” and “tastes like soap” and that I’m “not even a contestant” and suddenly I’m the asshole here, all because I searched my damned heart and cooked to their shitty brief.
Regardless, a few of them manage to nail down the essence of whatever hot-buttered nonsense the judges are talking about.
Brendan displays the kind of knife skills that suddenly turns his prior unassuming silence into something far more sinister.
No one who’s that quiet should be able to wield a blade that well. It’s unsettling.
There’s Tim, who has managed to tone down over-the-top confidence and is now exuding a calm cool.
You good, Tim?
Hell yeah, brother.
Tim cooks up some fried chicken which not only makes the judges go all starry-eyed, but impels sweet, Tasmanian Sarah up on the gantry to provide us with the single-most relatable GIF in MasterChef history.
Lady, don’t we all.
And then there’s Aldo.
Our boy Aldo.
He knocks together a panna cotta dish with Thai-inspired flavours because he learned it while travelling with his beautiful fiancé and so this isn’t just a good dish it’s a dish with LOVE.
Also his incredibly sequence of shots describing, physically, the perfect panna cotta wobble is some serious Hall of Fame-calibre TV.
How good is it? It’s exaggerated chef kissy fingers good. And doesn’t Aldo know it.
Multi bennies.
But because there’s literally no incentive to “win” this challenge – only dream-shattering punishment for the losers – we breeze over anyone doing good stuff and instead spend the episode focusing on things going very, very bung for three people: Denise, Adele, and Jenny.
Jenny’s grand idea for this is took cook up a sponge cake and put a heaping serve of machka in it.
Sorry, that’s matcha apparently.
It’s not good, and winds up turning her cake into less like a sponge and more like a foam brick.
Unbelievable, really. To screw a cake up that badly on Rusev Day, of all days.
Adele, meanwhile, puts together corn & jalapeño fritters that more closely resemble hockey pucks in both shape and density, linking it to the brief by telling a story about accidentally mistaking a chilli for a baby carrot in her Grandmother’s garden when she was a child that she performs so perfectly – right down to the nostalgic laugh on the same story beat – that, look… I’m not here to speak ill of anyone’s family or treasured memories, but on the other hand I’ll take “Things That Definitely Didn’t Happen” for $200 thanks, Alex.
But, sadly, it’s Denise who goes the bungest of all.
In attempting to cook a pork trotter, which it should be noted sends Gary into middle class England fits of rapture…
(If she’d chucked in some lamb’s fry there’s about an 86% chance he would’ve achieved climax)
…Denise casually forgets that she has but 75-minutes and not… y’know… several hours to cook that tough cut of meat down into something palatable.
And for committing the absolute cardinal sin of serving undercooked pig foot to a Brit, Denise is sent packing, off to continue being the stay-at-home Mum version of the Picture of Dorian Gray.
‘Course we’re not gonna get out of this recap without talking about how George somehow managed to scare the living daylights out of Genene by doing a MasterChef version of Spagett.
Spooked ya. You’re so spooked.
Look there’s cameras.
Crazy ole’ George. What’ll whacky scheme will he think of next? Hiding in a dumpster? Jumping out from behind a potted fern? Paying his workers a fair wage? WHO KNOWS.
NEXT TIME: Nigella Lawson arrives to make every single facet of the show a million times hornier.
