PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: Brett completes his all-time hustle of the competition by cashing out all the bets he clearly placed on himself, exiting the competition in 7th place. Because anything higher than that would’ve been too suspicious, y’know?
Meanwhile Trent suffers an almighty implosion on the aggro crag of elimination challenges, reducing the number of contestants left down to five; a number that, if late 90s English boy bands have taught me anything, will make you get down.
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT.
Here’s the thing you always have to remember about MasterChef: It’s always, always, always about “yumminess.” That’s the key metric of success in this competition. Literally every other aspect of cooking is just decoration. Is plating important? Sure. In the same way that ripping off a windmill dunk is. It’s sure as hell nice that you’ve done it, and it looks pretty as hell, but if you don’t put the ball through the hoop it ain’t worth shit.
At the end of the day, the judges could not give a toss how the dish you put in front of them looks, as long as it tastes good. They literally do not care if a plate looks like Satan’s anus, as long as it tastes like an angel’s dick.
Tonight, we’ve got Mimi, Elise, and Harry all dressed in black, because Matt and Elena have both won their way through to the quarter finals, even though is supposed to be “Finals Week” already. I’m ok with Channel Ten dragging this series on literally forever, but I’d just prefer it if they told us, y’know?
The challenge set out for them is a “How Far You’ve Come” kinda deal, where they bring back some of the ingredients they used in their original audition dish way back when. If by some minor miracle I ever made it this far in the competition, I’d hit up the loaf of bread, block of cheese, and the Breville that’d clearly be on that tray, blitz me together a dope-ass cheese toastie and peace-the-fuck-outta there.
The whole thing has George giddy with glee, and his deeply weird mannerisms are on full display throughout the episode.
Ah yes. That classic “stretching invisible dough” hand movement that everyone absolutely does.
Harry begins diving headlong into some lobster, cracking together a bisque even though he has nothing in his box that you’d usually put into a bisque. No vegetables, no flavour things. Nothing.
Putting together a bisque without any of that? You could say that’s a…
*clears throat*
…risque.
Mimi begins making a fig dish that her Granny used to make for her, which is definitely a sweet touch. She repeatedly mentions the fact that the dish needs goat’s cheese, which is accompanied by this shot:
And, look. I’m certainly no fancy big-city cheese identifier, but if that’s goat’s cheese then the goat it came from is sick as hell.
She begins making a FIGJAM (just ask her) and George and Gary refuse to point out this cheese conundrum because they’re clearly bastards of the highest order. Like… I know it’s a reality TV show and you’ve gotta ramp up the drama and such, but if you don’t just tee off and casually watch a ball sail into someone’s scone without yelling “FORE” ya dig? It’s a dick move. They’ll tear up your membership.
Harry‘s lobster biz is chided by Preston for being far too simplistic, which is fair enough too. You can’t just stick “it’s a beautiful…” in front of everything and expect people to buy your crap, Harry. You’re in the freaking final five. Pull yr bloody socks up, m8.
Preston even points out the fact that Matt and Elena are watching on from upon high on the gantry, and states that he has to produce a dish that’s gonna make them scared to cook against him. And BOY, don’t they ever look ~worried~.
“Oh yeah, I remember my first raviolo.“
At a complete loss as to what to do, Harry consults Matt who starts giving him some heartfelt advice, and suddenly we’re not so much looking at the MasterChef Kitchen as we are a local community production of ‘Romeo & Juliet‘.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and chicken dumplings are the sun.
But the real story of the whole episode is Elise, who inside 90 minutes attempts to make a brownie so high that it’s got a walk-on role in Seth Rogen‘s next film.
That brownie is so high it just spent the past 18 hours watching the ‘Encino Man‘ DVD menu on a loop because it couldn’t find the remote.
It’s so high that it ordered 4 pizzas, immediately forgot, and then ordered 4 more from the same place.
She bungs it into a tin that’s far too high to get anything meaningful done, completely ignoring the obvious solution of spreading it thin and layering it up instead. But bless her heart, she charges on blindly with it instead, working off little more than a wing and a prayer.
Sometimes you just have to shoot your shot, y’know?
It’s three quarters of the way through the cook, well past the point of no return, and it’s only at this point that Preston arrives to casually inform Mimi that that thing she assumed she had that’s completely integral to the dish she’s well on the way towards cooking is, in fact, something else entirely.
That goat’s cheese? Yeah, it’s ricotta.
Just a big ole’ block of ricotta.
Uh oh.
Meanwhile, Harry’s risky bisque just isn’t working, and George is not impressed at all.
He still eats the damned thing, of course. But he ain’t happy about it.
Throwing a hail mary, Harry attempts to fuck as much flavour into the sauce as he possibly can. He puts ginger in there. More lobster. Some coriander. Half a shoe. Maybe some of his own hair. He does rain dances and prays to the Mayan gods. ANYTHING to get some sort of taste into this sumbitch.
However, it’s Elise’s disaster brownie that’s the story of the day. There’s not enough time to cool it down, and the mousse melts, sinking the whole thing.
It looks like an absolute dog’s breakfast, and she is distraught. If she could’ve walked out of the kitchen and eliminated herself on the spot, I dare say she would’ve.
But remember that thing about “yumminess“? It’s always the winner. ALWAYS. And when you’ve dishing up a plate of what’s essentially gussied up cake batter to three blokes who get literal stiffies over sugary treats, you’re never going to go wrong.
That’s why it’s Elise’s dish, the Cinderella of MasterChef dishes, that puts her through to the final four.
And that goat’s cheese/ricotta fuck up is why Mimi is the one who goes home, even though her dish looked spectacular.
Like I said, you always get zero points if you don’t put the ball in the net. It don’t matter how many flips you do.
(Seriously though it should’ve been Harry. Mimi just got screwed harder than Bret Hart in Montreal.)
NEXT TIME: After finally completing FINALS WEEK, the show moves in to REALLY FINALS WEEK. And presumably ALRIGHT IT ACTUALLY IS FINALS WEEK THIS TIME after that. At this rate we should get a winner just in time for Christmas.
P.S. George really needs to cram it with the pithy “Ohhhh, *name*. We’re gonna *MISS YOU*“s every time someone gets the axe.
No one’s buying it, m8. Not even for a second.
Photo: Channel Ten.
