PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: Look, I’ve had a bit on this week – what with your Poo Jogger yarns and whatnot – so this is the first episode I’ve covered this week. But counterpoint to that: This week has actually been boring as shit.
Sunday: A relay race which ordinarily should be glorious chaos but wound up being ho hum nonsense where everybody just did sorta well. Boo.
Monday: A pressure test where everyone nailed the brief and they only really sent Jo home because they had to send someone home. Boo.
Tuesday: An immunity challenge featuring Jess once again wildly underselling her own abilities only to get brutally bashed by a professional chef in the way that EVERY SINGLE IMMUNITY CHALLENGE SHOULD ACTUALLY GO. BOO.
Wednesday: A team challenge where two captains had to memorise a recipe and relay it to teammates; a 55-minute episode notable only for the fact that the Blue Team got ROBBED STONE COLD MOTHERLESS BLIND. BOO.
There. We’re all caught up now. Get it? Got it? Good.
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT.
So Blue Team, comprised of Sarah, Aldo, Chloe, Brendan, Jess, Khanh, Ben, and Jenny aka literally everyone remaining in the competition who is pure and good, gets forced into this bullshit elimination challenge while Red Team, comprised mostly of muppets and also Reece, stands on the gantry grinning like the damned cat just chewed through the catnip bag. A privilege they’ve earned because???
I don’t get it. Did they not want the possibility of two Immunity Pins being played in the same Elimination Challenge, so they moved the goalposts just so Red Team could win? Because the last time I bloody well checked, a two-dish challenge was supposed to be judged on the merits of two dishes, not “which one dish was the best the rest doesn’t count anymore lol.”
Blue Team puts up two absolutely bang-on dishes but gets the fucking shaft because Reece cooked something marginally better even though their main course was trash.
Work on the averages, cowards. A 9 and a 9 beats a 10 and a 7 every day of the week.
Blue Team got Gerrymandered out of a win. Took the popular vote but not the electoral college of judges.
MasterChef is the US election. That’s what I’m getting at here. Are we following? Yeah?
The Red Team is Trump? And the Blue Team is Hillary?
Republicans and Democrats?
Did I make that clear enough?
Bernie would’ve won, etc.
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT (REALLY).
I swear to god, sometimes this show exists purely to piss me off.
Sarah, Aldo, Chloe, Brendan, Jess, Khanh, Ben, and Jenny all get to face off in a meat challenge that highlights proper cuts of meat and boy will that fact become ball-achingly important later on.
But first, in walks Curtis Stone, looking – and talking – like a human Coles ad.
In round one we endure one of those great “what’s this shit” challenges where contestants have to name all the unmarked offcuts that producers found in the corner of the pantry during a clean out.
‘Course George and Gary amuse themselves instead with the plastic lettuce in the display case, because they are both precisely 8 years of age.
Yes, it is lettuce made of plastic, the thing literally every butcher has on display.
The four people who go through to round two are the first four to incorrectly identify a meat. One is Sarah, who muffs her words and gives off an incredible “I beg your pudding?” face when told she’s wrong.
Jess also gets sent to the cook-off round by virtue of the fact that meat is not sugar.
But Brendan and Chloe fall victim to a sausage because this show refuses to be anything other than a pain in the ass.
It’s a Cumberland, George insists. A Cumberland, he says. Mate, that is a sausage. In every measure of it, that is a big fuck off banger. Why are we splitting hairs about this. It’s a sausage. They both said sausage. It’s a goddamned sausage.
And while we’re at it, what’s the point of being putridly specific about everything else. It’s all beef, chook, pork, and lamb. Literally who cares.
That’s my hill and I’ll gladly die on it.
For round two, Curtis puts on a butchery display that’s less informal lesson and more late night informercial. How he didn’t end it by selling them the rib of beef for three easy payments of $29.99 while throwing in the knives he used for free is a mystery.
All that is of no concern for Aldo, however, who is simply enjoying the view.
So then. The challenge.
After breaking down the beef rib into several different beautiful cuts, Curtis mentions that they have “so many options.”
Not one of them, NOT A SINGLE ONE, CHLOE, WAS MINCE.
MINCE.
MINCE.
Chloe takes a scotch fillet and decides to churn it into oblivion. I’ve watched horror movies that are less brutal than this.
Curtis’s reaction to the decision says it all really.
Yet despite a very obvious bit of “what you’re about to do is wrong and bad” bit of passive aggressive questioning that Curtis does with her, Chloe still insists on feeding the meat into the grinder like she’s Christopher Moltisanti disposing of a body at Satriale’s.
And here’s the thing – here’s the bloody thing – you’d think that because this clearly misses the brief by a country mile, that she doesn’t even attempt to butcher the rib, blitzes it into paste, and plates up what is ostensibly a dish of noodles in a meat challenge, that it’d put Chloe in severe danger.
Nope.
In fact, unbelievably, Sarah is the only one of the four that actually manages to nail everything about both the brief and her dish. A remarkable feat given George spent about 30 minutes standing at her bench saying the word “impeccable” over and over.
Jess puts up a beef salad that doesn’t make any sense, but still remembers to put actual strips of actual beef in it, and not a pulverised $40 steak.
Which leaves Brendan, who actually cooked a full steak, to eat shit because his was slightly undercooked.
And, sure, when we say “slightly undercooked” we really mean “practically still mooing.”
But christ alive, at least he hit the brief.
The judges even ask themselves “who made the biggest sin” and I’ll tell you this much for free: Chloe did. 10,000% Chloe did.
If you have to ask yourself what’s worse – attempting the thing we asked but falling short, or not attempting the thing we asked at all – and your answer is anything other than the latter, something’s gone incredibly bung.
It’s mince.
Mince is the sin.
Mince is always the sin.
So Brendan goes home, and this whole bloody show goes to the dogs. The DOGS, I tell you.
NEXT TIME: The gang goes to South Australia, and I bash my face into a cast iron skillet.
