As we do every MasterChef season, we have now reached the point in the competition where chefs are no longer motivated purely by the fear of finishing a truly humiliating 17th, and instead begin believing that they might actually have a half-sniff of winning this whole shebang. No longer is the pure dread of having to limp off home and self-publish a cook book lingering in the air. From this point on, everyone who leaves the MasterChef kitchen will have at least one or two publishing offers on the table waiting for them. At bare minimum, we’re looking an eBook distribution deal for Kindle now. No longer will these All Star chefs have to consider launching a poorly-thought-out YouTube channel. It’s all bright lights from here, baby!
Week Eight (and a bit) is in the can. Which Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares™ await us in Week Nine? Look on these Power Rankings, ye Mighty, and despair!
ELIMINATED: Simon Toohey
On the truly unfathomably long list of humiliating MasterChef exits, few have the kind of sting that old mate’s Soggy Sous Vide Broccoli Stem has. You just cannot get away with dishing up the soggy brocc, my man. An absolute catastrophe. Simon swanning into the kitchen and cooking up compost is, truly, one of the all time great exits. My dude straight up taking a Whole Beast approach to a broccoli stem. Wantonly shearing the florets off that bad boy and then drowning the trunk of it. Not even the MasterChef Twitter account could sell that over the line.
Our veggie king has delivered! 🥦🧡 #MasterChefAU pic.twitter.com/6GzuTknbKj
— MasterChef Australia (@masterchefau) June 7, 2020
Delivered what.
A perfect end to a similarly chaotic journey through the competition. May all your future circles be carrot-based, my friend.
10) Tessa Boersma
Much as it was genuinely heartbreaking to see a treasured memory from Nan brought onto the show only to have it fall short of the mark, I guarantee you – there is not a single doubt in my mind – that there is a solid 15 minutes of cut footage featuring Andy Allen waltzing around the room shouting things like “her Nan’s NAME is PYE???????” “it’s a PIE from NANNA PYE!” “it’s PYE TIME” and things of that nature. The man was frothing that morsel of knowledge. It is the dead centre bullseye on his dartboard of interests. A meat pie and a vague pun he can grind to dust. That’s Andy’s version of the Tradie’s Breakfast. He simply cannot get enough.
9) Sarah Tiong
The more this series drags on the more intense dread I have whenever Sarah Tiong is on screen. Something awful is going to happen, I’m absolutely sure of it now. She’s going to trip on something incredible simple and it’s going to be gutwrenching. You thought watching Jess cry alone while three metres away from everyone was bad? Tiong is going to overcook kingfish by about 10 seconds or she’s going to use wholemeal flour instead of white because the packaging is confusing or whatever, and then she’s going to go home in 7th spot while choking back sobs and it’s going to ruin me.
8) Brendan Pang
I don’t care what happens for the rest of the series; whether he winds up winning it or whether he goes home tonight. Whatever happens, my pitch for Brendan post-MasterChef is as clear as day: He and Reece are given their own travel/food reality series. Think of it like the exact midway point between Parts Unknown and The Simple Life. It runs for literally as long as they want. They get to spend their days ambling around the world at a very leisurely pace, eating food and being calmly lovely to restaurant staff and each other while throwing half-hearted bitchy barbs under their breath at passers by. I see it so clearly. It must exist.
7) Poh Ling Yeow
God help anyone paired up with Poh in that godawful Twins challenge. By pure luck she gets saddled with Reece, who happens to be the only person in the cast tall enough to pith a soup ladle over the top of the fridge to get her attention. The honest-to-god biggest shock of the series was that Poh didn’t reveal a completely different dish when their cloches were removed pre-judging. Not like “a vastly different interpretation of the dish they were both working on.” I mean like “completely different meal altogether.” Reece spends an hour valiantly trying to verbally collaborate on a tart, but then Poh reveals a lamb backstrap and some roast veg that she threw together in the last five minutes because she got bored and forgot to tell him.
That said, the pie she put up in Sunday’s elimination challenge? Put that shit in footy stadium bain maries immediately. Please and bloody thank you.
6) Reece Hignell
If that ridiculous Twins challenge and Poh’s uncontrollable chaotic energy combined wind up costing King Reece his place in the competition I swear – I *S*W*E*A*R*.
5) Reynold Poernomo
Get fucked. Get absolutely fucked, mate. How is it possible that a man, such as this, can be asked to make a pie – something he does not know how to do at all – only to have a blind stab at it and still get around 78% of the way there. That’s on his first try. Dude eyeballed puff pastry from scratch. That’s like me skipping into a World Of Music, sitting down at a piano, swinging my saveloy fingers about and coming up one season short of a full Vivaldi. Get out of it. Get out and keep getting out and once you’re fully out you can get out some more.
4) Khanh Ong
I just love this man SO much.
3) Laura Sharrad
Laura finally breaking through to win a Team Challenge – and doing so without relying on either pasta or a Hibachi Grill – is the kind of feel-good moment that MasterChef was built on. You don’t get that kind of personal growth on any other series. It’s a beautiful moment of triumph over adversity. We’ve almost come full circle back to the start of the competition, where Laura was smashing knockout dishes in her sleep. But she’s back at the familiar situation, having changed. You can’t write that kind of neat character progression. It’s a true and pure Hero’s Journey.
Was the dish she won her first team challenge on still technically noodles? Yes, sure. It was that, can’t deny it. But after begging all season I’m certainly not about to start choosing.
2) Emelia Jackson
Emelia is cooking with the kind of quiet, high-level confidence that just about every previous winner acquired at this stage of the competition, and that should shake all your pending MasterChef multis to the very core. She’s got that swagger that suggests she just sent off her font preferences to the plate engraver. It’s not quite the level of confidence that, for example, Sashi Cheleah had towards the end of season ten where he was just hurling fistfuls of turmeric around while grinning like a bung-toothed legend honking gas at the dentist. But it’s not far off.
1) Callum Hann
Well look who finally woke the hell up. After weeks of flopping about the kitchen like a goose, Callum found his working boots and put the yards in. Michael Jordan beat the Monstars, Mr. Swackhammer got banished back to Moron Mountain, and Callum touched the cursed ball and got his powers back. And not a moment too soon, either. Old mate is a serious contender.
