PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: An insane Brit flew halfway around the way during the early onset stages of what turned out to be a global pandemic just to give 3 extremely green TV hosts a baptism of fire by swearing mercilessly at 24 former reality cooking series contestants all of whom apparently hate themselves enough to have willingly signed up for another season of this torturous bullshit.
But it’s the only thing actually on TV at the moment, so fuck it! We’re all in this together!
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT.
We made it through Week One.
A full week of MasterChef: Back to Win is in the can, our first (and very surprising) contestant has been eliminated, we’ve seen off our first guest host, and we’re now looking ahead to Week Two.
How’s everyone tracking? How’s the form? How incredibly off the mark were my apparently dogshit series premiere Power Rankings?
Let’s check the tale of the tape ahead of this sure-to-be insane week.
ELIMINATED: Lynton Tapp
Have y’all ever seen anyone have a bigger ‘mare in a single challenge than Lynton? Jesus wept. My dude went from being a half sniff off grabbing immunity on Thursday to 1-2 Kostya Tszyu-ing himself out the door in dead last place last night. Maybe they booted him just to show that Andy Allen won’t play favourites for the handful of close mates that are in the cast this year? Maybe he’s the big sacrificial lamb that producers were salivating for the show everyone that it’s serious business this year? Or maybe it’s because that fucken crab and buckwheat hockey puck he put up tasted like the 1970s dinner party nightmare that it looked like. Who knows, man. But Lynton’s gone, and the game is afoot.
23) Ben Ungermann (No Change)
Did ok. Still got arrested off-screen and gets booted from the show soon. Can’t mention much more about it. Permanently last until he’s gone.
22) Rose Adam (Down 5)
Oh Rose. Oh mate. Oh pal. Oh love. That was almost disastrous. A middling Tart with enough coffee in it to keep the judges up until lockdown lifts is ordinarily the kind of thing that sails you out the door in week one. But a miraculous recovery in the second round of the elimination challenge prevented that from happening by the barest of margins. Still a more radiant TV presence than brain pureeing waves being emitted from the set, but very much on the edge.
21) Chris Badenoch (Down 16)
I ranked him at 5 last week like a big dumb idiot. 5. Five. What the hell was I thinking. At some point over the past 11 seasons this show has poisoned my memory, because where once I recalled a formidable competitor stood instead a bumbling goofball who can’t count pork. That the Meat Man had to fall back on a cheesecake to save himself says it all. A shocker of a week.
20) Hayden Quinn (Down 8)
Fair play to him, whomst among us hasn’t had a blind kitchen panic and tried to make 15 times the amount of food any one person can safely eat in a sitting before. If he keeps this pace up he’ll be schlepping a dozen buffet trays full of beans up to the judges by week four.
19) Courtney Roulston (Down 8)
It’s gonna take a few of these people a little while to get their groove back in the competition. Some of them have been out of the game for a while, locked into comfortable food jobs where the work isn’t necessarily that big of a creative stretch, so it’ll take a while to get that part of the brain fired back up to a top tier level. So it makes all the sense in the world that Courtney wound up Bottom 5-ing it this week, given she’s spent the past decade at the Sydney Swans piffing up schnitty sangas and 58 beef-and-rice third lunches for buff 19-year-olds whose only experience with a three course meal is dobbing two extra cheesies onto a Macca’s order.
18) Amina Elshafei (Up 2)
There’s two hard and fast rules in MasterChef: You don’t ever attempt a risotto, and you don’t volunteer to be Team Captain in Week One. Don’t do it. No one knows each other. Everyone’s frothing to get their TV time. Unless you’re willing to bark at them like caged animals, running a full service is going to be chaos. Sure, her team won. But god almighty it was a mess.
15=) Tracy Collins (No Change)
The brutal truth about these early stages of a MasterChef series is that there’s simply too many people in the cast to get everyone screen time in week one. So a certain few of them are just gonna be slotted into the background and barely heard of for the first few episodes. That’s Tracy this week, playing slightly less a role in proceedings than a blast chiller.
15=) Sarah Tiong (Down 2)
See above.
15=) Jess Liemantara (Down 9)
And also see above.
14) Dani Venn (Down 10)
Boy oh boy, what the hell happened here. Bolted out of the gates in episode one and secured the only Immunity Pin of the season, flailed through the week, didn’t use it for the first elimination, and came perilously close to coming unfathomably unstuck thanks to a big bowl of Hot Pineapple Slop. Tumbles down the rankings, but remains in the hunt due to the fact that the pin remains active.
13) Reece Hignell (Up 3)
We absolutely Stan a Bald King who gets handed a 90-minute time limit challenge but only needs 25 of them to sail through to next week. That’s getting your head right up the game.
12) Tessa Boersma (Down 5)
Tessa slides out of the top ten this week, but that’s really only due to a comparative lack of screen time. Sure, we’re all pumped about Poh and Reynold and Hayden being back, but the new school competitors are all in the wings, biding their time. She’ll let something outrageous loose soon enough.
11) Emelia Jackson (Down 3)
Promised heaps in the first challenge by winding up Top 4 and within reaching distance of the Immunity Pin, but fell back into the pack throughout the week as the competition woke up and the Dessert First playbook began slowly getting exposed as a non-mustard cutter. Needs a big second week to avoid sliding down the ladder any further.
10) Khanh Ong (No Change)
Rock solid, unflappable, without doing anything truly extraordinary. That’s the iron bar separating the top and the bottom of the Back to Win pack, and Khanh is working that pole like it’s shrinking his HECS Debt by the second. He’s also been getting deeply thirsty for fellow contestants on Twitter, which is precisely the kind of Rules Don’t Apply isolation energy we wish to put into the world.
Callum is serving an odd mix between daddy/twink and I’m here for it #Masterchefau
— khanh (@khanhong) April 16, 2020
9) Harry Foster (No Change)
Similarly up on that rung of reliability is King Harry, who spent the entire week making sure his ass had nothing to worry about come Sunday’s elimination challenge. That’s good MasterChef gameplay, folks. You don’t burn through your big ideas in week one, you position the chess pieces and steadily build towards the end game. It’s a marathon in here.
8) Brendan Pang (Up 13)
One of the great surprises of Week One was the revelation that Brendan apparently gained magical powers from that horrible glass bottle gash in Season 10 and has since spent the time getting really quite good. Those Chinese Beef Pie things he lobbed up in the elimination challenge? I don’t even know what the fuck that means as a concept, man. All I know is I want to stuff 50 of them in my mouth at once like a spicy Chubby Bunny.
Stop it @brendan_pang! 🧡 #MasterChefAU pic.twitter.com/jOh4eRnIgi
— MasterChef Australia (@masterchefau) April 19, 2020
7) Sarah Claire (Up 7)
HELL YEAH IT’S WINE TIME, BABY. Tassie’s Very Own had the kind of opening week you can only ever dream of, cooking right through to Thursday night, keeping up with a Gordon Ramsay insanity dish, and becoming a nationally beloved icon through the simple act of inhaling a well-earned house white from a measuring cup. The competition’s Savviest B.
6) Simon Toohey (Up 18)
Not a single person alive, not even me, can deny that old mate is in this up to his earlobes when he churns out incredible shit like that Burnt Soy Cabbage dish last night, which rightfully earned him a trip up to the gantry before the challenge was even over. Of course not a single person alive, not even me, can also deny that he still does all this while looking like a Chucky doll got a Pinnochio real boy wish. Still, he’s well in this.
5) Ben Milbourne (Up 13)
Probably would’ve been even higher up the rankings had he not been saddled with the Big Meat Moron who decided to cleave baby’s arm-sized pork belly portions during the Team Challenge, but otherwise ran an entirely decent service that imploded through no fault of his own, while individually serving up solo challenge dishes that gave him instant passage to the next round. But is the Bandy fix in already? Time will tell.
4) Reynold Poernomo (N/A)
This absolutely cheeky meat castle of a bloke is on some sort of other level. He’s got this entire process down so incredibly pat that he’s actually using the time to workshop ideas. Big herby ice creams that taste like licking a planter box? Sure man. Why not. Why the fuck not. Who gives a shit. Do whatever you want you absolute unit.
3) Poh Ling Yeow (Down 2)
Never in my MasterChef life have I been full of more dread than watching Poh flail wildly across the entire opening week. Even up until halfway through Sunday night’s episode I sat utterly convinced that Poh – POH – was going home first. She was frequently frazzled, spectacularly outgunned, and looked every bit like the fading veteran desperately clinging on despite having lost several steps. But then she steps up and goes full Maverick on the elimination challenge. She looks at a two-stage time management challenge, decides to use all her time on stage one, and serves up a whole-ass cake and it’s so goddamned good. Poh Ling Yeow is a bad, bad bitch. Never ever forget that.
2) Callum Hann (Up 1)
The only person safe from elimination this week, Callum reminded us all just how the hell he managed to get all the way to the Finals of his season way back in 2010: By being just a dick hair better than the person behind him. It’s not a Michelin Star-winning strategy by any means, but it’s a proven winner as far as MasterChef goes.
1) Laura Sharrad (Up 1)
If you managed to pick up Laura in your office sweep there’s a good argument to be made that you should be able to collect winnings now. She was a freak at 18 years old when she first gave this show a crack, and the only thing that’s changed in the 6 years since is she’s become an even bigger freak. Laura is insanely good at food. Truly a monster. She used her human hands to make food so good it made grown-ass adults cry twice, and she barely broke a sweat doing it. Buy your tickets now, mates. The train’s leaving the station.
