PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: Eloise stepped up to the plate against a quote-unquote “professional chef,” who looks like Fuller from ‘Home Alone‘/Harry Potter/Where’s Wally/an infinite amount of pop culture references.
Truly, the hardest tile on the Guess Who board.
Not only did she manage to hang with him, Eloise thoroughly kicked his unnecessary-suspenders-wearin’ arse, earning herself the first Immunity Pin of the season.
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT.
HOOO SHIT was this one every a doozy.
The group wanders into the MasterChef Kitchen on a glorious Melbourne day and is immediately confronted with the most dreaded and actually interesting of mid-week challenges: the blasted RELAY RACE is back, baby!
This year, the twist is that people won’t even know whose team they’re on until the very last second, drawing coloured aprons from a lucky dip bag meaning they could very well end up with the dud.
(It’s Ray. Ray is the dud.)
Four cooks are chosen to kick the relay off: Diana in red, Benita in green, Tamara in blue, and Benjamin in yellow.
Diana, Benita, and Tamara all begin their cooks with a clear dish and direction in mind. Benjamin decides to take the different route of “kind of half-arse one thing, let everyone else sort it out, and then smugly take credit for the whole thing like a brain genious.“
It’s the first leg. It’s the easiest one. You don’t have to rely on panicked information given to you by someone else. You don’t even have to *finish* anything. You just get some stuff on the go and then hand it all off to the next schmuck. But oh no, Benjamin’s grand idea for this dish, that has to hero maple syrup, is “ice cream?” Good hustle, bloke. Way to put in.
George enters the holding pen and asks for volunteers to cook in position number 2, to which the group reacts like it’s feeding time at the meerkat enclosure.
Eloise, fresh off her glorious victory in which she bashed a child cook in the face the previous episode, joins team yellow. Her confidence is sky-high and she’s not particularly fussed by Benjamin’s non-effort.
In fact she’s so fired up that she decides to bust out some white chocolate.
WHITE CHOCOLATE.
IN A RELAY CHALLENGE.
WHITE. CHOCOLATE.
Suddenly, the doors of the kitchen burst open and a ghastly, unholy howling gale swoops through, deafening everyone on the floor and forcing them to take cover.
“Adoboooo awwwOoooOOOoooooooOOOOOooooooOOoooOOooOOooOoOOooooo“
They say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but fortunately for everyone this time around Eloise is in such shithot form that she casually banishes the milky monster from the kitchen forevermore; erasing John‘s hellish legacy that has plagued generations in the two years since that shit went to air.
But if you thought the kitchen would be completely curse-free for the day, you’ve got straight-up rocks in your head.
The third leg of the relay rolls around, and Mich draws the blue team. Up until now, Tamara and then Sarah had been absolutely killing it. Tamara’s instructions to Sarah were clear and concise, and at this point they are well on the way to creating something great.
Mich, to her horror, arrives on the scene to discover that Blue Team has been cooking up her exact arch enemy. Her nemesis. Her one achilles heel that is sure to bring her undone:
“NOT A DESSERT.“
The many splendored and wildly creative ways Mich finds to utterly fuck it in her 15 minute cook time is something to behold.
Firstly, she ping pongs around the kitchen like a pinball machine stuck on multiball, utterly unsure of what she’s doing…
…then she decides to take the perfectly fine, nothing-wrong-with-it pork belly that Tamara and Sarah absolutely nailed and turn it into mince.
It’s not just that it’s thoroughly ruining the good work of her teammates. It’s also that those knife skills lead me to believe her knowledge of savoury food is so lacking that she’s hasn’t even cooked toast.
A jar of Nutella and a spoon sure is a good treat now and then. But as a full diet it’s shithouse.
Bless her though, she is freakin’ mortified when she gets backstage with her teammates. It’s early in the competition and skills are still developing, after all. And Karlie managed to salvage everything from the brink of utter disaster by calling several audibles.
Tamara, awash with relief, cheers her on by pulling out a bang-up impression of ‘The Castle.’
As in, “what do you call this?”
Seasoning. Looks like everyone’s kicked a goal.
By the time Jess rolls in to anchor Team Blue, they have thoroughly polished the potential turd and have got this.
Well, got it enough to avoid being put into elimination.
Team Yellow has built on Benjamin’s solid foundation of *shrug* and pulled together something fairly spectacular using what I can only assume to be witchcraft, given that Sam takes a saucepan that had a very small amount of sauce in it and somehow pours this out of it.
BURN. HIM.
The resulting dish has the judges in raptures for its mapley syrupy goodness, for which Benjamin contentedly takes full credit.
YOU DID ALMOST L I T E R A L L Y NOTHING. All this victory proves is that sometimes, like slacking off in group work at Uni, you can just kinda fail your way to victory.
Team Red’s efforts are being anchored by Ray, who is in the last group of cooks to come out. This, I can only assume, is because he was hunched in a corner behind some shelves praying to dog almighty that no one will remember he’s actually still there.
The speed and urgency he displays in pulling together the team’s dish can best be described as “like molasses trying to roll uphill,” leading to two – not one, but two – of his teammates dishing out almighty sledges via talking head.
There’s Samuel, levelling this stinging jab:
And then Callan, who launches an almighty spray:
Cal’s somehow feels much worse, but only because that’s probably the meanest thing he’s ever said in his life.
‘Course none of that compares to the silent daggers Diana shoots Ray’s way.
Assuming looks can actually kill, Ray is currently a smouldering pile of ash. RIP in peace.
Despite all that, Red Team’s dish is good enough to keep them out of black, leaving Team Green: Benita, Ben, Nicole, Arum, and dear sweet Pete to front up for the chopping block tomorrow, owing to the fact that a full bottle of maple syrup still couldn’t get them the maple hero they needed.
Sometimes ya just gotta take a visual hint. If George looks at you like this when you tell him what your dish is…
…then chances are it won’t matter how badly someone else bungs it up. You’re still not gonna win.
That’s MasterChef, folks. Part cooking competition, part learning how to read the room.
NEXT TIME: It’s a time auction elimination challenge, where contestants trade time for ingredients! Who is going to budget smartly? And who will foolishly chuck 45 minutes down on a pack of paprika?
Things are almost starting to get good, at long bloody last.
Photo: Channel Ten.
