I had nowhere else to put Cursed Green-tongue John Torode so he had to be the clickbait title card.

Seafood Scone, anyone? No? You sure?

Back to Basics

For the first time in the brief history of this challenge premise we have ended up with two contestants using the same basic ingredient for their dishes! This Chicken Thigh Showdown (my favourite anime) was between Chaz and Mathu. The latter was opting to create a deep-fried chicken burger which was a brave choice purely because burgers never go down well with John and Gregg unless they have specifically prompted you to make them a burger

it is however a glorious looking burger – the texture of that coating on the chicken looks beyond perfect. Where Mathu fell a little short in the eyes of John was on the fact she hadn’t used her 80 minutes to make her own brioche buns

the BBC Good Food recipe for Brioche Buns tells me otherwise (she could have made plain white bread but I think they would have found that unexciting)

she could maybe have tried to combine the sambal with chips in some sort of way – it just seems fundamentally flawed to serve a burger without chips. Give us the full Zinger Burger Meal Deal experience.

Mathu was far from the only contestant to fall short in terms of process as Haddy went a little too simple as well. She is however my new favourite person ever because I found her talking about how exciting it was to move to the UK quite relatable

I moved here from Zimbabwe when I was 12 and going into a Big Tesco was absolutely mind blowing – nothing will ever quite capture the awe and amazement I felt upon seeing a space that big filled with that many groceries. And I say that having seen two total solar eclipses, prides of lions and Victoria Falls.

Her giddiness over being within 20 feet of an ice cream machine was somewhat short-lived as John and Gregg critiqued her for not making the most of her time with her Moussaka and a Greek Salad

they also felt the mince was more of a feature than her chosen basic ingredient of Comical Aubergine

you and every guy on Grindr, babe.

Returning now to the Chicken Thigh Brawl, Chaz was going for Caramel Chicken which is a real Vietnamese Dish despite sounding like a Beef Trifle situation. Chaz’s however did not end up looking like the rich sticky dish it should

it has the same sort of vibe as the meal I made the other night where halfway through making a Miscellaneous Thai Curry™ I got as far as adding oyster sauce and paprika to coconut milk before I, like some sort of food poisoning Cassandra having a premonition, began to feel nauseous and called it quits. I still served it to my family with no explanation until after everyone had finished grimacing their way through it. I have a very polite family, by all means they should have hung, drawn and quartered me in the middle of the street because it was truly abominable

imagine how different an Invention Test would be if you had John and Gregg in the corner occasionally turning an electric chair on and off?

John and Gregg were particularly excited by one dish as Penny was supposedly giving them the very first breakfast on MasterChef

which cannot possibly be true but the cowards aren’t brave enough to release the full MasterChef Archive for me to prove them wrong. We have seen upwards of 300 British men clawing their way through this competition with nothing but the words “gastro pub” for a personality, there is no way one of them didn’t at some point cook a sunday fry up while talking a bigger game than the average Four In a Bed contestant.

It was mushrooms that were qualifying as Penny’s basic ingredient and in order to ensure that this came through she was serving them four different ways and then hiding them all inside what I will presume is the first Full English Breakfast Teepee

this dish qualifies her for both the Camper and Chef Scouts Badges. And hell, we’ll throw in the Patience of a Saint Badge as a freebie

Penny’s main shortcoming in the dish, other than the fact it looked like a poached egg was having the worst camping trip of its life, was that the Mushroom Crisps she’d scattered over the top were a little bitter and she probably didn’t need them considering her crispy bacon support beams were bringing more than enough texture to the dish.

On the better end of the spectrum was Aaron who was insisting that his lentils were definitely the signature ingredient of his dish and not the perfectly cooked whole duck breast

he had at least spiced his lentils phenomenally and showed a real talent for cooking with how well the duck breast had been cooked and has secured himself as My Mum’s Favourite™ which is the real prize.

Lastly we have Steve who was using Chicken Breast as his basic ingredient to make a Tikka Masala that they had to get the ol’ MasterChef-branded Dosimeter out before he served it

they will be keeping an eye out for John suddenly sprouting any extra limbs or Gregg developing the power of telekinesis.

A Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. Steve’s Three Eyed Masala Called Blinky
2. It Was The Lentils.
3. Justice For Mathu’s Burger
4. The First MasterChef Breakfast^{[Citation Needed]}
5. Poor Reviews For The Aubergine Comedy Tour
6. Chaz’s Hen Caramel

Easily getting the first two aprons were Steve and Aaron

while the rest would have to redeem themselves by doing the least worst thing to a very small bird.

We’re Having a Quail of a Time

After the last batch of contestants fumbled their way through a Bake Off Technical Challenge wearing Groucho Glasses, we return to a true Invention Test with this lot having to bluff their way through cooking quail

most of them didn’t know where to start beyond tangential chicken dishes except for Penny who went on a quail-themed honeymoon

she never said where she went (Quaila Lumpur, I assume) but her romantic quail experience certainly paid off for her in her roast quail and bulgar wheat external stuffing

it was certainly the only plate of food that sounded like a real quail dish on paper, everyone else’s had a distinct flavour of Chicken But Smol. But her dish wasn’t the only dish to work flavourwise as both John and Gregg fell in love with Haddy’s deep-fried quail with a Gambian Yassa Sauce

Things did not go too well for either Chaz or Mathu. Mathu had clearly taken the critique of not making the ill-advised attempt of cramming three hours of proving bread into 80 minutes so she was using this chance of redemption to try to force 90 minutes into a mere 45. Safe to say she is, despite the haircut, no Criss Angel

she had attempted to make a Congee, a sort of Chinese rice porridge, but what she’d ended up making was just… wet rice with a single chicken wing poking out of it like Uma Thurman clawing her way out of a grave in Kill Bill

I really liked Mathu, she wasn’t here for long but she was an icon for the 30 minutes that we barely knew her for.

Lastly we have Chaz who was going for a Quail Mole which delightfully sounds like one of the Frankenstein’d creatures Willem Dafoe made in Poor Things

Emma Stone’s Wig’s performance was great and absolutely deserved the Oscar however I do think The Goose-Dog was a scene stealer for the entire first 15 minutes, I clapped like a circus seal every time I saw it, I was just giddy with excitement.
In keeping with the theme of controversial Frankensteining, Chaz was throwing in a bit of chorizo for some *checks notes* Mexican Flavour

the damage Jamie Oliver has done to the culinary relationship between Britain and the Spanish speaking world will never stop reverberating through time and space, like the flap of a condor-sized butterfly’s wings

the bigger problem with Chaz’s dish was that the quail had shown up to the fiesta wearing a sombrero and a fake moustache and nobody wanted it there

it hadn’t even got the chance to get out the maracas and perform “El Jarabe Tapatio”!

A Quail Dish Ranking:
1. YAAAAAAS(a) QUEEN!
2. How Many Years Is the Quail Anniversary?
=. The Equal Weight Of Cultural Disappointments

With Haddy and Penny both receiving resounding compliments and Chaz and Mthu being resoundingly the opposite, we were losing the latter two

I’ll miss Mathu’s accent most of all.

A Two Course Race

This week’s trio of guest judges were Shelina Permalloo,

Simon Wood who looks a little it like the frontman of a mid-2000s pop punk bad that’s barely clinging on to relevancy

and all time Blog Favourite, Tony Rodd

sorry, and all time Blog Favourite, Tony Rodd

shoutout to the You Are Safe With Me pin on his lapel

there’s a reason he’ll always be *my* favourite. Less safe though is anyone’s dish from his chest hair

Rather disappointed to find he doesn’t wax his chest hair into its own twiddly moustache.

First to the pass was Steve who was just serving Aspirational Michael O’Hare realness

God bless a very premature deployment of the title of “Chef”.
I must admit, I completely forgot Michael O’Hare’s name and this was the only Google search I could think of to try and find him

if it works, it works.

Steve was starting his menu off with a Ribeye Steak rubbed with Coffee and Chocolate and serving it with an accompanying Bourbon and Coffee Sauce and obligatory Big Boy Chips

it does admittedly look better when it has the sauce applied to the plate

and the sauce was very much the highlight for most of the diners but unfortunately the bitterness of the rub blew their minds a little too hard. Except for Gregg who claimed he loved it while sounding like his throat was slowly collapsing in on itself

Sure Jan.

Steve was ending his meal with a Cardamom and White Chocolate Cheesecake which I don’t think was quite as quirky as he thought it was. I think Waitrose sells them as individual portions and we all know the shelves of Waitrose is where quirk goes to die

the main problem with his White Chocolate and Cardamom Cheesecake was that it tasted of neither White Chocolate nor Cardamom

I will give him credit for at least making a cheesecake that looked like a cheesecake. We’ve seen far too many contestants reduce a perfectly good dessert to a jigsaw of crumbs and smears.

Aaron was also going for a Main & Dessert combo, starting off his meal with a revisiting of the Fish Sauce Caramel that scuppered Chaz’s chances. Aaron choosing to serve his with salmon

it went down incredibly well with the diners and was overall a pretty beautiful dish.

For dessert he was going for the slightly risky Chocolate Lava Cake which he was serving with a Chantilly Cream that he kept adding too many Ls too and pronouncing “Chantilily Cream” which is an excellent drag name

as ever the success of the molten pudding could only really be seen after serving it and he’d more than succeeded in the technical aspect

part of me is convinced it’s more undercooked than molten but the bigger issue for the diners was that there wasn’t enough sweetness or sharpness to balance out the bitterness of the cocoa.

Moving on to the dessert avoiders, Penny was playing some sort of culinary mad libs as she served a starter that is completely incomprehensible as a concept

I don’t know how she didn’t immediately lose hope in her dish when she started describing it and Gregg looked like he was in the midst of trying to decipher the weird incestuous overtones of Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer in CATS (2019)

everyone reading the menu was giving her the benefit of the doubt and believed she was going to serve a sort of garlic and herb butter to use on their scones and then out came just 8 mussels covered in teaspoons of melted butter and the worst chopped parsley you’ve ever seen with a dry scone

every time I think this show is played out and doesn’t have much new to bring to the table someone comes in with baked goods and mussels to prove me wrong.

Penny wasn’t gaining many points back with Moroccan tagine that was perhaps just a few too many things on the plate

I am impressed that she managed to not serve raw lamb, especially considering how much of a bum fight it was in the far too small a pan she was trying to sear it all in

at some point you just have to admit defeat and use two pans. Rather uniquely she’d actually managed to overcook the lamb but like many before her, hadn’t quite rendered the fat down enough

it’s never a great sign when your lamb fat is still the same colour as the emphasising finger that’s jabbing it accusingly.

Lastly we have Haddy who was putting her Gambian heritage front and centre, starting her menu with a starter of black eyed bean fritters known as Akara

she hadn’t quite managed to get as many of them made as she wanted so everyone did end up with a very stingy 2 per plate which is only an acceptable portion size in MasterChef: The Professionals but they were all more than made up with how well made and tasty they were.

Her second course of a Chicken Domada (A Gambian peanut butter stew) was similarly crowd pleasing in its richness

I make something similar with pork shoulder that cooks for three hours and it’s amazing so I’m impressed she managed to get a sauce that looks as rich as hers did in under 2 hours. Dare I call her my favourite at risk of losing her to the nonsense of Knockout Week?

sorry to put a target on her back but if you walk into the show looking like you’re on a Chanel runway, you were always going to be my Masterchef soulmate.

A Two Course Menu Ranking:
1. Haddy’s Dominating Domada
2. Aaron’s Fish Caramel [tone indicator: positive]
3. Haddy’s Rationed Akara
4. Aaron’s 95% Cocoa Pudding
5. Steve’s Throat Killing Steak
6. Steve’s Cream Cheese and Biscuits Flavoured Cheesecake
7. Penny’s Everything Tagine
8. Penny’s Culinary Mad Libs

We had to lose one of the contestants ahead of the quarterfinal and after Steve’s menu I did think he was a goner because surely nobody could top flavourless cheesecake and then you know… The Mussel Cream Tea happened and Penny was rightfully doomed

I am morbidly tempted to recreate it for myself. Just for science.

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