Someone get Gregg out of the Metaphors Cupboard.

Dance with me! Dance The Dance of the Beans!

Back to Basics

As is want to happen every Leap Year with MasterChef, there comes a format change! With last year’s format having been put into a blender and reconstituted into a sort of dinosaur-shaped MasterChef nugget. I’m not entirely sure it works, these first two episodes of the week feel a little cluttered with the combination of introductory round, invention test and the two course menu round. Mercifully they have done away with the part of the show where John and Gregg are secluded in a room furnished by Homebase’s surplus stock meaning the dead air usually filled with Gregg trying to banter with anyone that looks him straight in the eyes like a sort of Wetherspoons Medusa had to be filled by rival contestants who don’t have a clue who one another are making awkward small talk from sensibly distanced stools

but with relief comes grief, as we have to say goodbye to yet another Blog Favourite: The Hot Mardy Floor Manager

type F to pay respects.

The actual format of the challenge isn’t wildly different, sadly I’m still campaigning for the Invention Tests of Yore where they had to prove themselves by resisting the intrusive thoughts to pair the obvious cottage pie ingredients with the errant strawberry jam. We instead turn from the Family Favourite Challenge to the Basic to Brilliant Challenge in which the contestants had to bring in a fairly mundane ingredient and truss it up into something special. It did make the food seem a lot more accessible, this way nobody is going to swan in wearing cashmere and pearls waxing lyrical about the weekly lobster dinner they cook for their friends. Although I give it one series before everyone realises you can say onions are their basic ingredient and the lobster is just a happy little £50 addition

I’m not sure listing the pork tenderloin after the onion elements is enough to make me believe this isn’t a pork tenderloin dish no matter how good all the onion elements are

it was clearly the standout dish of the round with Brin immediately setting a high bar for both food and facial hair

allow me to say something absolutely wild for a moment: he reminds me of Charlie from Twilight

it’s all in the kind eyes and The Only Sensible Romanceable Option In A Voltage Inc. Dating Sim energy. Sure, the mysterious art thief with a luxury dress sense has an allure but… it’s the vet that can cook every time.

Last year we suffered through something of a crisis in the form of dishes just being One Thing and a Flat Bread, and it was very rarely ever a good one thing. Fateha was however wildly course correcting the timeline for us by producing an Everything and a Flatbread

her basic ingredient being lamb (IN THIS ECONOMY?) which she cooked as a curry flavoured with Shatkora to showcase her favoured Bengali cuisine. Shatkora being similar to a lemon that you might think is a potato on first inspection

I did try to find out more about what a Shatkora is but the highest recommended source of information is a food YouTuber going a bit Christopher Columbus

babe, you didn’t discover ANYTHING, you just bumped into it!

Aside from the impressiveness of Fateha’s workload, both John and Gregg really liked her cooking of the lamb however she had slightly burnt most of the accompaniments so the flavours lacked a bit of clarity. Gregg did make sure to deliver the bad news to Fateha in a very hushed and gentle voice because she does always look a bit like Miss Tiggy Winkle on the verge of tears

Miss Tiggy Winkle and Jemima Puddleduck were always my favourite Beatrix Potter characters as a child and I fully realise now that they were my first transition goal icons. And I think I’ve succeeded.

Muir was also going for the tried and tested Impress ’em With Flatbread technique and true to her assertion that the culinary horizon is limitless

she was deciding to cook it all by piling her Lavash bread up with baba ganoush, pan-fried lamb steaks and baked couscous which was her basic ingredient

the only real complaint was that she could have rested her lamb a little longer but the flavours were all very good and the cooking was great across the board, in many another versions of this contest this dish could well have allowed her to leapfrog over the moss covered stepping stone we know as Culturally Obfuscated Gnocchi. Alas…

Gregg was a bit surprised that Matt the Butcher wasn’t also doing a meaty dish. His reasoning behind the “curveball” being that he wanted to do something different. Nobody tell him this was the first challenge and thus the setting of the status quo

sir, I’m not letting you beat the paleolithic allegations that easily

his hopes for proving Not All Butchers lay in Seafood Tagliatelle – his basic ingredient being Pasta

I will always give someone bonus points for making their own pasta, perhaps I shouldn’t but it’s like witchcraft to me, someone who doesn’t own a pasta machine and thinks the Tesco fresh egg lasagne sheets are the height of luxury. It wasn’t a bad showing from Matt, his fish was a little overcooked but was mostly a perfectly passable plate of food.

With Matt forsaking his Brothers in Meat, the only person in the kitchen cooking steak was Cirilo who was making it his MasterChef mission to showcase the food of Panama, starting with the basic ABCs: Ateak, Beans and Cice

it was not smooth sailing for Cirilo as he burnt his first pot of beans which meant he didn’t have the time to properly reduce the second batch down meaning they weren’t flavoursome of rhythmic enough for Gregg

funnily enough, Aliona also described Gregg as a dancing bean

how much do you think the BBC offers John Torode every year to do Strictly and how much do you think is his breaking point? I mean, he agreed to do that cookery show from his house with Lisa Faulkner and I think doing a Waltz to Peaches while dressed as Bowser could only ever be half as awkward as that ever is.

The only dessert of the round came from Hope, who had apparently gotten lost on the way to The Great Pottery Throwdown

and said bespoke plates seem to always come with a bespoke Live.Laugh.Love phrase imprinted on them that in no way will become annoying by the time she’s desperately thinking up cutesy puns for Duck a l’Orange. In this instance, she was making a brownie

the way John read that phrase like someone reading a message scrawled on the walls of an Egyptian tomb before realising they’ve just unleashed an ancient curse upon the world <3

Hope was basing her dessert on a Black Forest Gateau because her husband really likes Black Forest Gateau, a man of impeccable taste

except this was more of a Theseus’s Black Forest Gateau and you have to wonder how many elements you can remove and replace before you have to accept it’s not a Black Forest anything

you’ve got to keep John and Gregg on their toes and in the end they did really like Hope’s completely normal chocolate brownie which she had paired with a fortification of Sourdough Crisps

and if she was going to do one thing this episode it was make sourdough her entire personality. I’m not saying I could draw a picture of her husband without having seen him but I think I could draw a picture of her husband without having seen him.

An Unofficial Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. Theseus’s Gateau
2. An Afterthought of Tenderloin
3. Everything and a Flatbread – Middle East Edition
4. NOT. ALL. BUTCHERS.
5. Everything and a Flatbread – Bengali Edition
6. The Dark Cloud of Panama’s Literacy Rate

With only two aprons up for grabs after this round, it was pretty cut and dry that the successful candidates were Brin and Hope

No Way, no How, Gnocchi

The remaining four contestants were given one last chance to earn themselves an apron that you definitely can’t buy on Amazon

Oh, I’ll get to you tomorrow, Peter…

and in order to do so they were going to have to get through an Invention Test that was only a little bit of an invention test as they found themselves facing off against a pre-baked potato

sorry, wrong pre-baked potato

and from there they were penned in to having to make gnocchi. Mercifully they were given an abridged gnocchi recipe to read through which was thankfully more detailed than the instructions in the Bake Off Technical Challenges that have to be deciphered using a bag of bones and a divining rod

and while most of them decided to follow it as closely to the letter as possible, Muir, armed with but a handful of sage to spiritually cleanse the room with

was extremely dedicated to proving that gnocchi were merely Tattie Scones putting on an Italian accent

and thus she began insistently pan-frying them while John committed a more brutal drive-by murder than the mafia ever could

alas, amongst all the shots of everyone serving up boiled, nicely made gnocchi, Muir looked like she’s subjected a bag of Cheese Curls to a nuclear apocalypse

It’s the valiant attempt to hide them beneath a bushel of fried sage for me. Her Sage and Kale Cream Sauce wasn’t winning her back many points because it was less of a sauce and more of a fancy cream cheese

I mean, I would 100% eat it with a bit of salmon on a blini? And what Blinis but Tattie Scones putting on a Russian accent? (I know they are not similar at all, before the comments happen.)

Fateha, who didn’t know what gnocchi was, had decided to follow the recipe as closely as she could and apply everything she learned from the last round

couldn’t have shared those sparknotes with the rest of the class, huh?

and she really played to her strengths by sticking to what she did know and serving them with a tangy spiced tomato sauce

and as such easily had the best dish of this round, although Matt wasn’t too far behind with his Three (3) Gnocchi and One (1) Kofta in a Tomato Sauce

they really loved his sensible tomato sauce, which is funny because he only made it after Gregg told him to

I do kind of wish we lived in the timeline where Matt did serve up just three pieces of dry gnocchi and single meatball in a quest for what he believed was elegant and refined cookery

I wonder how the US election is going in that parallel universe? It seems a simpler time.

Lastly we have Cirilo who had also chosen to go with a meatball, and like Matt had disappointed John and Gregg with the gnocchi to meat ratio

I really liked Cirilo, he had some real vintage MasterChef flair to him, I long for the days when contestants would just throw fried bacon bits on top of something because saying “Lardons” made you sound chef-y.

An Unofficial Gnocchi Attempt Ranking:
1. Potato Pasta? I Hardly Know Her!
2. Emotionally Manipulated Sauce
3. Anocchi, Beatballs and Cacon
4. Tattie Gone

Muir and Cirilo had both had a bit of a shocker in this round so it was kind of fair that they were the ones finding themselves going home apronless

meaning Matt and Fateha both got theirs.

A Two Course Race

For our first Quarterfinal of the series, the quarterfinalists were having to cook their two course menus for last year’s trio of finalists: Anurag, Omar and Chariya

fish starters were the main trend of the evening with three of the four opting for seafood. Brin and Fateha facing off over mackerel – the latter making a Mackerel Salad but before I could deploy the You-dont-win-friends-with-salad.gif she added that she was serving it with an aloo tikki so she gets away with it, but only just

it was a well received dish with everyone praising the unique subtlety of the salad but the aloo tikki needed just a fraction longer in the deep-fryer.

Brin’s take on mackerel was a little more expected – serving it with a carrot veloute and pickled shimeji mushrooms making for a difficult dish to get excited by even if it did look quite striking

it was all technically very accomplished – smooth veloute, well torched mackerel but lacked any sort of real punch. He was quite lucky to scrape by in the end because his main course also left the diners a little wanting as he’d given himself a heavy workload for his Sambal-crusted Lamb dish, which the diners were a bit sceptical of quite how much was going on in it

babe, contestants are literally having to be emotionally manipulated into making 1 sauce – we need every sauce we can get to bring up the moisture quota of the series. But because of this, Brin’s dish hadn’t quite delivered in its entirety

thankfully he had actually cooked his lamb extremely well and amongst the rushed elements there were some real signs of very talented cookery – we just wont talk about the fact his workspace looked a bit like he’d had to wrestle the lamb into submission

clean up on Aisle Brin.

As for Fateha’s main course, she had stuck with fish and made a Haddock and Mukhi Curry alongside rice and an aubergine bharta. After a struggle of a google search because the subtitlers had misspelled Mukhi as Makhi which is a radical right-wing Cypriot newspaper (I cannot confirm or deny its uses in a curry) but in this case, Fateha was cooking with taro root

Everyone did end up really loving her assuredly BBC guideline following politically unaligned curry as she’d perfectly cooked the fish and spiced the whole dish to perfection.

Matt, still in his Not Like The Other Butchers phase, had decided to start his menu with a starter of Salmon Mousse wrapped in Smoked Salmon which everyone found a bit overwhelming because they were the size of breakfast muffins

God bless him being criticised for three (3) gnocchi and then wildly overcompensating in the next round. This time hedging his bets on elegance with the accompanying Melba Toast which he’d sorted of committed a reverse My Fair Lady on

look, some people are just born to serve absurdly large pies and the sort of mashed potato you could use to grout a bathroom with and I think Matt just needs to embrace that destiny a little more. I know how it feels to run away from who you really are, I spent 20 years trying to convince everyone I was a boy while looking like this

Honey, we’re convincing nobody, embrace the inner Ginsters that is desperate to break out, you’ll be so much happier!

Matt was finally giving in to the call of the meat with his Lamb Main course, opting for an unusual pencil fillet which he was doing on the barbecue because he, like every dad the moment they get a pair of tongs in their hand, becomes one with the ancient Viking journeymen cooks of history

he is the personification of a No. 1 Dad mug and I find his presence truly comforting. Sadly his barbecue prowess came under question considering the rareness of his fillet

Anurag was the most sceptical of the meat but the rest of the dish was actually quite good, he’d pulled off some really well done fondant potatoes, arguably the hardest element attempted in this particular round which he deserves some kudos for. But sadly the good will was a little lost considering his Red Wine Sauce just tasted a bit like he’d upended a bottle of merlot into a jug

see Anurag, this is why people have to make two sauces.

Hope was the only one going for a main course and dessert combination – starting her menu off with a dish of Baba Ganoush and spiced lamb mince

it’s a lovely sounding dish and I would certainly order it on any menu – the jury’s out on what pun lay beneath the pile of mashed aubergine but her accompanying flatbread’s tone was awfully pointed

although calling it a “flatbread” was a bit of mistruth as she’d stuffed it with feta and olives to the point of achieving complete sphericality

at some point you do have to just accept you’ve made a bread roll.

Her dessert at first glance sounded like your typical MasterChef dessert – a panna cotta with poached fruit but I did like the sound of the peaches in dessert wine with her basil panna cotta. I’m just grateful when someone doesn’t default to vanilla

and she pulled it off remarkably well, it had a great wobble and despite John’s worry about the entire kitchen garden of basil she’d used the flavour was subtle enough to not overwhelm the dish. She’d also managed to lend the dish a bit of texture with the sourdough granola. I do not know what the Panna Cotta pun was but I hope it was “Panna GOT YA! This was laced with 500mg of arsenic. You have 20 minutes to live. Good luck.”

An Unofficial Two Course Menu Ranking:
1. Hope’s Pun-a Cotta
2. Hope’s Round Flatbread Theory
3. Fateha’s Neutral Curry
4. Fateha’s Salad & Friends
5. Brin’s Super Sambalambanana
6. Brin’s Perfectly Safe Mackerel
7. Matt’s Eliza Doolittle Toast
8. The Barbecue Master Has Become The Barbecue Student

Only one of the hopeful chefs was getting dropped at this point with the decision coming down to being between Brin and Matt. Ultimately Matt’s dishes did have more glaring errors and I think Brin offers more of a point of view so we were saying goodbye to Matt

He’ll never look a fishmonger in the eyes ever again.