There is absolutely no way we could possibly come to regret this decision.

Maybe not everything should be pickled.

Ba[sic]

The first batch of this week’s contestants got off to a fairly normal start without much chaos or too much to make you ponder about the philosophical limitations of the definition of food. But if you thought this meant we were in a new age of Culinary Icarianism, Saint Jerome, the literal reincarnation of the previous Saint Jerome, came fluttering into the kitchen like Lorenz’s butterfly

for his first round he was aiming to turn chicken thighs into solid gold with his Shredded Chicken Panuchos that came with an Ancho Chocolate Sauce (I’m still trying to discern the difference between a Panucho and a Tostada but I think it’s down to how the tortilla is prepared)

in the grand scheme of Jerome’s trail of destruction, this is downright inoffensive – each element was very well cooked and tasted fantastic. He was only criticised for the fact his chicken felt like a background player. One way to get around this is to just make sure at least 80% of your dish is one ingredient then you can serve a whole fillet of lamb next to your factions of courgette and nobody can question it

this was the product of Farmer Louise, who I’m working on a theory that she might just be Hope from the future coming to warn her

none of us are immune to societal perception that any two women with a fringe look identical. I mean, I look like someone tried to draw Florence Welch from memory.

Also attempting the always risky lamb was Rana, but like Louise was insisting that it was not her main ingredient, instead that honour belonged to her pomegranate and definitely not the rack of lamb…

sure…. I can’t lie, it sounds like an amazing dish and she pulled it off phenomenally which is not something you get to write often about a rack of lamb this early in the competition. However, I think it needed one extra element to make it feel like both a complete dish and as though the pomegranates were central to the core idea but I really like her so… case dismissed.

The more egregious case of pretending the side dish is the main dish was Peter who was showcasing Red Cabbage in all its glory and then expecting us to just ignore the venison that was out there performing Act 3 Scene 1 of Hamlet like it was Jonathan Pryce

not helping at all was the fact it wasn’t *good* red cabbage either as Peter had a bit of a mishap

“burnt” is an understatement, that cabbage has been fully cremated and will have its ashes scattered in the National Memorial Arboretum next weekend.

Olivia I think had the best grasp of the challenge, the same could not be said for her grasp of the average kitchen utensil

I was so prepared to start brandishing a crucifix to ward off the Millennial Toddler TikTok Girlie that was possessing her but then I kind of fell in love with her when she served up three absolutely massive meatball filled potato dumplings on more cabbage than Peter could have ever conceived

Gregg and John both called her out for it lacking finesse however I think most Eastern European food just inherently looks like it’s the sort of thing you eat to keep you going through 5 months of hibernation. So asking for your potato dumplings to look elegant is to deny culture.

John and Gregg were lucky enough to get 1 dessert out of Sidney who I could have guessed was an aspiring food content creator by the scrunchy and puka shells paired with a sensible cricket sweater alone

he’s basically the Instagram algorithm made flesh.

He was making his childhood favourite, Madeleines with his basic ingredient being flour which… sure, I guess. I’m not sure if this “Basic Ingredient” criteria is working. There’s Basic Ingredients and then there’s Cupboard Staples but before this turns into a 5000 word philosophical essay about *that* conundrum, Sidney did well by his Madeleines

he’d managed to get that perfect shell shape and they were light and fluffy. They did look a touch burnt which neither John nor Gregg brought up, they had bigger fish to fry with his Lemon Tuile getting roasted

there is no harsher critique on this show than something you’ve cooked being described only as “unusual”.

An Unofficial Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. Louise’s Courgette Battle Map
2. Jerome used Sneak Attack! It’s Super Effective!
3. Olivia’s Potato Stockpile
4. Being Taken for Pomegranate
5. Like. Share. Subscribe!
6. Peter’s Shakespearean Venison

The first two aprons to be doled out went to Louise and Jerome which I can’t really argue with. The two of them did have very different reactions, Louise mostly just looked relieved

whereas Jerome was just making what turned out to be thinly veiled threats

little did we know the chaos gremlin that hides within.

Over and Trout

For their hopes at proving themselves worthy of not having to pay £4.99 for delivery

Rana, Peter, Sidney and Olivia were facing an Invention Test in which they had to prepare and cook a whole trout which is the sort of challenge that catches out even the professional pastry chefs that for some reason think they’re immune to any sort of butchery skills test – YOU NEVER ARE, BABE! Monica Galetti doesn’t care how well you can make a caramel if you can’t disembowel a monkfish correctly!

Now given the fact that wrapping the whole fish in parchment and saying “en Papillote” in a vaguely French accent was a more than viable option, every single one of them attempted to fillet the fish themselves. Olivia’s was in the safest hands as her boyfriend had taught her to do it so she ended up with a very good looking fillet of fish and all the finesse that she lacked in the previous round

I think the Pea and Asparagus Puree could have been presented a little more appetizingly than a sort of underlying slop but then Rana pureed a cannellini bean stew for some reason so all is forgiven

I think she may have accidentally stumbled into Wiltshire Farm Foods Grade 6 Soft Meal territory with this one but despite the stew that could be eaten with a straw, her trout was cooked very well. It was just a pity that she’d been a little heavy handed with the salt, although this would not compare to the Bonneville Salt Flats that Peter had turned his carrots into.

Sidney and Peter were both on the struggle bus, or at least Sidney was on the Struggle Bus, Peter was on the Express Struggle Train as Gregg watched him filleting his fish like he was handling ancient manuscripts without fancy white gloves

this would hardly be Peter’s biggest mistake as he presented his dish to John and Gregg looking like a toddler who is desperately hoping their parents won’t notice the fact they’ve written their own name in permanent marker on the sitting room wall

“maybe they won’t notice that I mixed up the sugar and salt in my carrots…” he prayed silently

you can pinpoint the precise moment that John realised he would never be the same – there is only Before Peter and After Peter

I need a full 5 episode mini series about Peter making these carrots because I need to know exactly how much salt he poured in there to turn those carrots into a weapon of chemical warfare

because even if he did put sugar in there, those carrots would have been glorified pieces of Haribo which I’m not really sure would be better or worse! Either way, Peter, you are a beautiful disaster.

Lastly we had Sidney who did well enough with his fish filleting but came undone when he just covered boiled potatoes with cream, did jazz hands and called it a gratin

it was a bit of a confused dish with some well made elements in the red pepper sauce and the cooking of his trout but none of it quite come together in terms of flavour.

An Unofficial Trout Dish Ranking:
1. Olivia’s Finessed Redemption
2. Rana’s Dencher Safe Stew
3. Sidney’s Confused Casting Choices
4. Peter’s 20 Years for Attempted Homicide

We did have to lose two contestants after this round with Peter having to go and sit in Belmarsh to think about what he’d done

and proving to be the shortest lived Honorary Blog Boyfriend (the greatest MasterChef honour) was Sidney

I’ll miss his scrunchy most of all.

A Two Course Race

One of the positives about the Two Course Menu challenge being moved to earlier in the competition is that it really, REALLY ups the chances of utter insanity being unleashed in the kitchen as everyone tries to climb the greased up ladder of aspirational restaurant cookery. Finding themselves the guinea pigs in this particular endeavour was The M&S Spring Campaign Catalogue

Ping has at this point competed on so many MasterChef specials she’s just part of the furniture – they keep her right next to the potentially haunted ice cream machine. I think she’s also my favourite MasterChef contestant of all time.

Rana was the only contestant to completely forgo making a dessert, starting her menu off with a Duck Kibbeh with Date-infused Labneh and Coriander Oil

it’s an interesting sounding dish which everyone was excited to taste. Unfortunately it didn’t quite live up to expectations as every single part of it got critiqued for not tasting of much

Baby Bear would have loved it?

The critiques of blandness didn’t stop there for Rana as her Lamb dumplings suffered a similar seasoningless fate despite looking like a wonderfully vibrant dish

she clearly overcompensated after having her Invention Test dish being critiqued for being overly salty and I’m sure having to rescue the guts of her dumplings from the pot like shipwrecked crew members wasn’t helping

it wasn’t a great showing for Rana who had showed a lot of potential and sadly the hopes of seeing her ascend to the heights of a Turducken were going out in a puff of unseasoned smoke

they were just afraid of how powerful she could be.

The standout of the round was very clearly Louise who started off with a Roast Pork, Cabbage and Mustard Mash dish that actually looked like a main course

and in a very rare instance for this episode, the cabbage was a particularly beloved component

we didn’t however get much of a critique out of John because he was having something of a moment with the pork

someone’s still sleeping on the couch after The Scallop Incident of 2021.

Louise followed up her main course with a Panna Cotta that has fast become the new Chocolate Fondant and I’m going to have start deducting creativity points if you serve one next series. At least it wasn’t vanilla as she’d opted to flavour it with honey and serve it alongside a wild blueberry compote and Lavender Biscuits which made us all too aware of Gregg’s Auntie Shirley’s underwear situation

I’m just saying, Aunt is a particularly weird relation to choose for this joke – I feel shy just going upstairs in my aunt’s house, her underwear drawer is like North Sentinel Island to me.

Other than potentially tasting like the most forbidden chest of drawers, the other aspect everyone would inevitably focus on was the wobbliness of Panna Cotta which was rather overset if it remained completely still while Jane Devonshire reenacted a category 8 earthquake for the class

but other than it was a very well received dish and by far and away the best dessert of the round

It is also probably technically the ONLY dessert of this round because both Jerome and Olivia decided to make puddings like Jacob van Maerlant drew snails

like… he knew what they were, he could see them, he had regular access to them and yet he still decided that the best way to depict them was as the tiniest, angriest dog.

Olivia’s menu at least started completely normally with a very strong Pomegranate Molasses Coated Lamb and Bulgar Wheat Salad

it’s a pity the lamb was kind of just tossed onto the plate because at first I thought she was going to present the dish like a toddler’s drawing of a butterfly when I saw how she’d placed her pickled onions

it was another dish that the judges all waxed lyrical about and things were looking extremely positive for Olivia and then she inexplicably started cooking a tarte tatin in a Le Creuset pot

many things on MasterChef have made me question my own reality, and because of this I did have to go and watch several videos of people cooking tarte tatins just to make sure I wasn’t wrong

everyone is on the same page, this is absolutely, without any uncertainty, taxonomically not a tarte tatin

congratulations Olivia, I think technically you’ve just made the Platypus of the dessert world; it’s technically a real dessert but nobody is going to believe you for the next 50 years.

Lastly we have Jerome whose approach to the challenge seemed to just be spinning a wheel to decide what he puts on the plate in the hope fate was on his side. I think what we learned from this is that Fate hates everyone except Jerome. He started with a main course of Suppli, which is usually more of a starter so to make it look more generous he’d thrown on a piece of steak and some Miso Hollandaise that looked like the emoji you’d use to challenge someone to a boxing match

as I think many would’ve guessed, it was a dish of two halves. The suppli? Fantastic! The steak and hollandaise? It works! The Suppli, The steak AND the Hollandaise? A bit like his plate was asking for directions to the train station in 3 different languages all at the same time.

This would turn out to be nothing compared to the Roland Emmerich directed disaster movie of a dessert that would follow as Jerome pondered “What if a Black Forest Gateau… but pickled?”

this dessert is a perfect illustration of letting your intrusive thoughts win and how doing so impacts the people around you as just before serving it he decided to top it off with salt and olive oil

“a bit of salt” he says as he applies crystals that could be seen from space. But still, salt and chocolate at least makes sense and it says volumes nobody mentioned the equine salt licks he served them because everyone was losing their minds over the fact they’d just tasted a cherry having an identity crisis in a fish and chip shop

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of a reaction from a plate of food, it’s truly an all timer and will have its portrait hung in the MasterChef Hall of Infamy right next to the Cod Cheek Omelette, Stefan’s Ring of Purple Potatoes and The Blueberry Ragu.

An Unofficial Two Course Menu Ranking:
1. Louise’s Ascended Cabbage
2. Olivia’s Lepidopteran Near Miss
3. Auntie Shirley’s Stiff Drawers
4. Baby Bear’s Kibbeh
5. When in Rome…. FIGHT
6. The Wreckage of the HMS Pork Dumpling
7. Olivia’s Holotypic Upside-down Pot Tart
8. Jerome’s pudding

Louise sailed through as the very obvious winner of the episode with barely a scuff on her reputation. There were still 2 spots available in the quarterfinal, the first going to Olivia on the grounds both of her dishes, while not entirely perfect, could at least be described as having tasted like food. This left either Jerome or Rana going home – either Rana goes home for not enough flavour or Jerome goes home for too much flavour, these are the two wolves inside of you that crave a cheese and pickle white bread sandwich at 3am.

Ultimately, they decided that the last spot in the quarterfinal belonged to Jerome, who didn’t look like he could believe it either

and Rana has to somehow process losing to a man who doused a cherry in malt vinegar.