Sir, just go to Hot Yoga.

This recap is made out of hand-sculpted meringue.

Basic Day

We start once again with the Basics to Brilliant Challenge and yet again, someone has named flour as their basic ingredient of choice. But at least Enya was choosing the exciting James Bond of ground grains

The name’s Zero, Doppio Zero.

Enya has lofty ambitions of owning a family run restaurant. Quite what cuisine it would specialise in I do not know because I have never seen a family that looks more like everyone is going to very different parties

from Left to Right You’ve got: Classic French, Nouveau Italian, Vegan Taco Food Truck in Shoreditch, Middle Eastern Fusion Food with Excellent Wine Pairings and Classic Italian where the chef will shout at you if you request even the most reasonable of changes to his pizzas. I’m already giving them a 5 star review on TripAdvisor even if Enya’s Ricotta and Chilli Ravioli only got a 4 out 5

aside from the split filling, everything else was pretty much perfect and in my eyes she’s a genius just for making her own ravioli. I’m going to have to try making my own pasta just to demystify this process aren’t I? I’m like a baby playing peekaboo, just constantly surprised when it appears as though people haven’t been making it on the show since day dot.

She wasn’t the only one making ravioli but she was the only one making sensible ravioli. Charlie’s was more of a panicked addition because merely serving pork meatballs in a chicken broth wasn’t going to be enough to successfully blackmail his daughter into auditioning for The Voice

Rather expectedly the main issue with Charlie’s plate of food is that it wasn’t really a plate of food so much as it was a reenactment of Noah’s Ark in the medium of Italian leftovers

The Ravioli comes in two by two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The Fennel comes in two by two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The Meatballs come in three by three because they’re a god-fearing throuple. Hurrah! Hurrah!

Pete was also attempting to make his own noodles, although his didn’t make it to his plate because they’d formed a mushy union against him

but he still managed to put out a plate of food that John and Gregg could admire even if it wasn’t the original reinvention of a traditional Khao Soi he’d promised

we’ve seen many a contestant go to pot after a mild inconvenience so he does deserve a fair share of praise for keeping it cool when half his dish had to be thrown out.

Also going for a twist on East Asian classics was Lee who had been sent to MasterChef to stop him from putting his family into excessive debt

THREE LITRES OF OLIVE OIL? IN THIS ECONOMY?

his basic ingredient of choice was chillies which were being showcased in a Crispy Chilli Beef, Gochujang Mayonnaise and Vietnamese Salad

it’s a very stylish plate of food and on both accounts of the judges held up in terms of flavour. If you’re a betting person I think Lee is a strong contender for the final. Which does now mean he’ll go out as soon as Grace Dent sets eyes upon him. I’ll get the RIP montage ready.

Shreya and Saffron were both opting for dairy products as their basic ingredients. Shreya’s being paneer, which she was smoking and using in a Karahi curry with a tomato and cashew sauce

there were of course also the accompanying baby naans which are just naan breads but UwU and because of her I’ve been singing Baby Naan (doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo) for the last 24 hours and I’m at my breaking point. I can’t be too mad at her because she is dedicated to bringing back the pronounced cupid’s bow

we should always reward the deployment of the perfect lipstick.

Lastly we have Saffron and her natural yoghurt which she’d made into a labneh and served alongside what was essentially just a list of ingredients that she’d barely done anything to

it did at least look pretty, which you could hopefully expect from someone who works as an Interior Designer but I’ve also seen Interior Design Masters and know this is not a hard and fast rule

No Francesa, nobody wants to live inside their GCSE art study of Matisse.

An Unofficial Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. Lee’s Chi-Lee Beef
2. Baby Naan (DOO-DOO, DOO-DOO, DOO-DOO)
3. Pete as Protested By The Noodle Union
4. Charlie’s Biblical Diorama
5. Enya’s Contribution To The Family Chaos Inn
6. Saffron’s Shopping List

with everyone except Lee and Shreya having some small issues with at least one component on their dishes, the two of them leapfrogged over the redemptio challenge with ease

Floaters

In order to win the dubious honour having being put through the stress of the Two Course Menu Round, the unaproned contestants had to make Floating Islands for Gregg and John because they seemingly can’t decide if this should be a Skills Test or an Invention Test. They were at least given full rein to jazz up their custards. This did inventiably result mostly in pouring as much booze as you possibly could into it, a tried and tested method.

Enya was particularly disappointed with the turn of events because she doesn’t believe in asking for the dessert menu

I usually roll my eyes a little bit at the “not a dessert person” contestants on here because most of the time I think it’s an excuse to be bad at making shortcrust pastry. However, I think we can diagnose Enya as acutely dessert divergent when she started handling the meringue like she was making a slime ASMR for TikTok

just when you start thinking MasterChef is getting a bit tired and played out because you think you’ve seen everything over the last 20 years, along comes a domino effect of homespun emulsified turkey sausages and fistfuls of meringue. Apparently handling your meringue like you’re Chriss Witty giving a hand-washing demonstration results in a truly unique texture

ok I might be a little impressed. I didn’t know Meringue could ever be described as “stringy” and not even John could really believe what he was saying.

She wasn’t the only one to struggle with the meringue process, as is evidenced by the Birmingham area now experiencing a severe egg shortage as the studio swiftly became a mass meringue grave site

with Charlie creating a perfect diorama of the situation by trying to cram as much boiled meringue into the smallest possible saucepan he could find

a little unsurprisingly this resulted in a meringue that wasn’t entirely cooked. John and Gregg were just happy to taste a coherent dish as he’d flavoured the custard with frangelico and topped it with hazelnuts (and just about everything else he could get his hands on before Gregg had to pull him away from the bowl)

unfortunately Gregg was too late to save him from sprinkling his meringues with salt instead of sugar

I’m going to need Peter and Charlie to take DNA tests because I’m working on a theory that mixing up salt and sugar is genetic

I’m going to be the Rosalind Franklin of MasterChef.

Despite hating every single second of the challenge as he read the instructions like he was genuinely reading the terms and conditions of his broadband deal instead of blindly clicking “agree” and selling his soul to Richard Branson

Pete probably ended up with the best dish of the round?

The meringues were a little underdone but John and Gregg both still willingly ate them, but then again they did also eat Enya’s hand-rolled meringue.

Saffron forewent the boozy custard trend (Enya’s was Kahlua flavoured which in my head only adds to the horror) as she flavoured hers with Passion Fruit. A fine idea but I do think she could have maybe strained the seeds out so it looked a little less like frogspawn

mercifully the camera operators kept her custard firmly in bokeh at all times and if anything Gregg wanted more of it because her meringue was somewhat marooned

it seems a petty complaint, especially when Enya didn’t even give them enough custard to cover a flat surface

her dessert really was an Ari Aster film of a dessert – every time you watch it there’s a new weird detail you notice. The use of icing sugar is the naked people lurking in the dark.

An Unofficial Floating Island Ranking
1. Pete’s Meringue is part of the Virgin Media brand now.
2. Saffron’s Marooned Meringue
3. Charlie’s Everything And The Salt Shaker Meringues
4. ENYA by Ari Aster

Sadly we’re never going to find out what sort of a restaurant Enya was planning to open because she, along with Charlie, was going home apronless

there’s always Peter’s black market option. Just knock three times and use the secret password “Accidental Salt.”

A Two Course Race

The previous contestants serving their MasterChef Community Service were 2022 winner and Mince Pie Savant, Eddie

who was joined alongside his runner-up, Pookie who was pulling a Marge Simpson with the The Mask costume

more contestants needs to show up to these challenges looking like they’re on a picnic that they’re expecting their partner to propose to them on. Radha, the other 2022 finalist, was otherwise occupied, assumedly in her parents liquor cabinet

so they joined by Claire who I still have no memory of outside of the time she rocked up to one of these talking about how she was the first contestant to release a MasterChef textiles range and it was just a tea towel with an uncopyrightable pineapple pattern on it

it’s giving The Apprentice Pyjama Pipe Dream which in turn makes her the Girlboss of MasterChef.

One of the biggest conundrums you inevitably face if you make it this far in the competition is whether or not you go with a hot or a cold starter – on one hand the cold starter is easier, on the other…

or, you could just make like Saffron and have your salad and kind of half-heartedly push it around the plate while wishing you’d order the Gambas Pil Pil too

the track 7 of Katy Perry’s 2008 sophomore album “One of the Boys” of a starter was a Crab Parcel wrapped in smoked salmon served alongside pea and wasabi puree, a beetroot puree and filo parcel filled with prawns – which she did seem to realise was an absolutely unhinged group of things to put on one plate only after she’d finished listing everything off to the diners

I’m still not entirely convinced that the prawns were hot because they didn’t look like they’d seen an ounce of seasoning let alone the heat of a pan

besides the obvious issue of it being two starters on one plate the plate looking like the poster for Anatomy of a Fall

she had pulled something of a Schrodinger’s Crab as everyone saw the crab go into the parcel but nobody could taste the crab

don’t you hate it when you try to cook seafood and you accidentally make a quantum physics thought experiment instead?

Things did not get any clearer with Saffron’s main course which was at least one consistent temperature but was still a 4 culture car crash as Argentina, France, Italy and India vied for dominance like it was an Olympic fencing tournament

it does at least look very good but the whole “don’t judge a book by its cover” adage does work both ways and even Saffron didn’t look convinced when she tasted her chameleon lentils

yet another contestant becomes a cropper to their intrusive thoughts

the only positive is that she wasn’t gimcracking a turkey sausage.

Lee ended up being a little more divisive this round. One of my favourite phenomenons in this particular challenge is when the guest diners are entirely unconvinced by someone’s food while John and Gregg wax lyrical about it and nothing captured this more than Lee’s Kashmiri Masala with rice and a flatbread

Eddie and Pookie both thought it lacked the depth that makes Indian food such a favourite as well as being slightly disappointed that they were served a single slice of flatbread that looked a bit like the last sad slice of garlic bread at the Pizza Hut buffet counter

Gregg and John however had no issue with any of it, which was also the case with his onion bhaji starter

we might have to start outlawing onion bhajis unless you’re going to do something interesting with them. This was pretty standard: bhaji, raita, tamarind chutney. But in the words of RuPaul “You ain’t gotta reinvent the wheel [unless we can use it as a reason to eliminate you]”

but it was at least a very coherent dish and cooked extremely well, it just once again lacked the spice that (mostly Eddie) was expecting.

Shreya was also going with an Indian menu, starting off with the street food favourite: Katori Chaat, a pastry basket filled with chickpeas, chutney and potato. The last element of which was causing her a little trouble and wasn’t cooking in time so she had to give it an emergency buzz in the microwave

despite this having the potential of going The Way of Jerome, it worked out really well for her

and her chaat was probably the best dish of the round with everyone loving it, especially Claire

I’m not sure the nuked potatoes were feeling the love but we get the sentiment.

Shreya’s main course of Dal Makhani wasn’t quite as well received because it’s difficult to make a bowl of lentils and beans feel like something truly special

flavour wise it was great but it’s the old Risotto Conundrum – there’s just no real way of making it look pretty and sometimes you’ve just gotta let your bowl of comforting slop (tone indicator: positive) speak for itself and I personally admire her for not unnecessarily trussing it up into something that the dish just isn’t.

Pete was starting his menu off with a Vietnamese main course of Thit Kho which encountered the same problem that many a braised pork belly dish does in that despite the pressure cooker putting in one hell of a performance

the meat just wasn’t cooked quite enough so ended up being tough

but everyone very much enjoyed his balancing of the sweet, sour and spicy flavours.

His dessert was going in a more distinctly British direction as he made a Sticky Toffee Pudding that he was putting a twist on with his miso caramel

I’m not entirely sure we can still call miso caramel “a twist” when even the BBC Good Food magazine has a Miso Sticky Toffee Pudding that they roll out for every November issue. But a favourite is still a favourite and the pudding was a crowd pleaser. The only slight issue was that his Hazelnut Ice Cream was more of a Hazelnut Sorbet and there can’t be much in the world more disappointing than expecting ice cream and getting what ends up essentially being nuts in water. Call be a non-believer but I’m still convinced that only fruit should ever be turned into a sorbet.

A Two Course Menu Ranking
1. We Need to Chaat
2. Miso in Caramel Sauce? Groundbreaking.
3. LET SLOP BE SLOP
4. Lee’s Standard Bhaji Protol
5. Lee’s Divisive Curry
6. The Littlest Pressure Cooker That Tried
7. Saffron’s 4 Culture Car Crash
8. Saffron’s Seafood Thought Experiment

Saffron was a goner the moment Gregg assumed the pose of an ancient Greek philosopher when she started listing off her main course components

there truly was no suspense in this decision, the other three all had at least 1 very good dish whereas Saffron kind of just had 5 mediocre dishes spread across just two plates

see you on Interior Design Masters?