Whoever smelled it, dealt it.

I’ll take all the All Stars crumbs I can get.

They’re Baaaaaaaack

As a very special celebration for the 20th series, they’ve decided to give me a little bite of the All Stars series that I, and I think only I, have been clamouring for

Given that everyone present had made it to at least The Top 16 before being eliminated; we’re skipping the Basic to Brilliant Challenge and leapfrogging straight to John and Gregg ploughing their ways through 10 plates of food as everyone cooked their best 2 course menu.
Matthew however was going to make this all about redemption given he had what I’m going to say is the most iconic fall from grace in MasterChef history. Him going from series golden boy having aced his first challenge with the best ackee and saltfish John had ever tasted to serving a two course menu that looked like someone describing a dream they’d had about The National Museum of Norway needs to be studied by science

he was recooking both of the above dishes. The Main Course being his Chicken Ballotines which he was filling with a Jerk Mousse that John hoped to weaponize in the future

and to further lean into the Jamaican flavours that had everyone earmarking him as one of the series favourites last time, he was serving it with a Callaloo Foam and a Plantain Crisp

Pros: it doesn’t look like Edvard Munch working through his fears of the uterus.
Cons: none. It was perfect, it’s just the main pro was that it didn’t look ridiculous.

For his dessert he was of course remaking his Sticky Toffee Pudding, the biggest change to which was just that he wasn’t cutting it up into small chunks and making aeroplane noises as Gregg ate it like a good boy

whichever therapist is responsible for helping Matthew block out his intrusive thoughts is a godsend. I’ll tip you. I’m so excited for his return and fully think he’s in contention for the win. I have said this before.

I wish more of the contestants had leaned into cooking dishes that redeemed their biggest flops, which I suppose was what Lynsday from Pre-Blog Times was doing given that her previous panna cotta looked like Bakewell pudding roadkill

it wasn’t really a direct recreation with her Panna Cotta this time being more about how many weird woodland flavours she could cram onto a plate before her dish started to sound like something Beatrix Potter made up

I think I draw the line at Acorn Tuile, that’s some Squirrel Nutkin Nonsense

it was a very pretty dessert though and was definitely the highlight of her menu given her main course of Crocodile Ballotine (my favourite Paul Hogan movie) and Gnocchi was a little too dry

God bless Lyndsay, she came in with Crocodile and an entire motorway verge of weeds ready to be The Quirky One™ but in a room with a literal fire-breathing pig and Farokh being Farokh, she basically wilted into just being a woman with frozen chips on her head

and sadly the most exciting her menu got was her somehow turning plating up pea puree into an extreme sport

speaking of messy, messy queens… Here’s Mary from 2018, famed for plating things up like a dinner lady who runs the school cafeteria like The Gulag

she never once met a plate of food she couldn’t somehow slop into a bowl like she hated you with every fiber of being. So her main thing to work on was both empathy and aesthetics. I think we can safely say she eventually got the hang of it with her main course of Pork Cheeks looking genuinely lovely

it was almost a disaster though given that she over reduced her sauce, letting out a “NO!” of such horror I thought she may have Vegan-Charlotte’d herself

luckily the cheeks hadn’t burnt and she somehow managed to create a nice madeira sauce in the dying minutes of the challenge in the midst of Lyndsay starting a brawl with her own pea puree.

For her dessert she was also making a Panna Cotta, choosing to flavour it with Chai as a nod to her doughnuts and chai custard dish from her previous series which you guessed it, looked like prison food

I’m still not convinced on the presentation of her panna cotta this time but it did at least look daintier

I just think a panna cotta should be free to wobble all it wants. The only critique she got was that her stewed plums needed to be a touch softer but they loved the combination of the chai, rose syrup and the brittle. However, I can’t critique the presentation too much considering Farokh had basically recreated the closing scene of Carrie in chocolate and beetroot for his dessert

I am still convinced that Farokh was grown in a lab from cell scrapings of this blog, he just appeals to me far too much

personally I might have gone with Porky Sisyphus 2: Porcine Boogaloo, this of course being a reimagining of the dish that nearly gave John an aneurysm during the Top 10 Challenge

“How can I make the dish inspired by cell cycles weirder?” Farokh pondered before sitting bolt upright in his bed letting out a scream of “CORN COB-SHAPED CORNBREAD STUFFED WITH BLACK PUDDING!”

if you ever studied Farokh’s brain you’d either find the cure for cancer or discover a more potent neurotoxin than even poison dart frogs are capable of producing. It was at least a good redemption though with the only issue being Gregg would’ve liked the pork cooked a touch more. Thus Porky Sisyphus’s boulder rolls back down for the Threequel.

Lastly we have Chris who may have to be my favourite contestant of all time purely for originating this sentence

nobody could ever hope to have a better introduction. He’s also been busy since MasterChef having worked in professional kitchens and causing chaos in the Tesco bread aisle

SIGN MY BAPS!

His menu started with a main course of Tuna Tataki which got one extra Ta for good measure

get ready for another Ariadne Lore Drop: in junior school I had to learn Shona, the native language of Zimbabwe, and the word for motorbike is “mudhudhudhu”

and nobody ever knew when to stop dhudhu-ing – the classroom would just sound like an acapella bike rally. Luckily, Chris was better at cooking tuna than I was at learning languages

and Chris had also done a better job of incorporating textures with his tempura shiso leaves and deep-fried noodles.

For his dessert Chris was making a Tiramisu and you’d think using Limoncello was the novelty addition. No, Aztec Herb was there to further rain on Lyndsay’s woodruff parade

foraging isn’t a competition but she definitely lost.
I was a little worried about this dish purely because John had taken one whiff of the Aztec Herb and proclaimed it as smelling like feet and farts

and if you want to know more about Aztec Herb, wikipedia tells me it was “introduced to the Spanish when they arrived” which is the nicest way they could have worded the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire. ANYWAY, Tiramisu

once you get over the fact it looks slightly like an environmental hazard or a secluded island grotto that a druid lives on in the middle of a swamp haunted by ghasts that scared you more than they probably should’ve done when you were a teenager

it was actually a really nice dessert that John sounded slightly disappointed didn’t taste of feet and in the words of Jake Blennings: I shall not kink-shame, I shall just kink-enquire-“Why?”

A Two Course Menu Ranking:
1. Matthew’s Redemptive Jerk
2. Mary by the skin of her cheeks
3. Eat Your Pudding Like a Big Boy
4. Farokh’s Kafka Dream
5. Tuna Tatatatatatatataki
6. Chris’s Feet and Farts Tiramisu
7. Lyndsay’s Squirrel Nutkin Nonsense
8. Mary’s Bowl of Things
9. Farokh’s Beetroot Jumpscare
10. Crocodile Flop

French Classics

For the last challenge before they decided which two of the returning contestants would be eliminated they were having to reimagine a classic dish. The twist being that they were going to be judged by a Super Secret Guest famed for their career in French Cuisine

and after everyone’s heads swam through their rolodex of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons graduates – Michael Caines? Sat Bains? Marco Pierre White? Raymond Blanc himself? (WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE!) In through the door came… Matthew Ryle

he’s from the 2018 series of MasterChef: The Professionals which I have only memorialised as a ranking list of the chefs.

Farokh did not need telling twice to take something normal and reconstitute it into a sort of culinary dramaturgy commenting on the futility of man

His classic of choice being a Tartiflette which he was deconstructing through the medium of a thesaurus

your words might confuse Gregg, fancy man

but it’ll take more than that to get passed me

it was not a dish that managed to capture the judges with all of them saying that the flavours just didn’t manage to come together cohesively. I’m not sure MasterChef is a place that Farokh will ever truly shine. I would however pay premium prices for a front row seat to watch him do a live presentation, sort of like a Teppanyaki situation but with a lot more panic and risk to human life

You know what they say, when one fire spitting supreme dies another must rise

everyone else answering the question of “Why MasterChef?” with pleasantries about finally doing something for themself or because it was the final wish of their granddad while Chris is like “I cannot afford any more fluid build-up in my lungs, PLEASE GREGG SAVE ME.” <3 The salvation of his respiratory system resting in the hands of a liver pate profiterole that looked a bit like the USS Enterprise fleeing from some sort of giant space octopus

but before you write that eulogy for Chris’s lung, the dish went down better than you think that sentence would allow! Sure the pate was grainy and his choux bun looked like it could house an entire Star Fleet but with the right champagne to nonsense ratio it would’ve been amazing

not even all the champagne in France was going to convince Matthew Ryle of Lyndsay’s roast pork dish

I’m just not sure if there’s anything very reinterpreted about it, it’s sort of just roast pork with miso and jazz hands

sorry, it was just roast pork with jazz hands

sorry, it was just roast pork with left jazz hand.

Of course because it was a reimagining of a classic, someone had to put forward their own thesis on the nature of fish and chips

not to get all PDO about it but I am going to need there to be more specifications on what counts as Fish and Chips than it being just a piece of fish and potatoes on a plate with a pea puree

is it reinventing it if 100 other contestants have done it before you? Don’t answer that, Edison. The ethics of 19th century inventors aside, everyone very much enjoyed Matthew’s pan-fried cod and fondant potatoes for what it was: pan-fried cod and fondant potatoes.

Mary had made things difficult for herself because she’d gone for the French classic to end all French classics: Boeuf Bourguignon. You’d think the hardest part was the fact she was having to break out the pressure cooker again

but it was actually the fact she’d chosen the classic French spelling and with every attempt to pronounce it sounded like she was having more and more balls of cotton wool shoved in her mouth until it was just a completely post-verbal stew

and it probably says a lot about the chaos that was happening in the room that the bowl of stew was the prettiest plate of food this round.

A Reimagined Classic Dish Ranking:
1. Mary’s Post-verbal Stew
2. Fish and Chips? For spring? Groundbreaking.
3. Deep Space Profiterole
4. Farokh’s One Man Show
5. The Ever Depleting Concept of Lyndsay’s Roast Dinner

Mary and Matthew were through to the next round with ease. The other three all had certain aspects of their dishes that the judges nitpicked over. This did mean I would of course be having to say goodbye to one of My Boys™ as two would be leaving. I do agree with the decision to keep Chris – he was definitely the strongest of the three and so I shall wait patiently like a whaler’s wife for Farokh to eventually produce his One Man Travelling Culinary Show

and Lyndsay was here too

she came. She croc’d. She left.