Welcome to MasterChef: Unfiltered.

Are you my mummy?

Lord of the Hob Rings: Return of the (ba)King

I’m sad we aren’t getting contestants from further back than 2019 but I imagine anyone from more than 5 years ago has probably worked hard on putting the trauma behind them and has blocked the MasterChef number that keeps dialling them. Most of this lot have spent the last year or so plotting vengeance

Ajay from 2019 was our furthest throwback and was returning on the grounds that he had just started a promising career before Covid came along and took everything from him

I think he’s mostly upset by the fact he hasn’t got us all calling him “Mummy” yet

One of my flatmates once accidentally called my “Mum” and it was the most gender euphoria I have ever felt.

Ajay was starting his menu with the always risky Rack of Lamb and given that Gregg has been burnt one too many times by raw lamb, he was keeping an eagle-eye on Ajay just to make sure he was actually going to fully cook it

who knew all it would take for someone to properly cook lamb was to have the person who you were feeding breathing down your neck the entire time

and God bless John Torode who is still trying to convince us that he has any sort of spice tolerance as he lost a game of hide and seek with Ajay’s liberal use of chillies

Ajay’s dessert, while incredibly interesting, wasn’t quite so positively received purely on the grounds that the skins of his wontons were a little two hard and chewy

it’s one of those MasterChef dishes that I would really, really love to try though. The carrot and beetroot halwa filling with the white chocolate mousse sounds really interesting.

Tigi was back from two years ago and determined to stop his friends bullying him with broccoli after he biffed his chances with a dish that was 90% butter, 7% raw broccoli and 3% anxiety

and also to you know, add some positive memories to put behind his MasterChef branding tattoo

his grand solution to his broccoli trauma being… to not cook broccoli at all

it was a stellar dish and certainly a vast improvement on Britain’s first indoor butter swimming pool.

Tigi’s Key Lime Cheesecake did not go to plan as the whole thing quite literally crumbled in his hands

I can only imagine that in a sort of pastry equivalent to the movie It Follows, Cliodhna had passed on the self-destructive pastry curse that ruined her chances last year

and thus Tigi’s The Yips of a cheesecake crash landed onto the plate looking like it had been plated up in the dark during a particularly bad earthquake

I can understand what happened to the cheesecake but the sloppiness of how he’d poured the curd into his little jug really tips it over the edge into comically awfully presented little village pub territory.

Tigi wasn’t the only one with a disaster of a dessert as Linda, only upon having finished baking her cake, realised she hadn’t put the butter in it

to be fair to her, that is an easier mistake to make than Maggie on Bake Off forgetting to put flour into her puddings

Neva4get.

The lack of butter did however mean that everyone could really taste the orange blossom which was the main issue they had with the dish last year, not that I think that was really lifting Linda’s spirits

on the bright side, John really loved the *checks notes* cream cheese that I’m not sure she did anything to? I just enjoyed that the dish looked like someone had tried to make the leftover Haribo and sheet cake from their child’s birthday party look gourmet

her main course wasn’t without issues either with John and Gregg thinking that with both a puree and a veloute the dish was wet enough to have provided a sustainable ecosystem for her sea bass to be re-released into

if she’d just added a potato she could have called it fish and chips.

Cliodhna’s dessert went better and because her entire storyline was that she’d left a snail trail of chocolate around the MasterChef kitchen last time she was here

we of course had to be treated to a series of intense close-ups and even more intense music as she plated up her tarts like she was Meredith Grey wrist-deep in a man’s stomach holding a bomb

luckily for her there was no pink misting and we got a lovely little Chocolate, Cherry and Pistachio tart that did look like something that Fanny Cradock would serve as part of a 12 course festive menu that started with individual partridge pithiviers and at some point required you to craft 7 choux swans filled with goose liver pate

it does admittedly sound divine, or at least it did until Gregg started comparing it to Hubba Bubba

tone indicator: complimentary????

Cliodhna’s dessert may have wowed the judges but the lack of a sauce with her Smoked Salmon and Spinach Ravioli left a little to be desired

but that’s to be expected when you spend most of your time baking a tart like you’re the understudy for a Vicky McClure led police drama.

Lastly we have Natasha from 2020 whose MasterChef journey was undone that time she stapled a lump of venison and a mango together like Hugo Simpson making a pigeon-rat

I can only assume she was on a personal quest to make a worse canape than pineapple and cheese skewers. This time she was on a mission to reinvent Surf and Turf, which did involve slightly more than just calling it Turf and Surf

for her Turf she was using Veal and her surf was a paprika grilled prawn that she was serving on Gnudi, a sort of funnier sounding gnocchi made with ricotta instead of potato

it is a bit of an inscrutable beige melange that the camera operators definitely didn’t know which angle to shoot it from but by all means it tasted great. The only slight downsides was that her prawn wasn’t evenly cooked with the thicker end needing just a touch longer and her gnudi were overly firm.

Last year you couldn’t breathe for someone declaring they were making a MILF, OI! However, I think Natasha’s Coffee and Coconut Mille Feuille was the inaugural one of the series

and it’s a good looking dessert and certainly more ordinary looking than the French Patisserie Fairground she’d made last time

it’s extremely Great British Menu does The Magic Roundabout, except it probably would be served upon a spring-loaded life-sized model of Zebedee and include a realistic Doogle moulded chocolate truffle filled with milk ganache from a rare breed cow named Ermintrude because nothing about that show is ever allowed to be subtle. I wish I could recap it but it’s far too repetitive. Maybe I’ll cover the always eventful Scotland Heat where nobody can behave normally for more than 5 seconds.

For Truck’s Sake

Given that we’re 20 series in and they have to come up with 20-odd challenge ideas every, it’s no surprise we get a few repeats but truly the Food Truck Challenge is the Andi Peters of MasterChef Challenges – it somehow always gets invited back. Where’s my Dish Inspired By Your Favourite 18th Century French Theologian Challenge? Bouillabaisse isn’t the only French classic, y’know!

In order to judge the dishes we had another special guest, this time being the 2019 MasterChef: The Professionals champion: Stu Beeley

I cannot say I remember him because the Pre-Peroxide Era is but a distant blur to me

and the BBC has it all hidden in the depths of their nefarious archives.

While most of the contestants went for your standard street foods, Ajay had come into this competition determined to cook dishes that averaged £25 per portion and nothing was going to stop him. His food truck dish being a pan-seared scallop with corn puree, seafood pakoras and a crab rasam as an ode to his affinity with the inherent eroticism of the unknowable depths of the ocean

Ajay may be Mummy, but the ocean will always be Mother.

Ajay’s dish was very well received by the judges but it was undeniable that it was in absolutely no way a food truck dish

if you’re having to serve it in more containers than anyone has hands, it’s probably not street food. Also, I’m going to say pureed anything immediately disqualifies you as street food, that’s a food reserved only for restaurants with lighting that’s specifically designed to inhibit social media posting.

Ajay wasn’t the only one to fall foul of Food Truck specifications as Gregg pretended to scoff at the notion of a dessert-based food truck

the entire fleet of Mr. Whippy Ice Cream men will meet you on the field of battle, Mr. Wallace. The whole British food truck industry is built upon their backs, don’t you dare pretend to be mystified by someone serving sweets out the back of a van

NO NOT LIKE THAT

REALLY NOT LIKE THAT!

For her dessert Linda was Frankensteining together a cheesecake and a brownie in a process that she seemed to be improvising as she went along

the end result being less of a dessert worthy of a high profile food truck and more something along the lines of a pastry birthed from an inner-city market cafe called Sandra’s Pantry

and you know Linda is going to be pitching her FrankenPuds as next year’s modesty buns

Linda becoming a minor local celebrity is everything I want for her. Next stop, MAYOR!

Cliodhna had gone for the most street food-y option of the bunch with her tacos. But they weren’t just any taco, they were BarbieCore Tacos because this was filmed a year ago and she didn’t know we’d have all moved onto TennisCore

fingers crossed that Anya Taylor Joy manages to make PostApocalypticNightAtTheOperaCore a thing because I cannot be dealing with everyone thinking wearing all white outfits is a personality for much longer (DAMN YOU ZENDAYA)

I must admit I had a visceral reaction to the phrase “pink taco” because it sounds like a euphemism used by men who use Reddit too much. But it’s a toss up as to whether it’s better or worse than “taco gravy”

naming conventions aside, it was a very good dish and it was love at first bite for everyone, especially Stu who will now only ever be seeing the world through taco gravy coloured glasses

so that’s Cliodhna’s final main course sorted then. The only thing that might have really pushed her taco over the edge was if she’d provided them with the margarita she’d promised in her fantasy version

Natasha however was going for the When In Doubt, BRIBERY! option with a rum punch that quite literally punched the living daylights out of John

and Stu certainly wasn’t driving home that night

quite why it was served in the little bottle that everyone uses for their “Drink Me” cocktails at an Alice in Wonderland themed bridal shower, I don’t know, it didn’t really to go with the look of the rest of her Honey and Chilli Chicken Skewer dish

but the judges all loved it nonetheless, even if they were seeing it through a fog of rum.

Lastly we have Tigi who had so much success with his Gambian food in his previous series that he was going back to his roots with his Benachin. A dish consisting of Jollof Rice, Chicken and a side of what John shadily called “what Tigi calls gravy” as though it’s not really gravy

it was a decent enough dish too – and perfectly tempered to the caucasian palate

however, because of his more gentle spicing John could definitely taste that Tigi burnt his pot and not because he had seen it happen 15 minutes beforehand

quick, lie and say it was smoked rice!

THEY’RE ONTO US, RUN!

A Food Truck Dish Ranking:
1. Cliodhna’s BarbieCore Taco
2. Natasha’s Rumbased Bribery
3. Ajay’s Aspirational Upper Class Food Limousine
4. Tigi Remains Broccoli Trauma-Free
5. Linda’s Modest Buns

There was definitely quite a big divide between the three best performing contestants this week (Ajay, Cliodhna and Natasha) and the two weakest: Linda and Tigi so I wasn’t that surprised to see them bowing out ahead of the quarterfinal

Tigi starting his apron-based economy <3