You cannot take her anywhere.

I went to Singapore and all I got were these two really cool knives.

Singapore Things

As ever, Finals Week starts with the reward of jetting the finalists off to a foreign country in order to speedrun cultural integration and run an 85% risk of starting an international incident. I don’t think Turkey has forgiven us for last year yet

look, it wasn’t Omar’s fault they made you sit outside in the Turkish winter only to be served burnt chicken.

This year’s destination was Singapore, a trip that immediately brought out the license fee sceptics who will never be happy unless all of their money is being used to fund Michael Portillo riding novelty steam trains while wearing trousers in shades I didn’t even know they made trousers in. Also, nobody tell them that the 4 plane tickets and 2 star accomodation for a week long stay in Singapore is probably one of the cheapest aspects of the show’s production.

For their first Singaporean challenge, the finalists were going to be cooking iconic street food dishes at Chong Pang Market under the guidance of MasterChef Singapore judge Damian D’Silva

the main judges of this round being the usual suspects of discerning older locals who wouldn’t hesitate to tell you your broth had brought shame upon your family and a younger crowd to mitigate that emotional damage

the finalists were putting together a menu of 6 items with each team of 2 being responsible for 3 courses each. Or if you’re Chris and Abi, one of you would end up doing two dishes while the other might do about 2 thirds of another

the slack being picked up by Damian himself

Abi had absolutely taken 1 step off the plane, felt herself sweat for the first time in her life and immediately switched herself onto energy saving mode

except for when she got to slap chicken with a big knife, that was her one treat

ABI SMASH!
It’s Chris in the background wishing he had a chicken to smash for me, all he got to do to work out his building frustration was set crabs on fire

what is brand can never die

Abi’s fried chicken did end up having to be delayed because the chicken wasn’t cooked in time as she was stuck in a perpetual cycle of making a marinade

my favourite part of this sisyphean ordeal being that, much like a parent knowing you didn’t clean your room, Damian took one look at Abi’s marinade from across the market and knew she hadn’t put the salt in it and the fact the whole thing was edited like it was a scene from The Office was the cherry on top

and thus completes Abi’s spiritual transition into becoming Kelly Kapoor.

So while Abi silently prayed that her chicken would eventually cook so she could ABI SMASH! to her heart’s content, Team ChrAbi served up their Prawn and Noodle Soup

it was a dish of two very different viewpoints – the locals begrudgingly ate the insipid broth that tasted a bit like it was made from the water used to wash a broth pot

while John marveled at how they’d learned how to make a really great Miscellaneous Asian-It’s-Not-Like-We’re-In-Singapore-Or-Anything Broth

there’s always a bright side to your trauma, Abi.

Abi did eventually get to serve her ABI SMASH! Chicken and while the actual chicken was deemed succulent, flavoursome and adequately smashed by this week’s Incidental Character Boyfriend

the rice and the accompanying spicy sauce had a distinct flavour of Caucasian panic

Chris’s conglomeration of dismembered crabs that had been sent to Hell and back were more than going to make up for any of the chilli Abi was lacking

this is why you don’t wish on a monkey’s paw because that way you end up with a plate of food at is 20% crab and 80% Damian D’Silva just sayig “Yes” when asked how much chillies you should put in the sauce

it’s no wonder that the only critiques from John and Gregg were a barely audible “oh, yeah” from John like he was the KoolAid Man doing a shy burp

and Gregg desperately trying not to put his fingers too close to his face because every part of him was burning

those are two men VERY aware of what tomorrow’s consequences are going to be.

It wasn’t smooth sailing for Brin and Louise who were dealing with two of Singapore’s most iconic dishes. Brin being in charge of the Hainanese Chicken and Rice which is Singapore’s national a dish, a fact that always surprises me considering it looks a bit like your gym rat friend’s bulking meal

I’m not throwing stones in beige houses, I am aware of what British food looks like.
The locals were at least all very complimentary over Brin’s effort, admiring how much flavour he’d managed to get into his chicken. I wasn’t too surprised given that we were privy to the footage of him steeping said whole chickens in his broth for as long as the average Yorkshire builder steeps a teabag

nothing tickles me quite as much as a whole, unbutchered chicken just bobbing around in a broth like a Looney Tunes character in a cartoon that I would say aged like milk but let’s be honest, it was bad at the time too

Bugs Bunny walked so E-girls selling their bathwater could run.

Brin and Louise also had to contend with making pork satay, a dish so famous there’s a whole street named after it in Singapore

in South Yorkshire we just have Goosebutt Street

I would be interested to watch a non-British series of MasterChef coming on a fieldtrip here, I just wanna know how they gas it up.

Brin’s satay efforts did almost go up in smoke as he took his eyes of the pan for a little bit too long

luckily only the bottom had started to catch so it wasn’t a complete disaster, this would however only be the start of Brin’s journey through having a No Good, Very Bad Time in Singapore. But for now, perfectly serviceable if slightly too chewy pork satay skewers it was

while Brin got used to having to do everything by hand and futilely yelling about blenders into the void of Chong Pang Market

Louise was having to gear up for an episode of high octane wokery (that’s WOK-ERR-REE not WOAH-CUR-REE) on the Turbo Wok which sounds like a questionably themed Alton Towers ride

the main obstacle to the thrill-seeking wok was trying to not let the noodles stick to the extremely hot wok by continually stirring them but not vigorously enough to mush the whole thing together

and for a first time, everyone was pretty pleased with the resulting Char Kway Teow

Louise however may choose to never look at another wok in her life.

Lee It To Me

For the second stage of their Singaporean Work Experience Adventure, the finalists were cooking at Pangium, under the supervision of restaurant owner Malcolm Lee

and the constant threat of his mother’s judgement

the way she prefaced every single compliment with “for a first timer” like she’s the mother-in-law in an early 2000s romcom <3

Louise was kicking off the dinner with a prawn dumpling served in a coconut and pineapple sauce

she managed to get through the service really well, only losing 1 dumpling to the bottom of the pot

which was still 2 more losses than the Liechtenstein Army experienced in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866

nothing has filled me with more joy this week than finding out that that very fake sounding fact was actually true.

Chris was next and, as the saying goes, was jumping out of the flaming crab pile into the lobster knife pit

his crustacean induced arthritis didn’t hold him up too much and certainly didn’t impact his ability to pull off the fiddly task of knitting an omelette blanket

my favourite genre of MasterChef cinematography is contestants holding up things they’re proud of making like it’s a war trophy.

Overall, the guests were very happy with Chris’s dish, making sure to compliment both the texture of his misua and the cooking of his lobster

not that Malcolm would’ve let him overcook that lobster as he watched Chris cooking it like a hawk that had just spotted a £45 per kilo mouse in the grass

I really liked Malcolm, he was genuinely helpful and excited to teach the contestants which was a world different to last year’s Turkish professional, Fatih Tutak, who was hellbent on making Omar’s life miserable

I will never forgive him.

Brin was in charge of the penultimate dish, Nasi Ulam, a dish full of exotic and unobtainable ingredients like laksa leaves and… kaffir lime leaves?

sir, I can buy those in Sainsbury’s, it hardly requires a 5 day mini-quest to your local asian supermarket.

The Nasi Ulam is mostly a cooked rice salad with anywhere in the ballpark of 30 ingredients, as you can tell from Brin having to run to the pass looking like kitchen utensil Wolverine (one of the less useful X-men)

The big set piece of Brin’s salad was a piece of coal fired Snapper liberally doused in a chilli and ginger foam

and he got the most generous compliment of all

every single thing the diners said about these dishes could also be said to a child at their first mini-golf experience

I’m not going to say 5 year old me *didn’t* lick the golf ball just to see…

Abi was seeing out the dinner with a kofta curry in which the only thing more threatening than her use knives

was the fact she was cooking with a poisonous nut from the pangium tree that gives the restaurant its name

sadly the cogs of world domination turning in Abi’s head were immediately stopped as Malcolm told her the pangi nuts had already been neutralised, the process requiring it to be boiled and then spend 40 days and 40 nights in the earth like a leguminous Jesus.

The trickiest part of Abi’s dish turned out be wrangling the quail eggs in the most extremely specific piece of kitchen equipment I have ever seen

it didn’t help that one of the quail eggs was intent on practicing its floor routine for Paris 2024

sadly it failed to impress the Singaporean Judge

Gregg however was on hand to to rhapsodise her wagyu meatballs, which to be fair were where most of Abi’s love went – the fact she went to Singapore and her favourite part seemed to be dual wielding knives is… well, it’s extremely Abi

her final menu is just going to be a game of knifey knifey at this point.

Singapore-in‘ In The Rain

The tour of Singapore was culminating in the finalists having to put on their very own ~fancy~ dinner for a select few special guests. Thankfully they’ve learned from the mistakes of theming this around the local embassy (again, I AM SO SORRY TURKEY) with Malcolm, his wife Jessalin and Damian all reappearing as well as a few other chefs.

Chris was tasked with starting the dinner and he was keen to show off all the improv skills he’d learned in Singapore

the entire dish which consisted of smoked buttered lobster and squid ink congee sounded like it had only just come to him in a dream that night

and while I would LOVE to psychoanalyse that as part of my coursework, I dread to think what dreams of squid says about one’s id. Do you ever think about how much Freud would’ve loved hentai? Because I do.

Luckily Chris’s experiments in Singaporean improv comedy paid off with everyone absolutely loving the dish, which looked as striking and oddly threatening as Chris’s dishes usually do

I mean, part of it is the fact it’s served on a plate that reminds me of a toilet seat but that’s not Chris’s fault, those seemed to be mandated for every course. Except the dessert, which had to be paraded out in a procession of orbs like part of a ceremony in which a powerful sorcerer was about to imprison souls within them

but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Louise was next to the pass with a take on a Laksa which probably could’ve afforded to be more of a laksa than she was allowing it to be

granted she’d run out of time to plate it as she wanted, and to cook the veggies hence why they look a bit like they crawled out of the bottom of a forgotten vegetable chiller. She was very upset about it and well aware of the fact it looked a bit of a mess, but she had at least cooked the scallops perfectly. We were however on the brink of a Rendang Incident 2: Laksa Boogaloo

we’ll just call it Sparkling Coconut Soup.

Brin was next with his Pork Char Siu. It usually requires the pork to marinade and cure for 24 hours thus meaning the return of our old friends: The Pressure Cooker and Brin Burning Singaporean Street Food

luckily he had two pressure cookers going and with the second one being caught before it burnt, it just meant half portions all round

it was a very interesting sounding dish especially the Pig Trotter and Soursop Sauce. Does it sound like something GRR Martin made up to hit a word count? Yes, but the 6 pages he dedicated to describing each completely plot irrelevant meal were the best part of the Game of Thrones books! And much like the “honey glazed peacock coated in dates” lives in mine, Brin’s Char Siu shall live rent free in Damian D’Silva’s head forever more

and you can’t say that to a child at a mini golf tournament.

Abi was ending the meal with a dessert, which doesn’t really explain why she walked around the hawker market recreating the scene of Timoclea killing Alexander the Great’s captain with a lobster

perhaps all the “Please do not manhandle the crustaceans” signs were in Malay.

Abi’s dessert was instead a showcase of Singapore’s abundance of tropical fruit – the centre piece being a mango cremeux. Her first attempt at which had to be banished to the sink because she forgot to put the butter in it

thus meaning she is never going to beat the allegations that she and Cliodhna are somehow the same person

I hear if I make a joke about ripping a mask off of them like a scene from Scooby Doo I’ll be unironically accused of plagiarism by someone running a Family Guy meme account.

Despite the detour, Abi’s second batch of cremeux did still manage to set in time. The only problem is that nobody thought they were a cremeux

OK, but at least the little sorbet looked pretty if a little bit like something Krispy Kreme puts out for Spooky Season

they’ll call them ManGhoul Doughnuts.

And that’s it for the Singaporean Tourism Board’s showreel. Could it have been an email? No, but it probably could’ve been a slideshow of cute family vacation photos that I fall asleep to by the time I’ve seen the fifteenth slightly out of focus macro shot of the same butterfly

I’m glad the finalists had fun and at least nobody had to then endure an entire long haul plane flight back knowing they had been eliminated. I’m sure there’s an iteration of this show somewhere in the world where that’s happened.