Vito Coppola on MasterChef will undoubtedly be the best part of 2024.

Pair Hugs

For this week’s Pairs Challenge the teams had been divided into Mutya and Dom on one team and Vito and OJ on the other. Both teams had vegetarian dishes, Mutya and Dom were making Tofu and Mushroom kebabs (please note the silly size of the example’s tofu bricks, it’s important later)

while Vito was going to try his best to guide OJ through making Beetroot Burgers with english not being his first language

got to admit, having OJ shouting “WAIT? CHICKPEAS OR CHICKEN PIECE?” at Vito during what was an explicitly vegetarian challenge did give me the ick (context clues, babe)

I’ve been through the whole people picking apart accent quirks and it’s not fun and it’s something I wish people would stop trying to play for laughs.

OJ did end up taking control of the challenge, which John was very proud of him for. Meanwhile Dom was being critiqued for waiting to be given instructions in a challenge where only one team member had instructions and that team member was not Dom

well yes. THAT’S HOW THE CHALLENGE WORKS????? WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE? Madness.

Both Dom and Mutya were rather out of their depths – Mutya clearly not comfortable being in a leadership role (Keisha was always Sugababe No. 1) and spent a lot of the challenge running around like a headless chicken in the background of everyone else’s shots

while Dom got all hot and bothered within 3 minutes of the challenge starting and had to strip from his biblically accurate Shoreditch cardigan and into his Victorian bathing suit

and would spend the rest of the challenge looking like the most underwhelming circus strongman

although to be fair, I do think managing to skewer tenderstem broccoli is a feat worthy of the circus. Who’s doing that? And why?

Despite the flapping and the fire hazard of seemingly forgetting their chips in the deep-fat fryer for like 20 minutes – they ended up with a pair of… passable plates of food?

the issue of the bread sizes came down to the fact Dom forgot he has giant man hands and Mutya… does not

wait until the transvestigators get ahold of the Flatbread Theory, forcing everyone they know to hold their hands against a saddle of naan bread to decide what gender they really are based on the naan-binary.

The main issue John and Gregg had was the size of the tofu on their kebabs

Your Honour, I would like to present Evidence File 1.a to the jury

My clients are NOT GUILTY.

OJ and Vito also struggled to get their burgers looking the same – mostly because OJ didn’t stop to think “maybe I shouldn’t dump a whole tin of chickpea water into a burger mixture” so his mixture was squishy and falling apart in the pan as well as being burnt to such a degree even its dental records wouldn’t tell you who it was

and so his Burger did rather pale in comparison to Vito’s which you’d have to unhinge your jaw like a reticulated python to actually be able to eat AS ANY GOOD BURGER SHOULD

OJ did however have the better onion rings – but even Vito’s slightly soggy onion rings were better than whatever Dom and Mutya had done to their sweet potato fries

controversial yet brave opinion: sweet potato fries are not good.

Go Pro

For the last Professional Kitchen Challenge Dom and Mutya were being sent to Fazenda to contend with Brazilian and Argentinian cuisine under the guidance of Francisco Martinez

as well as Dom’s unnamed moustache soulmate and this week’s Incidental Character Boyfriend

while OJ and Vito were sent to Supawan (which I can only pronounce in the cadence of NUMBERWANG!) to cook Thai food with the help of Wichet Khongphoon who was definitely not being subtle about who his favourite was

Vito is now an honorary member of the Khongphoon family and will be invited over for every family dinner. OJ can clean the dishes and sleep in the broom cupboard

Wichet tried his best to praise OJ’s subpar attempts at Pad Thai but there was no hiding the disappointment in his eyes, like my PE teachers when I managed to kick a ball in a direction you could vaguely describe as being straight

OJ was also a little bit up against it because he couldn’t actually taste his dish given he’s vegetarian and was imaginably drawing the line at having his face shoved into a box of dried shrimp like Wichet was trying to get state secrets out of him

and it does undeniably help to be able to taste what you’re cooking beforehand. I would’ve also probably kicked up a fuss if I saw Vito having a great time getting to make what he called chicken ice creams (please don’t encourage Great British Menu, they will do it)

while I had to squeeze tamarind in a scene that’s one part ASMR Sensory TikTok and one part Forbidden Shock Videos of the Late 2000s

OJ Borg’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

While OJ and Vito competed to be daddy’s favourite, Dom and Mutya both did really well over at Fazenda. Mutya impressed me the most. Given how much she’d flapped and confused herself during the Pair’s Challenge, I was really impressed with how she managed to stay on top of the intricate workload of the octopus dish she was cooking

I can’t explain it but somehow the dish manages to simultaneously look like an incredibly poisonous millipede that I should not touch and also really, really delicious. It has the same vibe as the bug platter from the Hakuna Matata scene in The Lion King

you can’t tell me you don’t want to eat every single one of those bugs.

While Mutya fought tentacles, Dom was being put through kebab-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with his continued exposure to the dreaded skewers

and he too got on really well with the job – he only got asked to put less of the demi-glaze on his pork 1 time before the entire challenge had to focus purely on OJ Borg being Wichet’s disappointing pretend son for 5 minutes.

Seasons Streetings

To decide the last quarterfinalists of the series were, we of course come to the Street Food Challenge – this week’s being a phenomenal display of who could get away with doing the absolute least. Dom was playing it particularly risky by not only choosing to just make cheese toasties, but to do it on a platform that exposes his toastie making process to the nation

none of this would hold up in a court of toasted sandwich law. Immediate five years in prison without chance of parole. I reject it entirely.

He had at least decided to make a trio of sandwiches inspired by the UK, America and Korea. The first being Cheese and Pickle, the second being a Philly Cheesesteak and the last being a Cheesy Fried Chicken Sandwich

the presentation is really cute even if whatever that M is doing makes my eye twitch.

John and Gregg were more than happy to roll with the humble toasties because he had deep-fried his own chicken and cooked steak for the philly cheesesteak. A lesson Mutya could have taken, having opted to serve up one (1) Cottage Pie Jacket Potato which is just a jacket potato with mince on top of it

now, had she done that three times with different minces? She’d have been on to a total winner, apparently. Speaking of doing three things and being a total winner, here’s Vito’s Neopolitan trifecta

I would take an entire plate of that deep-fried mozzarella with the green olive tapenade, IMMEDIATELY. The teeny tiny pizza, which John and Gregg LOVED, does make me giggle though purely because it reminds me of a DIY pizza party we had as kids during which most of us made elaborate pizza dough sculptures, while one of my brother’s friends rolled his dough into a ball, put one square of ham on it and called it a day. Which is only marginally more effort than OJ Borg put into his Borg’s Balls that lived and died by how funny you thought the not-at-all-funny name was

and he was TRYING with it

India Fisher was having NONE of it. She’s a consummate professional, she’s not saying “Borg’s Balls” on national television

the balls did not go down well and he got wrecked for not putting enough effort in – a critique that Vito seemed to take harder than OJ himself

Extreme Italian Empathy.

A Street Food Dish Ranking:
1. Vito’s Deep-fried Tour of Naples
2. Toasted Sandwiches Getting Second Place Is an Indictment On The Other Two Contestants
3. It’s Literally Just A Jacket Potato
4. BALL BAGS! D’YA GET IT? LIKE TESTICLES!?

I can only assume that Mutya decided to make the average cafeteria lunch with zero additional features as an attempt to get eliminated. I ate that exact meal for 5 months while I was in a children’s mental health facility until I eventually got banned and told I had to eat other things (BOOOOOOOO!) However, she really underestimated how little OJ Borg would try, walking into that kitchen and making what was only marginally more taxing than James Buckley serving three chocolate truffles as a dessert

I’ll miss you, Vernon Kay as Superman.

And so, we move on to the final quarterfinal!