Sir, what are you doing with the corn cob?

How hard is it to serve soup with croutons?

I apologise that I’m behind on the MasterChef recaps, this was happening

We had all you can eat tapas, a few too many cocktails and gelato in the gutter.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Despite the conceit of this entire challenge being to focus on basic ingredients, there’s always someone who ends up making something that hinges more on the luxurious ingredients surrounding it. And it’s ALWAYS a risotto because you can’t really argue that the rice isn’t the main component because, despite this show spending about 10 years trying to convince us that finely diced potato cubes can be a risotto, a Risotto is nothing without the Rice

this is Floor Fitter Peter’s Porcini Mushroom and Wood Pigeon Risotto because he’s really aiming for that Forager, Man Of The Countryside narrative as The Champion of Game (the subtitlers were fighting for their lives against regional accents – in the next episode they thought Nick saying “Mille Feuille” was Nick saying “A meal for you”…)

sadly(?) Peter’s quest for aspirational tweed wasn’t entirely successful as he’d overcooked the pigeon.

While Peter tried to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall all over the place without the levels or license to do so, Gabriel is just a man who downloaded the Sunday Brunch expansion pack – he talks in exactly the same manner as Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy thoroughly overselling the concept of corn on the cob

Corn was his basic ingredient and with it he was making a Bavette Steak Taco with a side of Corn Ribs – and if that sounds like it came off the depressive Noom menu, wait until you see the singular sliver of beef and the complete lack of a sauce outside of guacamole on the taco

I’m just sceptical of anyone that’s cooking is comparable with the Under 600 Calories Menu at Zizzi.

Gabriel wasn’t the only one on rationing duty as Mikael served his Sweet Potato Soup with two (2) prawns and a singular slowly sinking Crostini

I don’t mind it only being a prawn duo so much as I do mind the singular crostini – anyone who says they ordered the soup for the soup and not the bread is a filthy liar! He was at least somewhat redeemed by his soup being a good texture but it’s really hard to justify putting someone through on the grounds of an adequately textured soup when it’s up against Fay who I get the feeling has been practicing her MasterChef Champion acceptance speech in the mirror for the last 29 years as she makes perfect Tunisian fusion food

and a Mushroom Wellington cooked by Nick who might be The Perfect Man™

he’s big and he’s kind – of course I called him my favourite, AND YES, I do know how this ends for him because I. NEVER. LEARN. But for now, we enjoy his Mushroom Wellington

AND NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS AFTER THIS.

And lastly we have the first dessert being cooked for this particular challenge this year, with Emily using Bread as her basic ingredient and rather obviously turning it into a Bread and Butter Pudding which she was serving with a Whiskey Caramel and Brown Bread Ice Cream. The conundrum with a Bread and Butter Pudding is how you present it, and she probably should’ve made them in individual bowls rather than cutting out a chunk of it and serving it on a slate amongst a collection over things slowly oozing off the slate

also her Brown Bread Ice Cream might be one of the most deeply disconcerting bowls of an ambiguous state of matter I’ve ever seen

and her caramel hadn’t been browned enough so it had a sort of exoplasmic transparency to it

somebody call the Ghostbusters, we’ve got a caramel haunting in downtown Birmingham!

A Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. Tonight The Role of Fay Shall Be Played By Anne Hathaway
2. There’s Not Mushroom Left
3. Mikael’s Sinking Chances
4. Peter’s Fumbled Game
5. Gabriel’s WeightWatchers Taco
6. Emily’s haunted Bread and Butter Pudding

With Nick and Fay both knocking this out of the park, it was a very easy decision to just hand them the two available aprons

AND NICK WAS HAPPY FOREVER.

An Unboxing Haul

This episode’s Mystery Box ingredients were Parsnips, strawberries and a ramekin of chicken livers which will shortly be revealed to not be the weirdest thing lurking in a ramekin

sadly nobody gave into the devil on their shoulder whispering “Chicken liver paté goes on toast. Strawberry Jam goes on toast. It’s perfect. Do iiiiiit!” However, Mikael did promptly blackout and only came back to consciousness halfway through having whatever brain parasite was piloting his body making a souffle

he was in the trenches by this point and knew his chances were as deflated as the souffle he was about to serve

it wasn’t even really a souffle, it was more of a compressed omelette cylinder

it wasn’t even strawberry flavoured! He could have pulled out of this egg-based nose dive at any point! If he’d started to make a cheesecake halfway through, it couldn’t have looked much worse than Gabriel’s that looked like it had been mauled by a bear and left to die in the Canadian wilderness

you can’t really go wrong with a cheesecake even if it looks like that. Gabriel does also get a few bonus points for not being tempted to deconstruct and scatter its various components across a plate like the limbs of William Wallace. However, I am still deeply suspicious of the Strawberry Syrup that looked like someone was trying to serve you Calpol as an after dinner mint

I think you’re going to need something a little stronger for the raw liver that Emily had served up

nothing in this world could tempt me to cook Chicken Livers on this show – they are too much of a liability. I guess we have no choice but to embrace matricide now

high risk, high reward the livers be.

Lastly we have Peter who was hoping that this time an adequately textured soup would be enough to get through with

it wasn’t even an adequately textured soup, it was deemed a puree as we continue to wrestle with the semantics of liquidised vegetables. More egregiously, it somehow had less crostinis than Mikael’s soup – crostinis are not a competition but you are losing because I will not accept pistachio nuts in favour of bread. However, Peter was benefitted by being up against Emily’s kids baying for her blood and an omelette in a ramekin. I wouldn’t say it’s a win, so much as it a Consolatory Puree.

A Mystery Box Dish Ranking:
1. Gabriel’s Cheesecake Bear Attack
2. Peter’s Soup Semantics
3. Emily’s Last Meal
4. The Increasingly Less Rare Cup a Omelette

I was REALLY rooting for Mikael but that cup’a’omelette was unforgivable leaving the judges to decide if Peter confusing a puree and soup was more or less forgivable than Emily serving raw liver. In the end, it was Emily joining Mikael in a tandem booting

she came, she buttered bread like an absolute maniac

and she left.

A Two Course Race

Obviously, with only 75 minutes this challenge is always about time management and usually to hack the system the contestants will opt for a tartar starter. Or, in the case of Gabriel, even more egregiously: a salad in which the only vaguely technical elements are grilling peaches and making a crisp bread

the rest of it is just leaves and Stracciatella cheese! Which is delicious but there’s not much anyone could critique. Or at least you’d think, while special guest diners Thomas Frake and Nisha Parmar struggled to say anything beyond “This Stracciatella de Bufala is very well scooped!” and “The peaches have indeed been grilled” – Steven Wallis has never met a plate of food he couldn’t write a Shakespearean sonnet about

you see, when we analyse the works of Steven Wallis we can see that the peaches were actually metaphorical tits the whole time. I do love it when he shows up, because they get to play this shot of him with Angels by Robbie Williams playing in the background as he’s crowned the winner of his series and it’s beautifully absurdist television

I am 95% sure that there is a series of MasterChef where the winner was announced to How To Save A Life by The Fray.

Making a salad had at least manage to buy Gabriel the time to make his own pasta for his main course of Tagliatelle in a Broccoli and Pea Pesto topped with three (3) guanciale lardons as I continue to suspect he can recant the Ask Italian Under 500 Calories section of the menu by memory

it might be the world’s smallest bowl of Pasta and for that I believe Gabriel needs to be jailed until he learns how to properly portion. The bigger fault for the judges was the girth of his pasta. And really, Gabriel probably should’ve gone home but I think Peter sealed his own fate when he served an Apple Crumble Sinkhole

which was doing nothing to save him from the resucitationable venison he’d sent out before that in his tableau of an unkilling of a sacred deer

this may well be Peter’s villain origin story and the moment he turns against the countryside. BULLDOZE THE GREENBELT AND BUILD A PREMIER INN!

Fay and Nick continued to just merrily swan their ways through the competition though – Fay’s menu in particular sounded incredibly interesting. I just hope she hasn’t done the classic thing of using a dish worthy of the final too early with her Tunisian Mackerel and Chinese Cod main course

there’s a reason this dish has featured in all of the promo material for the show, it’s stunning and went down an absolute storm with the diners. I would like access to all the uncut footage of Steven Wallis because all they showed of his critique was him saying it’s one of the best dishes he’s ever had on MasterChef with this shooketh look in his eyes

and I refuse to believe there isn’t 15 minutes of him trying to rhyme “mackerel” with “falderal” but MY GOD was he on fire when it came to Fay’s dessert of an Orange and Almond Cake in a Cardamom and Star Anise Custard

oh I love to hate him because I fear I am him.

Lastly we have Nick who was starting with what was being called a Popcorn Chowder

but by the time it came to being served everyone had given up on the pretence and it was just being called what it was: A Sweetcorn Chowder served with bits of Paprika Popcorn

the whole popcorn trend does feel very dated now – it was *such* a thing on Great British Menu about 5 or 7 years ago. But it is a very pretty looking plate of food and certainly one of the strongest for this particular round. His Pork Tenderloin main course didn’t quite compare

the cooking of the pork was hit or miss amongst the diners and the surrounding veg was all a little bit underdone and it could’ve done with something green on the plate to add a little vibrancy.

A Two Course Menu Dish Ranking:
1. I’m at the Tunisian Mackerel. I’m at the Chinese Cod. I’m at the combination Tunisian Mackerel and Chinese Cod.
2. Portrait of a Citrus on Fire (2025, Fay off of MasterChef)
3. Nick’s Cinema Floor Chowder
4. Nick’s Middle of the Road Pork
5. Gabriel’s Pasta Rationing
6. Why is Bring Me To Life by Evanescence Playing?
7. I don’t care how voluptuous your salad is, it’s a salad.
8. Peter’s Crumble Subsidence

With the three others all at least having 1 dish that Steven Wallis had managed to produce a flowery bon mot about, it was very much curtains for Peter

he’s going to blow up the greenbelt!