The way they didn’t give him a second take for putting the apron on without messing it up <3

I am one of the of the 6% of Britons who have a nemesis.

Basic to Brilliant

I do love it when the show deliberately pairs up contestants to be a “rivalry” – in this case forcing the EVIL Martyn to compete with the SAINTLY Michael over eggs like a pair of culinary oviraptors

I don’t think they ever intended for Martyn to be EVIIIIIL, I think I just decided he was a villain because he seems to have modelled his entire MasterChef persona after Nigel Slater (we’ll get to that “lip-smacking butterscotch sauce…) and something about it flipped a switch in my brain that forced me to root against him. HOWEVER! He did know that the singular is Raviolo and for that I shall politely golf clap for my new nemesis

this also ushers in his tendency to choose the absolute worst plates to plate up his dishes in – he’s a huge fan of these glorified dog bowls and not enough sauce.
Certain parts of Martyn’s Nefarious Raviolo were very technically accomplished, he’d pulled off the runny yolk center very well (good luck scraping it off the bottom of your horrible plate!) but his pasta was a scooch too thick. but he assures us it was never too thick at his dinner parties. (that might also be a big factor in rooting against this man.)

St. Michael was here to fight off the evil that has long plagued omelettes on MasterChef from the classic Cod Cheek Omlette of Yore to the more modern iteration of Omelette Fuckery that is the Cuppa Omelette

Michael was making Omurice, which is a very gooey omelette that you serve atop rice and puncture it allowing it to ooze over the rice – look, there’s no way to describe this like it isn’t part of a niche interest series about weird body things on Channel 5

it’s a really interesting dish and required a lot of very deft and attentive cooking which he pulled off fantastically. I guess it is true what they say

do they say that?

Martyn was neither the only one to do eggs nor the only one to do Pasta in the room as Reuben was making his own Pappardelle for his girlfriend’s favourite dish – MASSIVE RAW BALLS

a tentative 2/10 for the food. A solid 8/10 for the attempt to take Gregg out this early. Sadly Joy had pulled out of her assassination attempt by restricting herself to a single Scotch Bonnet instead of the 13 she’s once stomached

I did enjoy her holding out said Scotch Bonnet like she was fending off a vampire with a crucifix

sadly the power of god did not compel her Mango Fried Chicken to glory

it just wasn’t spicy enough so the time they’d spent coating their tongues with wax was time wasted. HOWEVER, in Joy’s defense, the Mango was meant to be the star of the dish, which by the sound of things it was, and the judges seemed to have decided everything should be super spicy based on nothing Joy actually said. I WONDER WHAT THEY BASED THAT PRECONCEPTION ON. It sounded to me like she was intended to serve a seasonal Nando’s Sauce that someone who likes to occasionally step out of their Lemon and Herb comfort zone might like to try and that’s what she did.

The last of the main courses was from Victoria who was using Cod Loin as her basic dish and I don’t know if I have to chalk up another one onto the Reinventing Fish and Chips tally chart or not

she talked about the chippies of Hull A LOT but there is noticeably no chip component (the squid ink tuile does not count) but there is a curry sauce. It’s perfectly fine, but much like the 5000 other Fish and Curry Sauces that came before it, nothing about it feels wildly original or like I can’t find this exact recipe on the BBC Good Food website.

Lastly we have Naomi who was making a pudding using Hazelnuts as her basic ingredient (IN THIS ECONOMY?). What she actually served was a NutriGrain Elevenses that she’d stolen from one of the kids in her class and trussed it up with ice cream and a chocolate sauce

YOU CAN’T FOOL ME NAOMI! Despite the worry that it would be sweet (and a potential product placement violation) the judges were very impressed with her balancing of the sweetness.

An Unofficial Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. St. Michael of Omelettes
2. Naomi’s Trussed Up Lunchbox
3. I Begrudgingly Have Got To Give It To Martyn
4. Victoria’s BBC Good Food Recipe
5. MAY THE POWER OF SPICY CHRIST COMPEL YOU!
6. Reuben’s Raw Ball Loving Girlfriend

With their dishes having both been new and surprising the judges, it was a very easy decision to give Michael and Naomi their aprons

this hugging scene was deliciously awkward. Michael is clearly not a hugger and you can just about feel the director on the side telling him to stop standing on the other side of the room with a chair between the two of them

I love him.

Year of the Box

This Mystery Box Challenge was a particularly mean one with the contestants lifting their boxes and being met with sheets of three different kinds of pastry like someone finding a unique and cruel way to serve divorce papers

and despite limiting the contestants to pastries, the judges were SOMEHOW surprised that this resulted in 4 different pies

sir, you are dressed in a hotdog costume at the scene of the hotdog vehicle crash

WHAT WERE THEY MEANT TO MAKE WITH 3 SHEETS OF PASTRY IN ONLY 45 MINUTES?

We are of course using the term “Pie” incredibly loosely because it was mostly Stews with Lids, or in the case of Victoria an entire punnet of mince hidden beneath a puff pastry cap as she continued to champion the nexus point of all beige food: Yorkshire

she did by far the most work having crammed an entire sunday lunch into just 45 minutes and even managing to just about perfectly cook a batch of fondant potatoes. Which does make Reuben’s single accompaniment to his Mushroom and Leek Pie of a stingy pile of very limp cavolo nero that looked like it had washed up with high tide look particularly meager

it may not be a very generous meal but it does pack in a whole 2 months of your daily salt allowance per portion with the amount of salt on his pie crust being visible from across the room – he didn’t blame that one on his BIG RAW BALL enjoying girlfriend.

While nobody specified that you had to (or should) use more than one pastry, this didn’t stop Martyn from grabbing his shortcrust and puff pastries to make a sort of Chicken and Mushroom Clamshell

it’s giving Carousel’s Oyster Delights

despite deserving jailtime for mixing pastries, the judges were very complimentary of Martyn’s Star-crossed Pie halves. This may have been because he did at least blind bake his shortcrust pie. Joy on the other hand was flying by the seat of her pants as she took on a more vibes-based approach to pie making

and so she just sort of punched a load of puff pastry into a ramekin

filled it with strawberries, blueberries and enough amaretto to drown her sorrows and pondered if her oven had a warp speed to take her to another dimension

sadly I don’t think even if this oven could break the land speed record that the pastry she’d pasted against the walls of her ramekin would’ve been cooked

there was still hope for her though – they did love the flavours of her filling, they could eat it without risking rapid onset kidney damage and the potential reality TV gold of denying Martyn an apron were all factors the show had to carefully consider.

A Mystery Box Dish Ranking:
1. Victoria’s Warp Speed Roast Dinner
2. Martyn’s Pie-valve
3. Reuben’s Sodium-based Terrorism
4. Joy’s Vibes-based Baking

For the sheer amount of work that she’d accomplished in the timeframe, Victoria was safe as houses and an easy choice for an apron. Despite the potential nuclear woobie face of Martyn not getting an apron having the potential to power the entirety of south London for 5 years, he did get one and so it was goodbye to Raw Balling Reuben and Joy

don’t worry, the universe was just getting started on Martyn.

A Two Course Race

The special guest diners for this round were the 2022 Finalists: Champion and Mince Pie Whisperer: Eddie Scott along with runners up Pookie Tredell and Radha Kaushal-Bolland

honestly, an all time great MasterChef final lineup, I have very fond memories of writing about that particular series.

The first to face the pass was Martyn who was being pushed ever closer to the full ascension of his villain origin story as BOTH of the dishes he was cooking were being cooked by other contestants. This whole round was a bit of a multi-dish pile-up with the only one staying safely in their own lane being Michael while the other three all swerved across 4 lanes of traffic without indicating. At least with Martyn’s Sticky Toffee Pudding with a *GRITS TEETH* Lip-smackingly Gorgeous Butterscotch Sauce there’s like a 60% chance someone else is going to do one too, it’s a risk you have to take. I cannot imagine he thought in a million years he’d be having to cook a Smoked Haddock Risotto with Victoria breathing down his neck doing the same thing but slightly weirder and better

his was just a bit dry and the toilet seat of a tuille he’d wreathed it with was by far the most flavoursome and well received part of the dish. Whereas Victoria’s Arbroath Smokie Orzotto was much more flavoursome and interesting

Martyn losing the title of Best Risotto to a risotto that isn’t even a risotto <3

The Sticky Toffee Pudding is where it becomes very clear as to why it’s so hard to warm to Martyn as a TV personality – the way he spoke about this pudding felt like he’d rehearsed this in the mirror 500 times as a lovingly framed picture of Nigel Slater watched from the night stand next to a lit candle

because he should be my idol, his Sticky Toffee Pudding was the size of a house break – the mafia could drown someone with one of these

but his approach to the competition lacked an authenticity. And it doesn’t help that he plated it up like a passive aggressive fox trying to deny a stork its dinner

I am allowed one (1) reference to this Aesopian Fable every year, take it as a sign that I like you deep down, Martyn.

Martyn’s Sticky Toffee Rival was Naomi and I think this critique probably smacked harder than his butterscotch sauce

a truly galling critique having served them a sticky toffee pudding like 20 minutes beforehand

a broken man.

Naomi and Victoria were both doing Venison for their main courses – Victoria’s Fauxsotto having had to be a starter by virtue of the fact she was serving Venison Everything, Everywhere All At Once

I could’ve done without the decorator’s brush of beetroot that feels like everyone except Victoria left behind in 2014

but it’s a stormingly good plate of food and continues to add to the theory that Victoria can somehow defy the constraints of Greenwich Mean Time – she’s her own special time zone pocket.
It wasn’t a complete loss for Naomi who also made a very modern and contemporary looking plate of food with her accompaniments of Parsnip Crisps and Puree

I just think it looks very sharp and well put together. Are we finally safe from the blight that it is plates of food that are arranged so that nothing touches one another?

And now to the peaceful waters of Michael just lovingly making omelettes

this particular instance being a Tamagoyaki, which is rolled to give it a spiralling interior which he was serving with rice and a Miso Buttered Steak

it was a real hit with everyone and I’m sure the fact it was the most unique dish of the round certainly helped quite a bit.

Michael’s dessert wasn’t quite so successful with the flavours of his Coconut Sago with fresh Mango and Pomelo being a little bit too subtle

he probably could’ve afforded to make the mango into a puree but I also think that having a fresh and subtle dessert after his very miso-heavy main course isn’t that bad an idea.

A Two Course Menu Dish Ranking:
1. Venison, Everywhere All At Once
2. The Sticky Toffee Straw That Broke Martyn’s Back
3. Slightly Less Venison All At Once
4. A Second Lovingly Made Omelette Has Hit The MasterChef Kitchen
5. Sometimes The Best Risotto Isn’t A Risotto At All
6. Knowing What A Pomelo Is Purely Because of Pokemon
7. The Adele Losing An Adele Look-alike Contest of Risottos
8. Martyn’s Sticky Toffee Cinderblock

With the universe coming together to crush him like a bug, it was unsurprising that Martyn was an absolute goner

the Nigel Slater picture lay face down on the nightstand for the following 5 nights as Martyn took time to think about what he’d done.