A new supreme rises.

This recap is Italian.

Basic to Brilliant

Well, it’s here. The final Basic to Brilliant Challenge and then hopefully it can be retired forever – I’ve managed to manifest Matt Tebbutt as host into happening

I can will this godforsaken challenge out of existence as we find ourselves staring down the barrel of two people using eggs, neither of which were really using the eggs in any way the disseminated from any other ingredient they were using. I had high hopes for Gabriel too, because he talks about eggs like that woman on Come Dine With Me who hid sausages in a trifle talked about sausages

you’re going to learn very quickly in this recap that I’ve been on a Come Dine With Me kick recently.

Gabriel unfortunately was not playing a game of Find The Hardboiled Egg with a bowl of blancmange and jelly. Instead he was making the Brazilian version of a Creme Caramel known as Pudim Flan

I am genuinely impressed that it came out so well in the time limit – a creme caramel is a temperamental beast. I don’t think it’s truly within the spirit of the Basic to Brilliant Challenge but it probably is more so than Mel using egg as his basic ingredient and only using it to make pasta

which is incredibly funny because Olivia Whomst Is Italian cut out the middle egg-man and had just brought in a bag of Fregula pasta on account of her being Italian and having nothing to prove on the pasta-making front

or at least, she’s Italian FOR NOW because her pasta was on the tooth chipping side of al dente meaning she will be taken in by the Arma dei Carabinieri for questioning

I’m genuinely shocked that the pasta wasn’t cooked purely by the heat radiating from the scowl she was giving it as she served it up

is there anything more powerful in this world than a mildly pissed off Italian woman?

With Olivia having to surrender her passport, Mel and Zee would get to play a game of musical chairs for Italian Citizenship as they had the (mostly) superiorly cooked pasta of the round. Mel opting to make a Raviolo that featured egg nowhere but for the pasta

his pasta was impossibly thin which was impressive but had come at the cost of becoming slightly waterlogged and wrinkled. The bigger problem however was that his use of chorizo (which should’ve been his basic(?) ingredient was too overpowering). What the judges were trying to say was that the raviolo should’ve had an egg yolk in the middle to showcase eggs more successfully.

The most successful pasta of the round was made by Zee, who is a jeweller and uses the handle DiamondZee on Instagram so I am unable to refer to her as anything other all caps, Shirley Bassey enunciation, DIAMOND ZEE! like the rejected name for Jill St. John’s character in Diamonds Are Forever

her basic ingredient was Mushrooms with which she was making a Mushroom and Burrata Tortellini with fried King Oyster Mushrooms, a mushrooms tuile and a liberal slathering of truffle oil that was very successful

I want to do a complete history of those leaf-shaped tuile moulds and why that particular shape become the gold standard of tuile shapes – it definitely started on Great British Menu, as most things seem to, it truly is the Nexus Point of culinary trends.

The last of the Pastaneers was Ali who was hoping to show off Tomato with his Matar Paneer Tortellini with Bloody Mary Jellies

there’s a lot of very impressive culinary processes going on with the jellies, the pasta making, the spherification and his sauce but it came at the cost of the tomato flavour which got a little bit lost along the way. However, the Bloody Mary Jellies were dubbed a stroke of genius.

Lastly we have Molly who somehow looks like all of Henry VII’s wives all at once

she was choosing to showcase Cauliflower with a big old stonking pile of cauliflower done three different ways and a hardboiled egg for good measure that does make it look a bit like Oscar the Grouch was involved in a hit and run accident

the amount of praise this plate of food is kind of wild to me because it is not a million miles removed from what I routinely cooked for myself at university. It was always delicious though so I can’t knock it. My flatmates were just relieved when I was roasting a whole cauliflower and not de-inking an octopus in the sink. At some point I have to acknowledge that I was the nightmare flatmate.

A Basic to Brilliant Dish Ranking:
1. DIAMOND ZEE’s 24 carat Mushroom Tortellini
2. Gabriel’s Flantastic Pudim
3. Molly’s Pile of Cauliflower
4. Olivia Because If I Put Her Any Lower I Fear For My Life
5. Mel’s Wrinkly Raviolo
6. Bloody Mary – The Professor Ali Remix

The first two contestants to get their aprons were DIAMOND ZEE! and Gabriel

based on effort and pay off, it probably was the right decision given that Molly’s dish wasn’t that challenging a creation.

Mystery Box Inc.

This week’s Mystery Ingredients were Bread, Bananas and Potatoes – all tied together with the theme of being the most commonly thrown away food stuffs in Britain, thus continuing Professor Ali’s dissertation on British food waste

after Francesca’s Chicken Milkshake in the previous heat, there was a real fear amongst the judges that someone would try to do something unforgivable with the bananas. Luckily for them and deeply unfortunate for us, the only contestant who bothered with the bananas was Molly who made a very good Banana Cake with them and the bread that she’d remilled (read: blitzed) back into flour

she and Olivia were the only ones to use more than 1 of the available ingredients – Olivia causing the judges great consternation as she laced her fishballs with raisins – imaginably giving John and Gregg further flashbacks all the way to 2005 when someone served them up Stir Fry stacks that consisted of Aubergine, dried apricots and raisins (AND OH MY GOD, I FORGOT ABOUT THE CARAMELISED BANANA)

luckily Olivia actually knew what she was doing and her Neopolitan Fishballs were a roaring success

she can have her Italian passport back now.

Ali and Mel both gravitated towards the potato – Ali onto a really good idea of turning it into gnocchi. Unfortunately he then had the brainwave to lace his Bechamel Sauce with chili and coriander

it’s the sort of dish that only gets made in a MasterChef Invention Test when you’re up against a rapidly ticking down 45 minutes. It’s just not a real plate of food even if there’s lots of very good process – he’d made the gnocchi beautifully and the Bechamel Sauce was well made but a conceptual disaster.

Lastly, Mel just defaulted to mashed potato which he was serving with a piece of cod wrapped in parma ham and a heritage carrot that was leaking its horrible purple heritage juice all over the potato

we need to ban purple vegetables – I have never seen a single instance of them making a dish better. However it was Mel’s sauce that drew the most ire as it was barely anything more than a pot of double cream

the mashed potato was good though so… there’s that?

A Mystery Box Dish Ranking:
1. Olivia’s Neapolitan Fishballs
2. Molly’s Reduce, Reuse, Remilled Banana Cake
3. Professor Ali’s Conceptual Gnocchi Nightmare
4. Mel’s Faith in Mashed Potato

There was a clear separation in overall success this round, meaning it was an easy cut for Ali and Mel

which means that Molly and Olivia both got their aprons – the latter of which had a very lowkey reaction to it of course

Olivia treating this competition like a life or death situation <3 Someone please tell her they won’t kill her if she makes a bad Lasagne. I need her to have at least some peace of mind.

A Two Course Race

For the final set of special guest diners they were rolling out the big guns with Categorically The Best Winner And I Will Not Debate That Fact: Ping Coombes

the first ever winner: Thomasina Miers whose first ever dish on the show looked like this

I really should get back to doing those retro recaps but GOOD LORD are they a hard watch because of the 2005 of it all.
Oh, and Digger Dean was here

he shows up every year and my mum will always say “there was a rumour that he had died!” – and I cannot find a single piece of evidence that there was ever a Digger Dean Death Rumour. She is the rumour.

First up to the challenge was Molly who was going to face the additional challenge of having to face Suspiciously Insistently Italian Olivia in martial combat in the car park over de-pasta’d carbonara

so when Molly says she’s going to combine food nutrition and mental health support as a future career endeavour, we know exactly what she means

I am simply a girl with anxiety banging on the window and screaming that carbs are not the enemy. And in a similar vein, her Dark Chocolate and Olive Oil Mousse with Balsamic Strawberries and a Thyme Creme Fraiche was so joylessly unsweetened it could’ve been a main course

and yet everyone seemed to rave about it despite pulling these faces as they ate it

I don’t know, something wasn’t adding up to me in the critique of this dessert and I do feel a little bit of it was a fear of not being seen as ~getting it~. Or maybe I’m just super sensitive to someone whose approach to food seems to be an overt regulation of sugar and carbohydrates, which I don’t think is an outlook on food that matches with the ethos of MasterChef.

Granted, the Savoury Chocolate Mousse would not be the worst dessert to pass through those swinging doors as DIAMOND ZEE! brought through her Matcha Creme Brulee that looked like the Improvised Vegan Potato Pudding the guy on Come Dine With Me made with Chia Seeds after he forgot to buy the vegan cream alternative

Thomasina’s look to camera as she made eye contact with it was was almost audible

I just can’t imagine that she’d ever made that at home and thought “Yes, this pond scum green crust is exactly what people want to eat!” – WHICH IS WHY YOU DON’T TRUST A 10 YEAR OLD, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT WILLIAM!

DIAMOND ZEE!’s menu had started a lot better with her Chicken Katsu Curry

unfortunately her rice was undercooked but the Katsu Curry Sauce was as good as you could hope for!

Having only just made it to this point, Olivia came in with something to prove. And that something is that’s she’s definitely Italian

The Olivia Is Italian Counter at the end of this episode is 9 and it will only go up from here. She mentions it so often you do become suspicious that she’s not actually Italian and she’s about to get Nadine’d if someone asks her to name 15 different types of pasta

she was starting off her meal with a Deep-fried Cheese Ball topped with a Steak Tartar

it’s a deceptively simple dish that a lot that could’ve gone wrong with it. However, she is obviously a very good cook and this was quite possibly the best dish of the entire day. The only real critique that could be levelled at it is that it borders on being a canapé more than a starter.
She legally had to cook a risotto for her main course which is essentially her Fregula 2: Italian Redemption Boogaloo

it was thankfully a very successfully cooked risotto – I fear what Olivia would’ve done if word got back to her that it was undercooked. The only complaint was that Thomasina would’ve prefered chunks of pumpkin rather than it to be pureed into the mixture

IT’S ON SIGHT, MIERS.

It was also potentially a 3 vs 1 situation as Gabriel went on to risk the ire of Italy’s Chosen Champion with his Tiramisu, that he’d made his own sponge fingers for

which was impressive enough for everyone to forgive the fact they’d been served up a plate of coffee flavoured dry stone walling

I think Tiramisu should always be served at a height that would be capable of keeping a small to medium-sized breed of sheep in its pastures.
Gabriel had started his menu off with a Chicken and Chorizo Stew with Okra and Polenta inspired by the one he’d frequently been fed at school

that’s a pretty lush school meal, I’m trying to think what the the equivalent meal at my school was. Probably Miscellaneous Cut of Beef in Gravy? It’s the only dish I remember asking for seconds of – we did not have a successful kitchen at my school in Zimbabwe, we were served Vienna Sausages floating in a sauce that was only ever referred to as Grey Soup alarmingly often. I haven’t been able to look a hotdog in the eye ever since.

A Two Course Menu Dish Ranking:
1. Italy’s Number 1 Canapé
2. The Best School Meal
3. Legally Mandated Risotto
4. DIAMOND ZEE!’s 24 Katsu Curry
5. 1000 Years in Italian Jail For Molly
6. Gabriel’s Barrier of Tiramisu
7. My Suspicions of Molly’s Mousse
8. DIAMOND ZEE!’s Stagnant Brulee

Given that the Creme Brulee was the only dish to really be deemed unsuccessful, it was a pretty easy choice to cut DIAMOND ZEE! at this point

the living room is pleased that my reflexive urge to shout “DIAMOND ZEE!” every time she’s on screen has been curtailed.