Don’t ask about what happened to Gregg.

We’re (not you) are going to Greece!

A few weeks ago I was able to work out that The Greggening would happen during either the Semi-finals or Knockout Week using Gabi’s Instagram posts about her engagement – IT’S NOT WEIRD, IT’S DETECTIVE WORK! And I guess that all finally came to a head as John Torode lands in Greece all on his lonesome – we don’t even get any sort of an explanation or cover up like that guy from The Apprentice who got too drunk on the plane to enter Dubai. And in the following episode Gregg was thoroughly Poochie’d

Oh, how I howled.

Greece-y Does It

For their first challenge in Greece the contestants were at Margi Farm to put together a mezze style lunch for a group of the farmhands and their social media intern

all under the tutelage of “The first lady of Greek cuisine” Argiro Barbarigou, who really was a fantastic teacher to all the chefs

and as a whole, this was definitely one of the more successful international challenges – I will never forget the Turkish Nightmare and Abi’s Terrible Time In Singapore, perhaps two of the best MasterChef episodes ever broadcast. I’m sure it also helped that they found the one place in Greece with but a single slightly gross looking cat

Nobody had a complete disaster – the closest we came was Sam suddenly realising he didn’t understand Greek ovens and had accidentally turned it off

but they just let him have an extra 20 minutes while the diners ate the rest of the mezze so it didn’t really end up delaying anything given there were eight dishes for everyone to work their way through.

The two teams were Sam Claire, then Harry and Sophie, because it continues to be funny pairing Sophie with the tallest member of the group *every* time – it’s nearly impossible to compose a decent shot of the two of them together – you have to wait for Harry to be weighted down by troughs of lamb fricassee

Sophie was not having the best time with this challenge as a considerable amount of her time was spent trying to dodge the flying lamb gristle from Harry hacking at a haunch of lamb like Leatherface

there were at least some vegetarian dishes for her to do in this round with her taking charge of hollowing out a cabbage like a jack’o lantern, see, she was happy about it…

or throwing aubergines onto a sacrificial funeral pyre as an offering to quell Zeus’s anger

but her main duty was creating what I thoroughly believe to be Greece’s best dish, BIG BOI BEANS

and for the most part she’d done well with it – the only complaint they got for this specific dish was that it lacked olive oil

however, the funniest part of this challenge was the locals being very “eh” about MANY of the dishes before it cut to John having a near religious experience over how perfect he thought it was. The most egregious example probably being the Sam and Claire’s Stuffed Squid

meanwhile John got the one perfectly cooked piece of squid in all of East Attica. Granted, I do think there’s a lot of posturing from the local experts in challenges like this, which I fully believe the show encourages them to really lean into being very exacting and hard to please. But they were pretty blown away by Claire’s take on the classic Corfiot dish of Rooster with Pasta in a tomato sauce

it’s just a pity that Argiro has to kill Claire now that she knows the super secret spice blend

the most successful dish on the Blue Team was Harry’s Lamb Fricassee which went down extremely well and looked beautifully tender

although Harry can’t take complete credit for it, given that Sophie was suffering through making the avgolemono sauce like one of the Danaïdes trying to fill a bath with leaking buckets as their immortal punishment

however, their combined effort of the stuffed cabbage leaves, Lahanodolmades, got a less than enthused response from the man in his Bond villain turtle-neck

and then it was finally time for Sam’s Kolokithopita (zucchini pie) to be served 20 minutes late – it did look rather amazing and worth the wait though

and it went down stormingly well – almost too well, there seemed to be a general suspicion that the contestants hadn’t made it

and in general everyone was very intense about this pie

and I’d believe it if somebody did.

Server-Us

Truth be told, there’s a Professional Kitchen Round here in which the contestants serve a few plates at a restaurant called Patio helmed by Panagiotis Giakalis. However, it is a dearth of content in so far as a recap goes, it truly is an email of a round. Everyone does really well cooking plates of food that are barely discernible from one another – these are Claire’s and Harry’s dishes

They’re both just fish in a puddle. Claire’s was easier on account of Harry having to spin ribbons of cuttlefish into a perfect spool like he’d really drawn the short straw in Arachne and Athena’s Great Greek Weave Off

and none of them got to cook the restaurant’s stupidest dish – the cursed music box playing The Teddy Bears’ Picnic backwards in the locked attic

one teddy is safe to eat and the other is poisoned with the antidote hidden somewhere beneath the Parthenon. You have 2 hours, good luck.

Poisoned teddy bears aside, Panagiotis was actually a really lovely mentor and seemed genuinely invested in helping the contestants develop new techniques and was very patient when they did have the occasional slip up

I really rated him, but he does owe me a tutorial (and explanation) on Pandora’s Box of Bears.

So we instead skip on to the third and final challenge in Greece in which the contestants design their own service using all the techniques and new ingredients they’ve learned about. Or ignore it all completely, Harry sadly does not continue his efforts in haberdashering fish and was instead relegated to dessert.

Kicking off the service was Sophie who was back in her vegetarian small plate comfort zone, deciding to do her take on Briam, reimagining it as a tartlet

it was a really successful dish and she deserved all the kudos she got for making the filo pastry from scratch. Although she did have some help from Sam who’d learned filo making from Argiro during his creation of the Kolokithopita

and wikipedia informs me that Argiro is a lead filo dough expert and lecturer at the Greek cookery school, Le Monde

I now want a tournament where all of the leading dough experts and authorities battle it out for Dough Supremo – it can be a mixture of debates, cook-offs and bare knuckle boxing.

Following Sophie was Sam with a fish course, his first of the series which is a risk but I can’t think of a better time to make like Troy McClure at the Springfield aquarium and break your vow of fish chastity than on a round with no elimination

his fish of choice was sea bass, which isn’t the most exciting piece of seafood that Greece has to offer but he did a really good job of grilling so much of it all at once

I wasn’t overly convinced of the dish personally, I just thought the stuffed potato cups felt quite dated and really not worth sweating over like he was competing in the Dalgona round in Squid Game

and something more interesting could’ve been done with the courgette

the diners however were more than happy with it and all the nonsense stuffing going on

tell me… more?

Claire was on mains with a dish of lamb, potatoes and an auberginey salady-type thing (to give it its traditional Greek name)

I thought she ended up with the best dish of the round, I’m not even really a lamb person, but this looked delicious

it also manages to look elegant but still like something that would be served in a Greek taverna – it reminds me a lot of a goat liver dish I had in Kefalonia about 11 years ago that I still dream about. (Lorraine’s in Lourdata if anyone is interested.)

Seeing out the service was Harry on dessert with a traditional orange cake, Portokolopita – which has filo dough mixed into the cake batter and like most Greek desserts, is then served completely soaked in a syrup and is amazing

I did love that they specified that this was a real risk of a dessert because everyone at the table is deeply familiar with it

only to then cut to the one english woman at the table reading the menu description like she’d never heard of what an orange is

Harry did end up doing the dish proud and had really emphasised and showcased the depths and profile of orange as a flavour extremely well.

Overall, it seemed like a really good and beneficial trip for the contestants, and I’m sure there was a slight atmosphere given the circumstances surrounding the show at the time, but they seem to have taken the opportunity in stride.

I am off to London tomorrow – there is a recap scheduled to go live, but much like the pro-kitchen round in this episode, I’ve had to cut the trip to Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester Hotel out due to time and my own schedule. I apologise if anyone was dying to know what I thought of the 40 minutes advert for Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester Hotel – it was fine? They can quote me on that.