Is she… y’know… a timid posset eater?

This new format isn’t very Feng Shui.

Hopper To It

The Format Shuffle continues apace in this episode. On the plus side We’ve done away with the Professional Kitchen Round! However, the monkey’s paw curled and moved the Professional Chef Visits The Kitchen And Makes Celebrities Follow His Recipe So It’s Just The Professional Kitchen Round In Worse Drag out of the semi-finals and into the early heats.
I personally don’t believe this works very well, especially in an episode with a first elimination because more than half of it is spent cooking unfamiliar food with processes they’re not used to. The old Pro Kitchen Round was at least sandwiched between two other rounds. It also makes the quarterfinal an hour long and it *really* doesn’t need to be. The Pairs Challenge is not a quarterfinal challenge, it’s too silly and bares no relevance to the next challenge – the Pairs Challenge usually led into the Pro Kitchen Round where the celebs were still in their teams.
But they get a pass this week because I get to giggle and kick me feet while Karan Gokani teaches everyone very kindly to make Indian food

he continues to be one of the nicest, most patient men on earth. All of the contestants were of course cooking things from his Hoppers menu. While most of the celebrities felt like they had cooked full dishes – Antony made a red curry with a rice hopper side dish

it did feel a little bit like the Bombay Frankie (a great drag king name) that Gaz was cooking felt like an afterthought that Karan had scrabbled together to make a vegan option

granted, Gaz was still the only one who managed to set off the fire alarm

and while Grace had a decently cooked Roti, it was definitely the dish with the least enthusiastic reception, but there wasn’t much for him to hide behind if one thing went wrong. Uma somehow forgot a crucial third of her dish’s name but she still had two other components to show for herself

You’re making Paneer and Tarka Dal, babe HOW DO YOU FORGET THE TARKA? I want to know exactly how this happened – RELEASE ALL OF KARAN’S MOBILE PHONE FOOTAGE

she was more concerned with burdening her paneer with more weight than our own fathomless human existence apparently

the fact she’s just draining it onto her workspace? truly God’s strongest soldier in the IDGAF Wars.

This round does at least come with the conceit of teaching the celebs new things so we don’t end up with an entire series of the likes of Katie McGlynn furiously scrolling the BBC Good Food website for easy 30 minute meals. This time she was contending with a whole fish!

a fish which she was rather emotionally attached to

her workload did seem to fizzle out entirely once she’d mummified Burt in a banana leaf and shoved him in the oven so in the grand scheme of the round we see as little of Katie as we do of the actual dish she made because at some point they realised it’s very hard to get a glamour shot of a rigid parcel of partially cooked fish

and so the judges had to make sure to go crazy for the okra and yoghurt because that they could photograph!

it was also the only part they could really compliment because Katie’s emotional reverence for Burt the Bream meant she was late getting him in the oven

Ginger nearly had the same problem with her coconut full of prawns but she’d left enough time to put it back in and ended up with some perfectly cooked prawns in a near equally unfilmable coconut vessel

this dish fascinates me and is by far the most interesting of the dishes Karan brought in. And also probably the most dangerous as Ginger’s handling of the coconut had shades of the scene from The Restaurant in which the mother and daughter team were determined to open ANYTHING they possibly could at the greatest risk to their fingers

the wilderness years of British reality TV between 2005 and 2010 <3.

The Dinner Circle

In order to decide who gets eliminated, the final round of the episode is the Dinner Party Challenge in which the celebs had to cook both a main course and dessert.
First up to the pass was Ginger with her fish pie of a suitably gargantuan portion

as someone who spent an entire two week summer holiday in my teens with a personal challenge of eating only fish pies, size is a direct correlation to quality. Trust me, I’m a fish pie scientist.
It was a good start from Ginger with the fish being perfectly cooked and her mashed potato topping being free of lumps. Her dessert however was a noticeable plummet in quality and size: a quarter of a poached pear is NOT a dessert

and like many a miscellaneous snap on this show that has to sit under the studio lights for like half an hour while they get all the glamour shots, it had lost its brittleness and had the texture of a pair of wet tights

but John was sure he could detect some snap if he tried really hard

as ever they were very generous with their critiques of the celebs. Except for Gaz who they were oddly determined to eliminate this episode AND I DON’T KNOW WHY. The only praise he got was Grace doing some limp spirit fingers at his naan bread like a mother trying to encourage their toddler who just drew a lovely stick figure

They were very iffy about the fact he’d tried to cook a traditionally slow-cooked Nihari in only an hour

which I get, it’s never going to be the same. But they did not keep that same energy for Antony who’d cooked Tava which would also usually be cooked for hours

my favourite thing about this is that usually a Tava would be meat and potatoes but for reasons that feel like an important buried lede in the lore of Spag Bol Boy™ he’d swapped them for vermicelli, which makes it more akin to a lot of middle eastern casserole dishes

do we think Antony Costa doesn’t think vermicelli is a carb?

don’t tell him, let him be happy.

Then on top of Grace having to ever so gently slide Antony’s horribly unshaven chicken skin off of her plate while stifling a gag

both she and John just gamely laughed off the fact the Lemon Cheesecake he’d made tasted only of lemon juice and his buttery biscuit base was so buttery that’d he’d turned it into a sort of digestive biscuit spread

which actually might be kind of incredible? I also can’t overly defend Gaz’s Gajar ka Halwa which looked a bit burnt and drier than I’d expect a halwa to look but they don’t criticise it for that reason

the plating of this is absurd, right? Nothing makes me question my sanity more than these early rounds of Celebrity MasterChef because when Katie’s main course of Pan-fried Plaice with a Cream Sauce came up I said “that’s the plating of a crazy person”

AND THEN GRACE SAID THIS

be so fucking serious right now. It’s like Ginger dropped her fish pie from a great height! She gave you only two (2) baby potatoes! It looks like four but I guarantee you, that’s two potatoes cut in half – it’s potato geometry. And yet, it’s still more of a complete meal than Uma managed with her Antony Costa-friendly Thai Curry

I truly believe everyone else could’ve been responsible for causing an incredibly localised nuclear fallout and they’d still have eliminated Gaz Choudhry for some reason. Not that I’d want them to eliminate Uma, she’s my IDGAF Queen

and plus, her Black Forest Chocolate Mousse was pretty good

if once again, monumentally overpraised, you’d think she had discovered and plundered the secrets of ancient Bavaria herself

I think that’s just how you make Black Forest ANYTHING, John?

Lastly we have Katie McGlynn’s Lemon Posset which came with some vigorously assaulted shortbreads

if you’re thinking “it’d be much easier to do that with a rolling pin than a ladle?” – you’re right but you see, she’d accidentally swallowed the rolling pin

she’s a nightmare to get through airport security.

As for her posset, both John and Grace loved it despite being registered as legally blind the moment they tasted it

was it set? No, not even slightly. Is that more forgivable than John Torode personally not liking the taste of a plant-based steak? APPARENTLY SO.

An Unofficial Dinner Party Dish Ranking:
1. Ginger’s Family-sized Fish Pie For One
2. Uma Discovers Bavaria
3. Ginger’s Fish Pie From 50ft High
4. Uma Jammeh’s Accidental Paleo
5. I DON’T BELIEVE GAZ’S MAIN WAS THAT BAD
6. Antony’s Body-shamed Chicken Stew
7. Katie’s Blinding Posset
8. Gaz’s Halwa Pit
9. Ginger’s Barely Registering Dessert
10. Antony’s Lemon Juice and Biscuit Butter

I wasn’t surprised given the fact Antony Costa has been decked out in a full array of plot armour and the generally harsher critiques pushed upon Gaz that we were losing the latter at this point

I liked Gaz and don’t think his elimination is entirely invalid or unfair but the build up and narrative to it was a little bit too heavy-handed and he seemed defeated. I think the show expected Katie to be a ~hilarious flop~ to create more jeopardy and then she decided to be extremely competitive in the dinner party challenge

good for you queen, I look forward to seeing what other utensils you can eat like a cormorant in the future.