Always how your email finds me.

Who amongst us hasn’t drowned a pancake?

Winging It

Philli continues her uniquely masochistic approach to the Skills Test, this time demanding that the chefs make a plate of Laab-stuffed Chicken Wings served with a Soy Caramel Sauce

which does sound delicious and am devastated that I cannot in fact find anywhere near me that does them and nor am I willing to put in the work to make them myself – that’s prison work and I am much too law abiding

I’ve really liked all the dishes that Philli has brought to the competition and they certainly involve techniques that the chefs should know – like how to best a chicken wing in an arm wrestling competition

but they all do get a little specialist and fiddly in that very algorithm pleasing way. These wings are a great Instagram Reel – I don’t know if they worked as a method of testing this poor Eggs on Toast Yorkshireman

I love Dale, he’s the second coming of Garden Centre Sandwich-maker Christ and lasted about as long.
Sadly a life of brunch orders have not got his butchery skills as finely honed as the challenge required but my God if he doesn’t know how to deploy an errant egg

they were trying to get him to use the egg to bind the pork mince together but he ended up using it for the coating of the chicken wings that he’d turned into chicken tubes to keep the mince in and he was so proud of the bravest little egg that could

an despite using entirely the wrong formula, he did end up with a… correct enough result, granted the plate is nearly as much peanuts as it is chicken

and if you thought Dale had taken liberties with the methodology, in came Dhananjai to tear up the rule book, stuff it with pre-cooked pork mince and deep-fry it

the judges were weirdly upset about him precooking the mince but HONESTLY? if you said I only had 20 minutes and you wanted laab inside of a chicken wing, I would’ve probably done the same thing? Much like Dale, despite approaching the challenge like me vibing my through any GCSE maths question that asked me to calculate the meeting points of trains (I am sorry, I was the wrong flavour of autistic for that – I got the dinosaur kind) he got a… plate of food that was mostly passable

(the answer is always Darlington at 10:37 for some reason.)

Souffle’d Alive

As always, the final Skills Test of the week is a pastry challenge with Philli setting the task of creating a batch of Japanese Souffle Pancakes with Sake-poached Plums

and you knew it was going to be an upsetting time because Monica was watching Philli make them like this

granted if you’ve spent a single second on the food side of Instagram in 2023, you probably know how to make a souffle pancake. I was surprised that both the chefs knew they were meant to steam the pancakes, or in the case of Alix, drown them

I felt SO BAD for Alix, all she wanted to do was come in and cook something classically French and she got bamboozled by a social media trend from 3 years ago – and a hob she clearly didn’t know how to use

you can always tell which chefs are more used to cooking with a gas cooker because they set the induction hob to The Rapids of Phlethegon and think it’ll be fine AND IT’S NEVER FINE

Monica asking that through the billowing steam as the kitchen rapidly becomes a Swedish sauna <3
Alix didn’t have the time to save both pancakes from the torment nexus she’d turned the pan into, leaving one of them behind to burn alive

which might have honestly been the more humane option because the one she did serve looked like something Philli had horked up as she succumbed to a panic attack in the cupboard

and that’s nothing to say of the POACHED plums she’d also managed to burn. At least she’d used so little of the sake there was something to go drown her sorrows in, I think she earned that.

On the complete reverse, if you’d lined up Alix and Mark, the designated Big Meat Man of the Year

and told me to guess which one would end up with a pair of perfect Souffle Pancakes and which one would leave behind a crime scene that could revive the Satanic Panic, I would not have voted in Mark’s favour AND YET

he could at least backwards engineer his way through the challenge having eaten Souffle Pancakes before

and the only real struggle he faced was a game of Hard Mode Pancake Operation

I would expect nothing less from a barbecue chef on the brink of a meat-induced divorce

it’s no wonder he approached making these pancakes like this marriage depended on it.

Signature Here

This was a particularly good Signature Dish Challenge with the judges really having to be nitpicky over tiny insignificant details like Alix’s singular offending peanut

FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF HER FACE

she’d gone for the first signature dessert of the series, with a feminist mille feuille

unfortunately once you’d got beyond the theatre of female rage involving breaking the impressively made sugar domes

the dessert was kind of a nothingness of creme diplomat and brik pastry and I think it needed to be a lot more visually compelling in order to warrant the reveal of it all

but asking for the mille feuille dedicated to women’s empowerment to be prettier feels misogynistic.

Alix wasn’t the only one doing a very Great British Menu coded dish, Dale had come with an entire philosophical conundrum

which apparently does have a concrete answer

the egg and chicken components were apparently not designed to be eaten together which… I don’t know, feels like it’s a poorly thought out dish to me? I think he got a bit carried away with trying to be clever and kind of forgot the point of food

everyone loved the Manchego Custard that he’d served in the egg but then it was a bit downhill from there with his chicken being overcooked and the accompanying bits and pieces all being a little bit too fussy and nonessential

it’s a shame, because I really love Dale and I could watch an entire show dedicated entirely to him – he’s got charisma for days but this felt a bit like the first draft of Mark’s 18th Century Sci-fi Pirate novel

which I need to read IMMEDIATELY – I’ll trade my entirely too long unedited screenplay about the court of Louis XIV being a cult dedicated to an Eldritch entity housed beneath Versailles? It’s currently sitting gathering dust under a box propped up by a stick as I try to lure Emerald Fennell away from any more Bronte novels.

Mark’s Hogget dish was almost an unfinished as his novel about Georgian Space Pirates with his rolled hogget being just on the cusp of cooked

but the judges were still happy to eat it, glossing over the seemingly unrendered fat to focus on his handling of the flavours in his Smoked Sauce and Merguez Sausage filling.

Lastly we have Dhananjai who had the most interesting dish of the round, showing off the French-Indian cuisine of Pondicherry with his Crusted Halibut in a Vadouvan Sauce, which is also known as a French Masala

it was just a really good dish and something I don’t recall having seen before which always makes for an exciting contestant.

An Unofficial Signature Dish Ranking:
1. Having a Vadouvan Day
2. Going the Full Hogget
3. Alix’s Mille Feminism
4. The Chicken Certainly Came Last

The only real “tough” decision for the judges was whether they should take through Alix or Mark but with a Skills Test as rough as Alix had she either needed to really set the Signature Round alight or hope that Mark smoked his own chances, which just didn’t happen ultimately leading to Mark and Dhananjai going through to the quarterfinals

Alix and Dale by no means had bad showings in the Signature Round and honestly, in a couple of the heats so far they would probably have gone through, this was a close one.