Monica’s going up in the ranks.

We legally cannot say the slogan.

Playing Chicken

After last week’s Rice Pudding debacle in which nobody knew what they were doing, least of all Monica and Marcus, we are on track with a more normal Invention Test utilising various secondary chicken bits

the thighs were a very generous life rafts for everyone – I think they should’ve chucked in a stray couple of chicken feet just to test the limits of Georgia’s blind panic

she’d made the mistake of coming in with a plan for a pastry challenge and it’s a little bit hard to pivot from the Tarte au Citron you spent all night memorising when you come face to face with a bowl of chicken hearts – curse the French for not having a recipe for Tarte au Coeur de Poulet! Georgia does at least have a knowledge of pasta making to pull from

but… now I love a chicken liver pate however, the thought of a chicken liver pate inside of a ravioli fills me with the same deep despondency as watching more than 10 minutes of the news does

and she was serving her ravioli in a Chicken and Mushroom Ragu Sauce with some shredded chicken thigh

it was a mixed bag of a dish, the biggest error being the plating up with Marcus and Monica both thinking the pasta should’ve been placed atop the sauce to prevent the shredded chicken thighs from drying out. I see the validity in that critique, but it’s also not her fault the dishes have to sit around for like 40 minutes getting the glamour shots done – cold liver pate ravioli…

Georgia did at least get points for making the chicken central to her dish, Patrick’s Chicken Thigh stuffed with a Liver Mousseline was very much just the satellite to the fondant potatoes and braised leeks

this plating… it’s like a platform crossing puzzle from The Crystal Maze’s deleted Classical French Zone. It does show some good technique with his rolling of the thigh and the making of his Blanquette Sauce but the Invention Test isn’t really for the classics, it’s for making Fancy Fried Chicken

somewhere Big Meat Man Mark seethes realising he missed the second opportunity to make fried chicken on this show in favour of making desserts – throwing his novelty bbq apron in the bin as he sees Ben steal all his jokes

This was meant to be his moment! He was meant to make Marcus embrace Legally Distinct Finger Licking!

although it’s palpably obvious that Marcus has never actually been to KFC and has merely absorbed it by cultural osmosis because he didn’t seem to *get* Fried Chicken and Gravy as a thing

Marcus, please stop wishing away the gloriously beige food!

he was also going to get a few bonus points for being the only one brave enough to go for the Chicken Hearts but there were questions over whether or not they were actually cooked or not

run a mild electrical current through that and it’s going to start beating again, babe.

Lastly we have Polly who was making Liver and Onion but at some point panicked and just whacked a pan-fried chicken thigh on top of it, regardless of how well it actually hung together as a dish

again with Polly, there’s flashes of brilliance here and there and if she’d stopped to think of a way to make the chicken thigh reach the same level of interest as the liver and onion ragu or the deep-fried enoki mushroom (a God Tier food btw) she’d have been on to a real winner here. Although she might have still had the best dish purely on account of it not having raw hearts, the aura of a French woman on the edge of a breakdown or my irrational grudge against Patrick going against it.

An Unofficial Chicken Bits Dish Ranking:
1. Polly by Virtue of Everyone Else’s Failures, I guess?
2. Kentucky Fancy Chicken
3. Patrick’s Side of Chicken Offal
4. Georgia’s Scuppered Pastry Plans

Critical Hits

For this week’s Quarterfinal, we saw the introduction of a new addition to the MasterChef Critic Roster in Xanthe Clay – a food columnist for The Telegraph, so I’m sure she’s got some GREAT opinions of the last couple of weeks of News™

and she was joined by Jay Rayner and Leyla Kazim for this surprisingly halibutless quarterfinal! Instead the only fish dish was Patrick Uzumaki’ing a gurnard into a disconcertingly perfect disc

this was for his main course of “Chowder”

A Chowdn’t, if you will. However, I do think it is somehow even less of a main course than it is a chowder

sir, this is somehow even less substantial than Polly serving a genetically modified GigantoScallop and an ungodly amount of cheese sauce WHICH WAS A STARTER

Granted, he kind of gets away with it on account of everyone having to eat 7 other dishes but I think he needs at least 1 other component on that plate for me not to roll my eyes into oblivion over this. It was however all beautifully cooked and certainly an improvement over the cooler reception if White Asparagus and Lardo di Colonnata with a Comte Foam

it was deemed easier to admire than actually enjoy which seems apt for Patrick.
It wasn’t the only asparagus-based starter this round though, as Ben was repping both forms of Asparagi

everyone really loved it both for and despite the fact it felt like a brunch dish, what with the liberal blanket of Hollandaise Sauce it came with. Or not liberal enough for Monica

She will be running for Prime Minister on a Hollandaise Sauce as a human rights issue platform.

Unfortunately for Ben, it was all a bit downhill from there as when it came to start plating up his lamb main course, he realised it was still very underdone and Monica was NOT helping by bleating at him

he did manage to get it cooked enough to serve it by throwing it in a frying pan for a couple of minutes but at the loss of any quality or care for the meat

and nothing else on the dish was really interesting or flavoursome enough to redeem the substandard lamb. And it really didn’t help his chances that Polly brought out a really stellar Lebanese 7-spice Lamb Rack served with sumac courgette, a garlic labneh, herb salad and pomegranate molasses jus

it sounds delicious but my only contention is that 5 sprigs of coriander does not constitute a herb salad, that’s still a garnish at best and not worth listing on the menu description. It was just nice to see Polly prove that she could make a dish that didn’t feel like it had a late-stage element added out of pure panic and insecurity. If anything, the lamb dish could maybe have used some sort of starchy element to bring it all together a little better.

Lastly we have Georgia who, back in the safety of her own recipes, produced a truly spectacular main course of Iberico Pork and Romesco Sauce with a side of Patatas Bravas

and honestly, she could’ve just done the Patatas Bravas and still absolutely demolished everyone else

and her dessert was a similar hit with the critics and judges alike

I was less convinced by this – purely presentationally, I think a Goat’s Cheese and Apricot Cheesecake (I will NOT be calling it a Gee’s Cake, thank you very much) is really lovely and right up my street! The look of it however feels a bit like you’re trying to convince a child that two Rich Tea biscuits and some sweetened creme fraiche is a dessert. There’s a naivety to it that I personally found lacklustre but it made Leyla’s brain make printer noises

And who am I to argue against that joy?

An Unofficial Two Dish Menu Ranking:
1. Georgia’s Gold Standard Potatoes
2. XXL Scallops
3. Cheesecake Go BRRRRRR
4. The Little Chowdn’t That Could
5. A Duality of Asparagi
6. Polly’s Lesbian Lebanese Lamb
7. 3 Chunks of Asparagus and Some Pork Fat
8. Lamb for Lamb’s Sake

Given that his dish was the only one with a glaring technical error, it was no surprise that it was Ben dropping out ahead of Knockout Week

I’ll miss his sad eyes most of all.