It’s been a while since Monica Galetti looked directly to camera with mild disappointment.

*fires up the Blog Fav funeral dirge*

Thai Breaker

For this round, they brought in guest chef and proponent of Thai fusion cuisine and owner of michelin starred restaurant AngloThai and potentially Mark Watson in disguise, John Chantarasak

who needs to IMMEDIATELY tell me the name of the band he was in before getting into cookery because it looks exactly like my kind of music (which is just men with deep unrelenting sadness in their eyes)

30 minutes of searching and all I managed to find was the AngloThai bathroom playlist which amongst all the instrumental Thai music includes “About You Now” by the Sugababes – THAI FUSION!

I do enjoy the Professionals version of the guest chef, wherein the guest, instead of making everyone cooking their dishes to overly rapturous acclaim, gives a masterclass of two dishes to showcase their culinary ethos or point of view. In John’s case, it’s all about classic Thai influences through a lense of British seasonality. The key points of his masterclass being how to make a Thai Curry sauce that doesn’t rely on coconut milk and how to barbecue a crab with minimal dignity

I don’t know, there’s just something *very* funny to me about that massive crab lying on its back. I feel a spiritual connection with it.

This did mean that this was an Invention Test, with the only guidance being that they had to cook at least one component on the outdoor grill, meaning that Mark was FINALLY reunited with his beloved after accidentally taking a break

his christening of the MasterChef Courtyard-Barbecue-Area was grilled chicken which had been cleansed of its malevolent spirit with a bushel of sage dipped in crab oil

although I give the soul of this crab that was desperately trying to escape its pot, full permission to haunt Mark forever

luckily for Mark, his return to the grill was a success – or at least the grilling part was, John LOVED his chicken drenched in crab juice

however the Thai influence of the green curry sauce fell just 2300km short

oh, how I began rubbing my thighs at the thought of John potentially telling someone they put a distinctly Malaysian amount of coriander into a sauce as he began critiquing curry sauces like Trevor Rainbolt playing GeoGuessr – “It’s the Senegalese Gradient of Thai Curries”

and then like wishing upon the monkey’s paw, my personal fav got absolutely eviscerated

poor Sel, I fear there is no returning from being told you’ve just cooked a curry worthy of a Sharwood’s bottle. But also, I truly do not know what he thought he was doing by just throwing a completely unspiced, seasoned or nurtured porkchop onto a barbecue and shrugging

ah, the No Frills Porkchop, as opposed to DD Fuego, the All Frills Porkchop

still not over her having a Betsy Johnson collab only to be eliminated first – she networked too close to the sun.

Sel wasn’t the only to have a bit of a flop as Georgia found herself having to think about anything other than French or Italian cuisine and brain-farted out the truly abominable looking Liver Brioche Toast

you deep-fry an eyeball one time and you lose your entire perspective of the culinary artform. Her Satay Skewers and Salad were more sane

but some of the chicken was undercooked and the salad added about as much to the plate as the wilted bags of lettuce in any take-away.

The best dish of the round was easily Gareth who had gambled big on the high potential for disaster that the ox heart came with

he’d sliced it thinly to grill on a skewer and slather in a black garlic marinade – it sounded REALLY good

the trick to this challenge was keeping things relatively simple because even Luke who was possessed by the senseless urge to wing his way through a John Dory for the first time

had a really good result for his very minimalist plate that showed off perfect cooking of his John Dory as well as understanding of the brief with his Thai Green Sauce and Pickled Daikon

and Caroline was doing anything but being simple as she kept throwing vaguely Thai spaghetti at the wall in the hopes something would eventually stick

Ultimately leading to a workload that was just too demanding, leading her to have to change the crab croquette to a simple scoop from the communal bowl of crab meat

the core part of her dish – the barbecued sea bass was perfectly cooked and the judges were very complimentary about it but the dish just didn’t hang together very well and I think a croquette would’ve confused things ever more.

A Thai Fusion Dish Ranking:
1. Farrow and Bull(‘s Heart)
2. Luke’s Millennial Grey John Dory
3. Lord of the Grills: Return of the King
4. Overworked and Undercrabbed
5. Baby’s First Thai Curry
6. Georgia’s Assault of the Concept of Toast

Dessert Island Discs

Following the John Chantarasak meet and greet, nobody was deemed safe for the rest of the episode and everyone would cook again – WHY WON’T YOU LET GARETH GO HOME AND SEE HIS KIDS!? So yes, that was just a stealthy BBC-friendly advert for AngloThai, but it does also save you having to watch Great British Menu where he made nigh on identical dishes, granted with a few less props

this series of Great British Menu has infuriated me. For those that don’t know, it’s themed around British Cinema which has unfortunately meant we’re already like 4 Harry Potter dishes to the wind – my personal favourite being the guy that made a dessert for Fantastic Beasts… Like yes, let’s celebrate the highs of British cinema by toasting to this series that got quietly taken out back and shot in the head before it could fulfill even half of the contracted films it was slated to comprise of because the writer went insane?????? But I think my bigger issue has been dishes themed around movies that had like 1 scene filmed in the local area that wasn’t even integral to the plot.

This elimination decider didn’t have a theme beyond having to make a dessert so everyone retreated to their comfort zone – nobody more so that Georgia who ran back to the Amalfi Coast after being forced to acknowledge a world beyond Europe

and made a Tarte au Citron with Meringue and a Lemon and Basil Sorbet

the lemon tart was immaculately well made, some of the finest pastry work we’ve seen on the show so far. I just don’t know how much I like everything going on around it. I think the issue is largely that she chose too big a plate and was struggling to fill the space – can I get a job as a crockery supervisor in the MasterChef kitchen?

I will say, I am glad that every chef in the country seems to have been rehabilitated of the urge to whack anything and everything on a slate. We must acknowledge how far we’ve come.

Georgia wasn’t the only one to go for a dessert that showcased one specific flavour, with Luke going all in on Pistachio. I was excited because I’m a fiend for Pistachio but then his dessert came out and it was… just a bit of a disappointment really

the most sane issue for the judges was that there wasn’t a strong enough raspberry element to contrast the pistachio, so nothing really sung. The least sane point of issue was Marcus being mortally offended by the quarter of an inch of missing tuile

the tuile wasn’t even very good – it was 6 millimetres of mercy! Pastry is all about precision and refinement, so I get why Marcus would be so particular, I’m sure he still brings up his Egg Custard Tart from Great British Menu at every available moment

but he was comparatively kind to Luke after Mark brought out a PB&J Cheesecake that looked like a Shambler from Quake

but if you manage to stomach that it looks like a interdimensional putrid flesh demon, it’s not a bad dessert and there’s some really cool ideas in there! The Pretzel Base, Burnt Honey Meringue and Caramelised Pastry Ice Cream were all hits with the judges. And as much as the pastry ice cream sounds great, I did not appreciate the amount of screentime given to the making of it

I now realise the severe traumatic impact that finding my uncle’s 4 hour soaked Weetabix on the kitchen counter has had on me. It was like finding a corpse in a ditch.

While Mark would have his visual shortcomings redeemed by the flavours he was working with, Sel was the opposite issue having presented a really beautiful dessert inspired by forest walks

only to have the White Truffle Ice Cream tear through the whole thing like the bulldozer in The Animals of Farthing Wood

and Sel was but a poor unfortunate weasel

the thing was, everything else on the plate really worked and if you were able to just get the required iota of truffle ice cream, it wasn’t “unpleasant”. I know why he went with the truffle, he was very dedicated to the forest theme, but if that ice cream had just been vanilla to pair better with the Matcha Mousse and Cherry Compote he would’ve been absolutely fine.

With any pastry challenge, there is inevitably someone that has a terrible time with getting things to set. This time it was the turn of Caroline who the blast chiller had decided needed to be humanised

and she would spend the entire 95 minutes walking around the kitchen muttering like Eeyore

and personally, I think this the vulnerability that the judges are looking for!

they were very kind about the whole thing because as much as the White Chocolate Parfait did not technically work, they could still appreciate that within that puddle lurked the bones of a very good dessert. You might just need a team of divers to recover the body.

Lastly we have Gareth, who was making a Sticky Toffee Pudding but putting a bit of a Caribbean spin on it because before he was born, his family lived in Trinidad and Tobago

we’ve seen Sticky Toffee Puddings with a million and one twists, but his one returning from vacation with shellbraids was very successful

I’ve made 2 Friends references in a single recap, I fear I have become the millennial cringe we all fear.

An Unofficial Dessert Ranking:
1. A Trinidad and Tobag-offee Pudding
2. We’re Amalfi Coasting Along
3. Caroline’s Primordial Idea Soup
4. Mark’s CheeseQuake
5. Sel’s Truffle Scuffle
6. Luke’s Clip-on Tie of Tuile

I hope you all saw this coming because as is want to happen the moment I declare someone my personal favourite, they get Caeser’d in the carpark

I do think it should’ve been Luke – that dessert was a complete nothingness whereas I think Sel at least had more components that worked and showed more technical capacity. But I suppose they were also taking the Thai Fusion round into consideration, in which Sel did flop rather hard. BUT THEY’LL NEVER MAKE ME HATE YOU, KING!