Exactly the face I pulled for a good third of this episode.

No egg is safe.

Signatures

So yes, the primary talking point of this episode is obviously Ferdinando The Hot Italian who is thirst trapping in the inserts

but we’re all going to be very cool and very normal about him right? RIGHT

while they go try cool Anna down like Samoyed in the summer, Ferdinando was cooking his grandmother’s favourite breakfast, Mozzarella in Carozza

which is a sort of Italian Scooby Doo Sandwich filled with two kinds of mozzarella, smoked ham and potato then topped off with a rich tomato and aubergine sauce

and given that it is a sandwich with a Neapolitan accent, the judges questioned whether or not it was enough of a MasterChef dish

but he was judged first and this becomes funnier in hindsight as the dishes really peaked with the Just A Sandwich™ ultimately culminating in a pair of over promised and under delivered desserts from Zenub and Dehaja. The latter of which has the energy of someone that gave up on applying for Bake Off after the fifth rejection, but it might just be the enigmatic knitwear

and by God they were going to give her the full Eliminated On Patisserie Week Fantasy. She’d started with making Choux Pastry that she was topping with a craquelin crust, which even I could see were much too thick because they’re built like hockey pucks

which might give some valuable insight into her attempts at choux bun retail

but perhaps the people of London should learn not to judge a choux by its cover because even though they very much hadn’t risen the salted caramel and the passion fruit curd were very good

she was going to have to work harder for that Haugh-lywood Handshake though.

While Dehaja had managed to at least keep things on track with her flavours, Zenub kind of lost it with the amount of Saffron in her Saffron and Pistachio Ice Cream which was served alongside Knafeh – a Middle Eastern dessert made from layering kadayif and cheese then soaking it in a syrup

however, it sounded like Zenub had run out of time to actually to do the soaking so everyone was just crunching through pastry and cheese (not ordinarily a bad thing)

but she wasn’t the only one to not quite get the balance of their spices right as Sean pulled a Professor Utonium and accidentally turned his carrot puree into a weapon of chemical warfare

however his dish was saved because if you took the time to perform some very exacting condiment alchemy, the dish could in fact be deemed safe for human consumption

he had also cooked his herb-crusted rack of lamb and fondant potatoes beautifully which can be something of a rarity at this stage of the competition

Kirsty was also going for a Meat and Potatoes dish, opting for her wife’s Valentine’s Favourite of a Steak Rossini

and mostly going home with the dreadful niggling at the back of her mind if the relationship is built on a pile of fillet steak lies

god forbid a woman eat like an analogue watch

it’s Chicken Liver past Asparagus, you said you’d be here by at least Steak to Asparagus!

Lastly we have Andy who looks a bit like Player 2 Daniel Radcliffe

he was cooking an Irish Seafood Chowder containing Prawns, Cod, Smoked Haddock and apparently too many potatoes

Thou Shalt Not Make An Irish Potato Joke.
The problem there being that they’d made the creamy sauce a bit too starchy and thick, but he clawed back a few points with his Stout and Wheaten Bread

and maybe could’ve clawed back a few more if he hadn’t hogged the dregs

we need to bring back bribery.

A Signature Dish Ranking:
1. We Have Actually Gotta Hand It To That Sandwich
2. Sean’s Pepper Spray Puree
3. Tick Tock, It’s Steak O’clock
4. Andy’s Starchy-owder
5. Dehaja’s Hardsell Choux
6. Cheese and Pastry (Tone Indicator: Not Great.)

The judging felt particularly picky this episode, especially for a Signature Challenge where they’re a little more lenient with mistakes. Ultimately they had to really walk back the opinion that the Italian Sandwich was not in fact a MasterChef worthy dish as Ferdinando and Sean get to go back to do their Men.com opener

Right in front of my Classic Recipe Test?

Rock and Roulade

For this week’s Party City Technical Challenge, they were going for a dessert with the contestants being challenge to make a Lemon Curd Roulade with a Raspberry Coulis

which seemed like a great redemption arc for Dehaja who came in talking big about desserts in a competition where most people would rather chew off their own arm than cook anything more advanced than a crumble

Great!

oh.

But what I will say for Dehaja and all the others is that armed with a recipe of passive aggressive vagueness to make a meringue roulade, I think they all did really well to all get things that you’d be able to tell were indeed meant to be roulades! Or in the case of Kirsty, may have been 3 roulades in a trench coat

her only real fault was that she’d folded her meringue lengthways, meaning she didn’t have quite as pronounced a swirl

but I’m not sure how much that critique really holds up when Andy’s is actively expelling its, admittedly very good, lemon curd making his roll indistinguishable

and Dehaja’s could be used as a Pythagorean tool to calculate acute angles

the perilously full jug of raspberry coulis is very much giving Blood Pool in the Runespan

friends fear she’s posting about Runescape again.
Dehaja had somewhat undercooked her meringue and I can see the logic behind wanting to take it out early to roll it. As opposed to Zenub who just wanted to be assured that this was all fine

she’d only just managed to get into a roll and somehow between that time and getting it to the judges the curd had vanished, leaving her roulade to look like it had been artfully plundered of all its curd

I’m almost tempted to say she deserved an apron just for managing this? Of course you’ll find out that there’s just a lemon curd clone (a clurd?) beneath the floorboards.

A Roulade Recipe Test Ranking:
1. Andy’s Excess of Curd
2. Kirsty’s Ode to Long Boi
3. Zenub’s Recently Back From Zanti Roulade
=. Dehaja’s Angoulade

I think this was a very close round with Anna and Grace having to be very picky in order to choose who to put through and I think ultimately the decision to axe both Zenub and Dehaja here was fair

it’s unfortunate because I think they clearly had some great ideas and they faired better in that Roulade Test than I think lot of other people may have managed without clear instructions. I distinctly remember someone on Bake Off rolling a tea towel into their roulade at one point. Also, if you’re going to leave, leave in a GREAT coat

I need it.

A Two Course Race

Having cooked his grandmother’s favourite classic Italian sandwich for his signature, all bets were off with Ferdinando who was committing to the bit of being the biggest Italian disaster since Mount Vesuvius wiped out Pompeii

and the victims of Pompeii 2: Eggy Ferdinando-loo were Nish Parmar and friend of the blog, Tony Rodd

and you’d think Tony’s neckerchief would be the most interesting outfit choice of the episode and then the winner of the Shirley Carter look-a-like competition walked into the room

there is a surprising knife edge between rock & roll and your grandmother’s sensible evening wardrobe and I don’t think I’ll ever fully be able to decide which side Simon Wood fell on – he looks like he’d both do a line of coke in the bathroom and order the prawn cocktail.

We’ll get Ferdinando’s High Concept Volcanic Nonsense over with first because I think it provides valuable context to the absolving of everyone else’s sins

his starter, the above “Eye of Vesuvius” involved burying an egg yolk in breadcrumbs like a springtime squirrel

freezing it thusly and then deep-frying it to give it a crunchy coating while leaving the centre runny. He would then serve it with a Parmesan sauce. Just a parmesan sauce.

*RECORD SCRATCH*

You might be thinking “That’s just an egg yolk and sauce?” and you would be entirely right – apparently the Eye of Vesuvius looks an awful lot like Just A Fried Egg

three times in my notes I just wrote “Diva what is this?” because I feel like I am experiencing the kind of madness only caused by gazing upon one of the Seraphim. I want to put him and Michael in the same room to create a chamber of Biblically Accurate MasterChef Insanity. My favourite part of the whole thing was his dramatic countdown to the reveal of his Parmesan Sauce which… I really don’t know what he was expecting to happen here?

and then came the infuriating task of eating your horrible egg yolk and parmesan puddle off the COMPLETELY FLAT SURFACE

actual footage of me trying not to mention Aesop’s Bastard Fox and Equally Bastarding Stork

but you know, Michael survived this round and he’d almost killed Jane Devonshire so there was still hope for Ferdinando and his, what I am beginning to suspect is a kink, love of Vesuvius

and the only real positive you could give this dish is that at least his ring did something this time

but above all else, this challenge for him just turned into an opportunity for Grace and Anna to practice their zingers

Hey! I’ll have you know that that means “I love you!” in dinosaur! Unfortunately it is hard to love pasta that is the consistency of a waterlogged doc marten shoelace

Tony Rodd’s eyebrow raise after taking one mouthful might be the most brutal murder of an Italian since 1943

well, it’s Ferdinand-over, especially considering the palpable relief of everyone holding up Kirsty’s Pappardelle like she’d served them scraps of The Shroud of Turin itself

she’d served her pasta with Italian Sausage and a Brown Butter Sage Sauce

and Kirsty being a comparative miracle worker would continue into her dessert after Andy pulled a Ferdinando and seemed to forget that people like to experience a crumb of texture amongst their slop

Kirsty had made sure to serve her Chocolate Mousse with a biscuit base and some blitzed pistachios for good measure

Andy hadn’t had a technically bad mousse though – it was very light and well aerated but had fallen short in terms of the orange flavour that it was meant to be accompanied by.

As for Andy’s main course, he was going for a demi-glace to serve alongside his Schnitzel but with only 80 minutes and everything else to do, that’s just really not an option – a good, proper demi-glace is a 12 hour job and despite Kirsty’s assertation that the MasterChef Kitchen is capable of time travel

he did not pull it off but at least it distracted everyone enough from the fact he’d burnt the one side of every schnitzel

the tactical plating is still a bafflement though

What are we even doing anymore? Does everyone need to go back to school to understand the physics of liquids? It is at least not quite as infuriating as the eggy cheese puddle that will never leave my brain

I am going to write sordid fanfiction about Ferdinando’s abstracted Vesuvius and Michael’s portrait of cthulhu. They’re boyfriends AND THEY’RE KISSING.

And to recover from the roughest use of metaphor and visual imagery since my GCSE Art project about unusual sexual dimorphism in animals (gee whizz, Ariadne I wonder why that piqued your interest) we shall turn to the safe haven of 2013 for just a moment

I have never been more delighted for a man on this show to be so boring!

there were some questions about it being unseasoned as he seemingly course corrected after his carrot puree being legally indistinguishable from pepper spray a little too hard

but it looked and tasted like a real plate of food which was the low hurdle we were trying to jump this evening.
For his main course he was making a Smoked Haddock and Asparagus Risotto

it was mostly ok, the apsaragus and arborio rice were well cooked and the haddock flavour came through nicely. The only real issue was that it was a bit soupy

however, it is at least a liquid that is correctly contained within a bowl which again, is the near subterranean hurdle we’re trying to jump on MasterChef at the moment. You can all sign up for my Open University course Jugs 101: A Reintroduction to Containing Sauce.

A Two Course Menu Dish Ranking:
1. The Normalcy of Scallops, Pea Puree and Black Pudding
2. Kirsty’s Comparatively Miraculous Mousse
3. The Shroud of Turin in Brown Butter
4. Soups Is For Bowls
5. Terry’s Chocolate Orange for the Level 5 Diet
6. Andy’s Tactical Othello Schnitzel
7. The Italian Pasta Disaster Is At Least A Vaguely Real Plate of Food?
8. The Destruction of Pomp-egg

I think rather fairly after having burnt his schnitzel and seeing his reaction to not going home, Andy was fully convince he was going home

and even if the contestants had collaborated their experiences during the deliberation, I don’t think Ferdinand had realised that there was anything wrong with having served everyone a singular egg yolk and some parmesan scented milk ON A PLATE which he very much deserved to be eliminated for before you even get to the pasta

and last look to the judges in what can simultaneously read as “are you sure?” and “sleep with one eye open, DENT!” is a glorious parting shot

fly high you absolutely deranged King.