We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!

I could do with one of Antos’s patronising pats right now.

Baptain Brunch

Kicking off the quarterfinal was the Invention Test in which the contestants had to come up with a spur of the moment Brunch dish

which immediately had Jeane on a backfoot because there is apparently no such thing as a Brazilian brunch

the blazed out emotional support chicken was working overtime for Jeane today

she’s much more of a ladies who lunch or sinners who dinner kind of woman

and from the larder had decided to grab the entire tray of beef because the Wetherspoon’s lunch menu starts at 11:30 and that’s technically still Brunch time

Grace did very tactfully point out that what she was making didn’t sound much like a brunch dish so much as a Sunday dinner that comes with a prescribed 2 hour nap afterwards

so Jeane had to skedaddle back to the larder with her well-poked and fully prepped beef to rethink the whole thing

and I’m going to assume that someone just whispered a few vague brunchy ideas that she could accomplish in the rapidly dwindling time, thus ending up with Asparagus wrapped in Bacon, Bruschetta and the only survivor of her previous concept: a mushrooms slathered in Stilton

the judges do praise her for managing to plate up the collection of hotel conference canapes considering the start she had but it’s not really what they wanted from this challenge. I just hope they let her take home that beef she’d prepared and had no business being in the larder for a brunch challenge in the first place. I’m beginning to think the MasterChef Larder is an expenses scandal waiting to happen

less than a third of that food gets used – the crew hasn’t paid for groceries in MONTHS. They’re going to start getting brave and throw a floating duck house in there as an ingredient for a salsa based invention test.

Jeane may have been the only one having to play brunchy charades with one of the production runners but she was far from the only one slightly adrift. Jamie loves a brunch but doesn’t cook it very often

so was sticking pretty safely to taking inspiration from a Smoked Salmon Bagel. However, while the larder came stocked with the unbrunchable beef, there was not a bagel in sight so he was just toasting some sourdough. Now, when I think of any salmon brunch dish I think of something quite dainty, usually flaked or thinly sliced salmon so when they cut to Jamie’s dish and it’s just a rolicking salmon fillet on a slice of toast, I did cackle – there’s just something so absurd about it

it’s all beautifully cooked but the judges did have to take issue with the fact it looks a little bit like a stray cat plating up a gourmet dinner on the lid of trash can

but apparently it does look better from a distance, as assured by Antos

to be fair to Jamie though, nobody’s dishes looked particularly pretty and I imagine Antos was a little bit apprehensive about how his bowl o’ beans was about to be received

he hadn’t gone in with much of a plan, sort of playing hot and cold with the judges as he described elements for his dish

it was another mixed reception with Anna thinking there was too much cider in them, but to be fair Antos did specify that they were meant to be hanging out in the club’s bathroom giving you the most sage advice you’ve ever heard with smudged eyeliner and 1 missing eyelash

so I’m not surprised that Grace was picking up what Antos was putting down

TAKE THAT, HAUGH!

I hope he’s better at managing those corporate banking relationships

and speaking of career chyrons, I will never be over Daniel’s being Actor / Vintage Car Builder

and while everyone muddled around profering various ingredients at the judges to gauge whether they’re brunch or not like the cerulean belt scene from The Devil Wears Prada

Daniel was getting ready for an Olympic sprint

and he was basically competing in a different competition with his Arnold Bennett Souffle (lovely name for a D&D gnome) and comté cheese toasts

it just felt very technically above what everyone else was making and I’m not surprised that Anna was all in on it

I suppose you could say that it’s… the dog’s bollocks

It was an incredibly well made and risky option for an Invention Test and can accept that it was probably the best this round even if I did prefer the sound of some of the other dishes a bit more. I’d have ordered Antos’s blackout beans any day! And I loved Joyce’s Chicken Pho, which is primarily a breakfast food in Vietnam

to add more of a twist onto it, she’d also put together the inaugural breakfast menu spring roll

and I do believe that such a creation of the divine probably deserved better that to be crammed into this tiny bowl like baby Moses about to be sent down the Nile

but it tasted great, whereas the pho was lacking a bit in the lemongrass and ginger notes that it should have been hitting according to Anna.

Lastly we have Mukul who was going for the only sweet option, opting for Halwa which he was making from purple heritage carrots so for a while it was all very war flashbacks to a certain other, dense and darkly coloured mush

but Mukul did manage to make it not look like the summoning ritual for an elder god but it does very much look like the prototype for a Muk porridge at the Pokemon Cafe

I waited with bated breath to see what the judges made of it – purple food can be a hard sell but they really loved it! And found it to be very comforting

A Brunch Invention Test Dish Ranking:
1. Actor / Vintage Car Builder / Souffle Maker
2. Putting The Muk in Mukul
3. Antos’s Gazebo’d Beans
4. Jamie’s Back Alley Salmon Bagel
5. Half A Spring Roll Can Only Save So Much
6. Jeane Playing Guess Who? Brunch Edition

Jimi, Jimi, Aha!

This week’s guest critic was Jimi Famurewa who was challenging the contestants to celebrate the humble nut

a challenge that of course had everyone thinking incredibly carefully about how they talked about their dishes and how they felt about the challenge

which was unfortunately being referred to exclusively as “Jimi’s Nut Brief” – a sentence I hate with my entire soul and hope India Fisher was paid double for

I do really like the challenge though, I think it’s a very open one that gave the competitors free range to go savoury or sweet and is certainly better than William Sitwell’s Quest For Soup. It did mostly result in desserts however, you took one look at Daniel’s face during the outlining of the brief and knew he had some nonsense up his sleeves

that’s the face of a man with a bag of lamb’s testicles in the fridge

I do have to wonder how Daniel felt when his lambily jewels only garnered this much of a reaction

and was thoroughly outweirded by Antos revealing that he’d woken up in the middle of night from a cheese dream with the desire to make Thai Green Curry Ice Cream and got the full comedy zoom out

I am so intrigued by Antos’s creation, the main component of which is the Coconut Rice Pudding that everyone did indeed love

but nobody really commits to an opinion of the Thai Green Ice Cream, they sort of just vaguely describe aspects of it while increasingly sounding like they’re being choked from the inside out

so did they like it? The evidence is inconclusive and I fear now I need to try the ice cream for myself. The things I’d do for science.

Meanwhile, over with Daniel’s Gonad Raviolo

everyone liked it without any fuss or debate – Anna was the only one that actually talked about the cooking of the testicles which Daniel had done very well. The raviolo did also have a hazelnut filling and the most unsettling part of the whole dish was probably the testicular strata when they did the slice-through

it’s the texture, I am unable to discern what it’d be like.

While Daniel and Antos tried to outweird one another in their competitive Jugheading

I think Joyce snuck in with the best dish of the episode as she took inspiration from a Pecan Pie and turned it into a Swiss Roll topped with a bacon crumb and served with a Bourbon Caramel

I really like Joyce, she’s such a calm and unassuming presence in the competition but then packs an absolute punch with her food, she also looks like she runs a GP reception desk like the Navy

I think she’s neat.

The other three all had a bit of a struggle – Mukul’s dessert was drawing inspiration from the Dubai Chocolate trend that immediately dates the filming of this series

and part of the reason that the whole thing went viral is that it has a certain aesthetic appeal (and also the horrible ASMR quality…) and then Mukul slammed down a plate of what looked like someone turned out a tin of tuna using a gun

you can see the precise moment he gave up was evidently the splattering of Rose Jelly just shot at the plate like someone coughing up blood. Diva… WHAT HAPPENED? Truly one of the most bizarre crash outs of all time. The judges could’ve forgiven Mukul for a lot, they evidently liked him but this complete visual backfiring of a cat would test anyone’s limits. Instead their complete overlooking of a glaring issue would be reserved for Jamie whose Hazelnut Frangipane Tarts looked and sounded incredible

but, at least one of them, was described as raw

and I just have to question how was only 1 them was not just overcooked but as raw as this but the other two apparently perfectly fine.

Lastly we have Jeane who was back to being able to celebrate Brazilian ingredients, opting to make a Cashew Nut Brownie with a Cupuacu Mousse and Pacoca Crumb

the immediately obvious problem is that’s an awful lot of what is essentially just the dust at the bottom of a bag of honey roasted peanuts which was rendering the whole thing as dry as the Atacama

but the brownie wasn’t great either, and barely a brownie so much as a handful of cashew nuts being held together by chocolate like one of those healthy protein flapjacks they sell next to the gum

it just failed to come together as a cohesive dish for Jeane.

A Nut Dish Ranking:
1. The American-Swiss Roll
2. Jughead 1 (You Can Decide Who This Is)
3. Jughead 2 (You Can Decide Who This Is)
4. Two of Three Aint Bad, I Suppose
5. A FlapJack Is Not A Dessert
6. Mukul’s Du-bye Shock-olate

It was abundantly clear from the judging alone that Mukul and Jeane had kind of biffed this challenge something fierce so as disappointed as I am I can’t really argue against the decision to eliminate them

HOWMST SO EVER, I do have to take a little bit of issue with them not also eliminating Jamie – he didn’t do that great in the Brunch Challenge and his frangipane was just about completely uncooked. That to me alone is eliminatable offense and I think it’s a little bit of favouritism.