Clean up on aisle Sean!

How long could washing one octopus take

Plates of Future Past

We start this stage of the competition with the 14 Knockout Weekists being divided into two group. This episode was made up Jhané, Antos, Sabina, Sean The Plumber, Bolton Kirsty, Daniel and Jamie

and in order to decide which 5 of them would go and cook the world’s most disparate lunchtime menu over at Roe on Canary Wharf, they would all have to cook a dish inspired by the goal for their culinary future. Which most of the time is a cookbook or Jamie waxing lyrical about the Boutique Highland Hotel I’m beginning to think he gets money for mentioning

and then you have Antos backstage monologuing his master plan like an evil stepmother with an equally evil cat

all he has to do is convince Anna to make him soul beneficiary and then whoops! What a tragic spatula incident, officer! And before she knows it, Grace will be cinderella’ing away in the cellar because someone has to keep the silverwear polished

given that Matt Tebbutt is apparently just going to be a One Series Wonder over on MasterChef: The Professionals, they might as well just give Antos that completely superfluous role – he’s charismatic, knows how to deliver a cutting remark

but is also adept in slightly insincere sympathy

and you know, most importantly of all, he does know how to cook with his Plum-glazed Duck and Peking Duck Pierogi going down incredibly well

it’s going to be a while before he’s able to demand a monopoly on Polish food in his rider though

I hate to see my faves fighting, because his Pierogi Opponent was Jhané who was doing a bit of Jamaican-Polish fusion food inspired by her partner’s Polish background

and I did love the sound of her Peppered Prawn and Lobster filling with the crispy leeks for a bit of added texture

and I really liked that her ideal culinary aspiration is a community pub

I will throw my weight behind anyone involved in taking down the tyranny of Ember Inns and their terrible menus! It also seems realistic amongst some of the others wanting TV shows. I’m so sorry Sean The Plumber Man, but I think the last think we need is another middle aged man doing a European road trip

I will however advocate for more men to go do train rides in Uzbekistan to end the male loneliness epidemic

I don’t recap Race Across The World, but here’s a quick list of my favourite moments:
– Kush pulling at the Circumcision Party
– Harrison looking at pictures of Birmingham Tescos with a Turkish grandfather
– Puja and Roshni kamikazeing their chances by saving sea turtles
– Naima, the woman who let Kush and Jo sleep on the hotel sofa for free and then paid for their Taxi.
– Kush saying “The Mongolians are just the baddest pimps of all” because he liked their boots
– Harrison’s Uzbekistan Train Ride To End Male Loneliness
– Margo wining and dining around Akhaltsikhe while Mark was dying in the hotel room
– Andrew having a near religious experience in the Taurus Mountains while it had no effect on Molly whatsoever

Back to Sean and his… Beef Fillet with Blue Cheese Mousse and Pavé Potatoes

ok, you’re going to have to do more than that to be given a novelty vehicle to tour Occitania with. It’s all very well cooked, I would trust Sean with my life to perfectly cook anything you’d find on a relatively upscale pub’s Father’s Day menu but that presentation is BAD and stood out like a sore thumb against everyone else’s. Especially when you’ve got Jamie wrapping a sensible scarf of cavolo nero around a Celeriac Fondant so that it doesn’t catch a chill

with his goal of a Boutique Highland Hotel (drink!) Jamie didn’t have any other choice than to cook venison at this point

other than the bizarre quantity of Blackberries, the glaring problem is the rareness of that Venison. It’s still fine to eat but any game meat that rare is going to be a very acquired taste and the judges weren’t really vibing with it

but they loved the rest of the dish and he wasn’t the only one to have a bit of a tale of two halves with Kirsty evidently being unable to decide between two dishes so just making them both

She absolutely wouldn’t have got away with just a Lancashire Hotpot at this stage of the competition and I think she overthought it from there. The only strictly bad component of the dish was her sauce which was about halfway to making hand soap

but in the grand scheme of things she probably didn’t have anything more or less wrong with her plate than Daniel, who is adding to his career chyron like a middlingly famous TV personality competing on Strictly (I am not ready to discuss the Josh Widdicombe Developments – The Straights™ are gentrifying Strictly)

WAS VINTAGE CAR BUILDER NOT ENOUGH, DANIEL?

his dish was also looking back to the past, inspired by the Ancient British cuisine he was resurrecting the Leaf Pudding which sounds, and very much looks, like a culinary horror from the war rationing era (and is actually, I looked it up after)

and he was serving the hedgerow fatberg as an accompaniment to his Oak-smoked Pork

the pork was lovely but the Leaf Pudding was maybe a bit too accurate to the Caledonian Confederacy palate

you’ll certainly having to rejig the recipe if you want to compete in next year’s Mytholmroyd World Dock Pudding Competition, Daniel

I need to know if anyone from further away than Skipton travels for the *World* Dock Pudding Competition.

Lastly we have Sabina who’d cooked a Garam Masala Lamb Chop with a Pasanda Sauce and Baba Ganoush

she continues you mother with another outstanding dish.

A Future Aspirations Dish Ranking:
1. You Won This Battle, Jhané But The Pierogi War Isn’t Over
2. The Pier-OG gets Out-pierogi’d
3. Nothing Funny To Say About Sabina’s Lamb Chops
4. Sean Needs A Steak and A Long Weekend Away
5. Kirsty’s Unnecessary Bolton Bolt Ons
6. Daniel’s Pork and Lawn Clippings
7. Jamie’s Third Place On Four In A Bed Highland Hotel

Two of the contestants had to be eliminated with the three obviously in the danger zone being Kirsty, Daniel and Jamie. Given that Jamie’s star component, the venison, was so under and not particularly well prepared or seasoned, he was a goner

and I honestly thought that Daniel was going to go home here, I just personally thought Kirsty had more going for her dish. But it turns out to be a bad day for regional specificity, as we lose The Pride of Bolton

I am kind of glad Daniel’s still in the competition though because it’s always Something™ with him whereas I think we had seen the start of Kirsty’s plateau. She was never going to whip out lamb testicles or a recipe for parsnip porridge last cooked in a cauldron by Mad Agatha in 1605 that got her tried for being a witch

She turned me into a newt. I got better.

P-Roe Restaurant Challenge

Roe was serving as the location for the remaining contestants’ introduction to a professional kitchen with Will Murray and Culinary Nepo Baby Jack Croft serving as their head chefs

as much as I dread any man leading charge in a Professional Kitchen Round, let alone this Hydra situation, they were actually really nice and INCREDIBLY patient even as Antos burnt through more doughnut batter than a seaside food truck finding new and intriguing shapes for a doughnut

he was so bad at doughnut making they barely even mentioned the fact he was also having to cook prawns to a very specific 56 degrees

I do think Antos drew a bit of a short straw in terms of what he had to do to order but I honestly don’t think they were trying to set someone up, I just think nobody has ever made this big a meal of doughnut making. It was like watching a toddler trying to smash the triangle into the circle hole. But at least it was only the doughnut batter he was pissing away and not any of the luxury ingredients

he got there in the end and his last set of Lobster Doughnuts were pretty much spot on and Will Murray’s relief was palpable – he was about 3 more doughNOTS away from demoting Antos to Sean’s Chief Forehead Wiper

Sean was having to constantly work over the barbecue grill with this duo of kebabs that passes for a sharing plate

dare I say that Sean had by far the easiest job and they had to really make working on a barbecue sounds like a gruelling Herculean feat? Sure, it’s uncomfortable but Sabina was wrist-deep in two octopuses for 45 minutes

the flat I lived in for my second year of University held an emergency meeting to request I stop washing octopuses in the sink – I used to buy them really cheap on Thursdays and refused to pay extra to have the fishmonger prepare them for me. Sometimes you look back and realise that yes, you were the problem flatmate sometimes.

Sabina’s octopus dish was an Octopus Pizza which I personally think is a slightly questionable use of octopus but sure

and aside from the evidence that she burned one singular bottom

she did incredibly well. I did find it slightly odd that she was seemingly having to do each pizza one at a time but that might also have been to stop her speeding too far ahead of Antos’s Undoughnutting

she’s too mother, we must tie one hand behind her back! Leave some for everyone else, Sabina!

The last of the main courses was a Venison dish being cooked by Jhané which did look and sound really divine – it might be another sharing platter though, I don’t know many high end London restaurants willing to give you 6 whole slivers of Venison, they usually cut you off at 3

and despite never having cooked venison before, she got on great with the whole process and the biggest problem she had was probably making sure her eyeliner didn’t melt off

I love how much the camera operator also clearly appreciated the eyeliner with this framing decision.

So lastly we have Daniel and this elusory banana dessert that he too got on fine with without too much of a hiccup

I’m just glad we finally have an answer to the age old question of “How many men does it take to quennell some ice cream?”

the focus of the dessert was to make something that used banana waste, which also meant deep-frying the banana skin “as a garnish”

so I don’t know if it’s edible? Literally nobody would’ve been mad if you just mulched that, babes.

Overall, I did quite like this Professional Kitchen Challenge, I think Sean might have got the short end of the stick in terms of ~an education~ – I think all he learned was how to portion meat to under 100g per person. Everyone else was doing something a little more intricate, advanced or learning about doughnuts. And I just appreciate that Will and Jack were so nice to everyone, they can come back.