A rare insight into how they make Olympic-grade Curling stones.

The Straits are at it again.

Outlook… Food

It was the turn of our final group of contestants to come in and lay their food dreams bare for Grace and Anna to crush – and group two was made up of Matt, Kristen, Jim, Joyce, Adam???, Frankie and Tony

and I am so sorry to Adam but gun to my head, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you a single thing he’d done so far

Clearly I am doing a very professional job here at Ariadne Reviews Inc. I did remind myself and he was the one that made the Veda Bread Treacle Tart. So he was continuing to play to his Irish Classic niche, because it is vitally important that you pigeonhole yourself in this challenge or the judges are going to do it like an Amazon delivery driver insisting that package is going to make it through the letterbox come hell or high waters

Joyce just wanted to make a Scotch Quail Egg on a Sweet Potato Rosti for her food truck and then Grace started demanding to see the passport of this fancy packed lunch

and I have to think that Joyce hadn’t actively set out for this be strictly Mauritian-inspired, especially given that the spicings that were the supposed Mauritian twist weren’t coming through in the end when her use of spices in her Mauritian cooking has been so consistently good. I think she just wanted to make a nice scotch egg, guys?

and it was a very good scotch egg at that!

the judges also had issue with how dry the dish was and I agree it could’ve done with some sort of fancied up ketchup or a mayonnaise – not to start Scotch Egg Condiment Discourse when we’ve already got That’s A Tortilla, Anna discourse on the near horizon – we’ve had the biweekly American vs British Food Discourse on Bluesky and I am TIRED.

While Joyce aimed for a food truck (that better have a Mauritian license plate or Grace is going to slash its tyres), Tony was trying his hand in the Fancy Fish and Chips Tombola with his fish of choice being Halibut and his avant garde chip replacement being a potato roll-up

I think *maybe* sometimes we have to accept that we’ve abstracted a concept too far – if you placed this in front of someone I’m not sure their mind would go to “oh this is meant to be like fish and chips!” It is a very good plate of food and phenomenally well cooked. It’s such a travesty that it’s taken this long for Tony to have his real talent for food recognised. And it’s the same for Kristen to be honest – she’s hitting so heavy there’s a real fear that the 3 chefs in a trench coat that’s she’s made up of will lose momentum at some point

I think this was my favourite dish of this particular round – that Grilled Mackerel Taco with the three different salsas? That’s got Ariadne written all over it. And then she threw a Mackerel Tartare Tostada on there just as a bit of a brag

but someone is going to have to sit Anna Haugh down eventually and make sure she understands the difference between using the word taco and tortilla

if Old El Paso can get it right, so can you. AND I DEFINITELY HAVEN’T EVER MADE THIS SAME MISTAKE, SHUT UP.

Fish was definitely a common theme – both Frankie and Matt were also going with seafood dishes. Frankie threatening to summon Beetlejuice with her jailbird striped Cappelletti on a Kale and Walnut Pesto

the filling proved to be divisive with the judges – Anna had not a single bad thing to say about the dish and deemed it the perfect mouthful

whereas Grace felt that the combination of Sardine, Mascarpone and Red Pepper in the filling had washed away the impact that you kind of want from something with sardines in it. I think the dish sounded amazing, she did start to lose me when she went on about the Omega 3 in the tablespoon of sardines she’d used in the cappelletti though

I am sure there are a lot of people who care about the cruciferousness of their pesto but i am afraid I am not one of those people

I fear I have been one of those people and maybe I should talk to my therapist about the kale trauma that clearly I am hanging onto.

As for Matt’s seafood dish, he was going for Lobster, choosing to tempura the claw meat and then serve the poached tail meat inside of a Polenta Crepe with creamed beer braised greens

it’s a fascinating dish and he pulled it off spectacularly. My one thing, and it’s not even a critique, is the three slivers of red onion on top as a garnish looks very dated and only reminds me of Michael Kors noticing that one of the designers on Project Runway had sewn shark teeth-shaped buttons onto the cuff of his women’s business suit

nobody has ever done reality show critiques like Michael Kors – I think about “She looks like a transvestite flamenco dancer at a funeral” every time I wrap a towel around me

and now I don’t know how to segway from that to Jim and his Sri Lankan Red Chicken Curry so… HERE IT IS!

it was another very good showing of Sri Lankan cuisine from Jim with Anna and Grace being particularly enthused about his Brinjal Moju (lovely name for a baby girl) which is a sort of Sweet and Sour Aubergine Dish

Anna was very keen that this feature on the menu if he ever manages to realise his dream of opening a home-style Sri Lankan restaurant.

And we shall end as we began, with a complete dissemination of Adam through the medium of Pork and Cabbage

it honestly looked and sounded like a really nice plate of food but it was littered with a fair few little technical errors, not least of all the apple gel

I am too Drag Race pilled to hear someone describe something as “chopped” and not scream like I’ve just witnessed someone being murdered right in front of me – it just sounds like such a scalding read.

A Culinary Dream Dish Ranking:
1. My Tortilla and Taco Revision Flash Card Business Is Booming
2. The Crepe’d Crusader
3. Theseus’s Concept of Fish and Chips
4. Little Baby Brinjal Moju
5. Cappelletti Cappelletti Cappelletti
6. Joyce’s Forcibly Nationalised Scotch Egg
7. Adam’s Chopped Chances

So there’s no real recovering from your food being described as “not delicious” so it was pretty obvious that Adam was being express shipped out of there

I am so sorry to this man, you could’ve been my Anxious Bird Looking Fav and then I forgot you for anyone that deploys statement eyeliner or tells one joke.
Then the judges faced a decision between Joyce or Frankie and as soon as it came down to that I knew Joyce was a goner

and I can’t really argue with the decision, I think it was definitely Joyce’s weakest dish of the competition and fell just a little short in terms of concept but I have no doubt she’ll be living that food festival dream eventually.

The Straits Are At It Again

Having survived the dream crushing, the remaining members of the group were off to Straits Kitchen for a lunchtime mentorship from Adam Bateman – the chef and not the Eastenders character whose departure from the show involved being hit in the face by a bin (the wiki informs me that this is vital to his character arc)

I don’t know if I am familiar with Adam Bateman or not because I think I’m confusing him with Sat Bains? Either way, I really liked Adam during this challenge and whoever is vetting the kitchens and chefs for these professional kitchen challenges has been crushing it.

Kicking off the lunch service was Frankie having to overcome self-deprecation via the medium of the world’s beefiest scallops

and once she was done with the Orkney Scallop CBT, she was serving them pan-fried on a Dulse Beurre Blanc and with a yuzu gel

the latter of which she was getting a little bit too trigger happy with and had to be under constant yuzu supervision until she’d proven she was being a responsible yuzu user

she wasn’t the only one struggling with portion sizes as Adam Bateman stood behind Jim while he portioned out the 3 slices of duck everyone was allowed hissing “Thinner! Thinner. THINNER!” over his shoulder like Nicky Hambleton-Jones in 2004

his excuse for less and less duck is that the diners’ delicate wrists would be incapable of cutting through the tender meat and definitely not the profit margin sacrificed with each millimetre of duck meat

I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure you get to worry about the diners’ ability to eat when you serve your dessert on top of a lump of basalt

despite Jim’s struggle with thickness, he had cooked his duck perfectly and the pairing of it with the Nam Phrik Ong inspired lentils (a traditionally pork-based Thai dish) sounded really lovely – the whole menu sounded great, it was a very good barely disguised advert for The Straits.

Over on the main course, Matt was experiencing love at first sight with a pile of premium pork cutlets

at they weren’t the only things getting him a bit hot under the collar as he’d drawn the obligatory indoor barbecue straw, char grilling the cutlets to order. The cooking side of things didn’t phase Matt, it was his guy-in-the-pub-who-is-a-little-too-confident-in-his-ability-with-darts approach to accuracy that was causing Adam to pull his hair out

if the meal is not perfectly centred, the diners become confused and start their migration pattern weeks early causing them to fall foul of the katabatic winds of the Adriatic Sea leading to devastating effects on their breeding chances.
As the narrative of the show demands, by the end of it you will be unsurprised that Matt had overcome his cycloptic judge of distance and depth so Adam was no longer having to use a laser pointer to guide him to success! You can really see the strings being pulled in the Professional Kitchen Challenge – the professional chefs are not *great* line readers and the clips of them worrying about the time crunch and how they’re going to get this 30 cover lunch service done aren’t overly convincing. Except when Antos was doing awful things to doughnuts, that was all genuine! As was Adam being baffled by Tony slathering pasta in unemulsified butter

I don’t know why but “Tony, this is just butter, yeah?” really tickled me and I’ve been mumbling it under my breath for the last two days.

The biggest struggle bus of the challenge was Kristen, so its nice to know that she’s at least a little bit fallible and had maybe been avoiding making desserts for good reason

it was the partial dipping of the Vanilla Ice Cream into the chocolate that was causing her the most problems, and to be fair to her it is a deceptively hard thing to do, but again Adam was so supportive and nice whenever she tried to flee into The Backrooms to escape the survival horror game that Strait Kitchen had become

but if he was getting his knickers in a twist over 3 millimetres of duck, I imagine he had to go and scream in the walk-in freezer when Kristen started golding her fancy ice cream sandwich like the fireplace in the The White House

if the ice cream is too blinged out it triggers the diners’ prey drives and causes rapid onset behavioural sink.