Anna Haugh and Grace Dent endlessly trapped in a cycle of recreating the Withnail and I meme has been my series highlight.

Sorry this is late, I was having to fight for a recap oven.

You Want A Pizza Me?

In order to decide which 4 contestants would move straight on to Semi Final Week and bypass the Fancy Take Away Challenge, the 10 remaining contestant would be making… fancy pizzas

I actually think pizzas is a really interesting challenge that relies on a lot of very intelligent culinary decisions to make something that’s interesting but still taxonomically a pizza. The part of the challenge that I was less enthused by was the 10 people sharing just 4 pizza ovens, turning the MasterChef Patio into a recreation of John B. Calhoun’s experiments on Behavioural Sink

and the role of Calhoun making the life of a bunch of lab rats’ lives miserable was to be played by Grace taking every opportunity to instigate fisticuffs over Pizza Oven Number 3

and then she and Anna have THE GAUL to HotDog Costume when Jhané starts running around like Katniss Everdeen looking for a bow and arrow

you can all blame Sean and his quite frankly insane deployment of scallops on a pizza for eating the budget for at least 1 more rentable pizza oven

I love a seafood pizza! But Sean throwing a collection of in-shell mussels onto a pizza makes me, I believe perfectly fairly, rationally angry

I ordered pizza because it’s easy to eat and now my delicate and feeble wrists have to shuck a mussel!? And for WHAT? THE DRAMA?

It’s bad enough when a pizza place forgets to cut your pizza and makes you do geometry – our flat almost started World War Three over the dividing up of a Domino’s Meat Feast once! If you’re wondering how many computer science students it takes to cut a pizza it’s 4.
The interactive mussel shells weren’t the only thing Sean was using for a bit of drama as squid ink once again gets dragged into the picture

Whose wrong hands could you possibly be talking about, Grace?

Anna heard “squid ink” and once again felt that inky ichorous tentacle wrap itself around her heart and had to go have a lie down before she started shoving her face in a blender to make the call of the sludge stop

and Sean wasn’t the only one opting for a dramatic black dough, Tony was also going for the contrast but was achieving it with charcoal instead of squid ink as he was inspired by a Somalian flatbread introduced to him by some of the people he works with at t’dairy

and I won’t lie, given the state of the world in general and the UK in specific, hearing somebody talking about how much they like working with immigrants and sharing parts of their culture was genuinely lovely. It is just unfortunate that maybe the Goat Pizza looked like how it currently feels to be in the UK

but despite looking like my mental faculties during the hottest day of the year (so far) it tasted delicious but that came slightly at the cost of the structural integrity of the pizza, the charcoal making it a bit too cakey and the toppings all being rather heavy. Kristen ended up with a similar critique for her Okonomiyaki Pizza having the weekly contents of the average British family’s compost bin dumped on top of it

it turns out she might have been better off serving the one that she jettisoned into the pizza oven like she was trying to break the fabric of time and space, losing most of the toppings in the process

but they did really like her use of beer in the pizza dough – which is one of the few ideas that guests judge James “Pizza Pilgrim” Elliot was on the lookout to steal

the other being Jhane’s Shawarma Mushrooms that were topping her vegan pizza

You can prize that recipe from her cold dead graphic eyelinered hands, SIR! And I cannot believe that in the year of our Lord 2026, we are still pulling looks of absolute shock every time someone says they’re cooking plant-based food

This is just not a normal reaction to encountering veganism? I thought Saint Sophie of 2025 had relieved us of this when she conjured faux pork belly out of mushroom gills or whatever form of fungal occultism she was partaking.
Jhane was once again one of the standouts, as was Matt and his Lamb Offal Pizza which featured a sauce made up of minced liver and heart

the judges went bonkers for it and Matt’s to me was the most interesting, or at least it was until Sabina informed us that there’s no such thing as a Bangladeshi Pizzeria

so while everyone else spent days and weeks concocting the perfect pizzas in their kitchen, or in the case of Daniel the garage he’s turned into a mad scientist’s laboratory, she’d just eaten a block of cheese, taken a Xanax and hoped her sleep paralysis demon would do the rest

I don’t think anyone was having a better time with this challenge than Sabina, who ended with the biggest smile on her face before they smash cut to Tony looking like he’d just lived through the second world war

the Super Smash Brothers Pizza Brawl has NOTHING on the average street of Dhaka

as for the Pizza of My Dreams by Jade Thirlwall, it was an East Asian affair with a Gochujang sauce and topped with hoisin glazed duck

it divided the judges a little bit – James really didn’t seem all that enthused by it and Anna thought the gochujang could’ve punched through a little more. I’m not surprised by the slightly muted reaction, I think Korean, Chinese and Japanese flavours on a pizza are maybe a bit of a harder sell? Something about the thought of hoisin sauce on a pizza makes my brain start screaming like a dial-up modem. But on a technical level, Sabina’s dough and toppings were all perfectly cooked.

No pizza challenge would be complete without Pineapple Discourse, with Antos being the one wading into it with his conversion therapizza

he was taking inspiration from Mexican Tacos al Pastor, topping the pizza with Chipotle Pork and charred pineapple

James and Grace both loved it while Anna is still yet to be fully brought to the Dark Side of pineapple on pizzas but loved the rest of it so I guess it’s back to the electrotherapy drawing board for the pineapple consortium

there was a question of the presentation from Grace who described the Avocado Crema as looking like “a sneeze” which honestly felt more like an attempt at a joke that fell a little flat

especially because she didn’t say the same thing to Daniel and his 5 Cheese Glamorgan Sausage Pizza

I massively enjoyed Daniel listing off the five different cheeses and Anna waiting for the other testicular foot to drop

but the weirdest it was getting with Daniel this week was the use of Gin in his tomato base. Unfortunately it does seem the limit on cheeses for the average diner is possibly four, with Grace declaring that she could probably only manage one slice which to me is more of a her problem that she needs to deal with in her own time

aside from Grace hitting her cheesy brick wall, the bigger issue was that his stuffed crust, although impressively made with not a single burst seam, was only adding to the richness and maybe unnecessary. I was surprised that more people hadn’t gone for stuffed crusts, the only ones were Daniel and Frankie which I imagine was where she usually hides the spiders

her pizza was drawing inspiration from a holiday she spent in Jordan, so she was topping it with Harissa Lamb and Pomegranate with the crust being stuffed with feta and mozzarella

unfortunately, the crust was a little bit too dry – feta was definitely a bit of a misstep there but the rest of it sounded really nice, maybe not the most inventive of flavour profiles when you’re up against lamb offal, Daniel’s infinite cheeses, Sabina’s sleep pizza-ralysis demon and Jim’s Brazilian Sweetzza

he was taking inspiration from the Brazilian dessert, Queijadinha. Which if the poorly translated wikipedia entry is not lying to me, is a sort of egg custard tart made with Serra da Estrela Cheese (a sheep’s’ ‘s milk cheese) but the same wikipedia entry then says that despite its name the tart does not contain cheese so I don’t know what Schrodinger’s Cheese is up to but Jim was deploying a block of Cathedral City mature cheddar

I am yet to meet a single dessert pizza that isn’t a gross disappointment but the judges seemed to enjoy this one, likening it to a cheesecake in its general flavour profile. But there was concern over whether it stood up against the others on a more technical level because it was kind of just some raspberries, grated cheese and condensed milk

what really confused me was that when someone makes a dessert option, they’re usually put it last in the judging order because it just kind of makes sense to do that. However, they made Jim serve this up to the judges bang in the middle which I just thought was odd.

An Unofficial Pizza Ranking:
1. Matt’s Not Too Offal Pizza
2. Jhané’s Patented Shawarma Mushroom Pizza
3. Antos’s Pineapple Conversion Therapizza
4. Do Androids Dream of Duck Pizza?
5. Tony’s Carbon Dateable Pizza
6. Kristen’s KO-nomyaki’d Pizza
7. The Cheese Limit Does Not Exist!
8. Frankie’s Spider Nest Pizza
9. Jim Missing the Sweetzza Spot
10. Sean’s Pizzabyss

The four best makeshift pizza chefs were going straight through to Semi-final Week and in a rare event for the blog, all three of the current Blog Favs were safe as Jhane, Sabina and Antos all become semi-finalists and Matt is there too as Honorary Blog Fav For A Day

tag yourself: I’m the floury handprints on Sabina’s butt.

Give and Take-away

In order to decide which two contestants would be leaving the competition, they all had to cook up an elevated version of their favourite take-away and I have to imagine Jim’s heart sank when he saw that everyone was bringing out elaborate platters and he was serving up a single pile of curry

I mean, it could still be the nicest curry they’d ever tast-

oh, well, that’s one on the Out Tray then.

As was to be expected, it was a very Indian food heavy challenge as Daniel continues to lore drop like a D&D player telling you about their homebrewed pantheon of deities

I would personally have insisted that my career chyron was “Husband of Bollywood Dancer” if this was the case.
The focus of his curry was fusing Indian food with Welsh ingredients as he set about making a Laverbread Saag Paneer and Cockle Curry. But because this is Daniel, the cockles had to be deployed in the most insane way he could possibly think of as he snuck them into the curry like 23 to 50 Trojan soldiers

I hope the Trojan Horse in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is played by Dylan Mulvaney, just to maximise the discourse that currently consumes people too blind to see that Lupita Nyong’o is easily one of the most beautiful woman to grace this earth.

What worked for Odysseus very much worked for Daniel as Grace was very taken with the cockles on a stealth mission as well as the Welsh Cheddar Naans

It’s easily Daniel’s best dish and I think does a great job of feeling inventive and new without needing to do whacky jazz hands to sell the concept.
Tony had gone for a similar take on fusion food, deciding to make Cullen Skink Takoyaki (a beautiful name for a baby boy)

I am a fiend for Takoyaki – it and Korean Popcorn Chicken are my go-to for a take-away option but Tony had removed it somewhat too far from the original concept as he swapped the octopus filling for a whole scallop meaning there was none of that creamy filling, it was just a whole battered scallop

I can think of worse things to eat and certainly worse deployments of a scallop but part of the joy of a takoyaki is that spongey slightly gooey filling. It just fell a little flat in this iteration but shows a lot of promise to be something really great!

I am also very much with Frankie on starters being the best part of a take-away menu and being happy to just order a selection of them

her selection of starters were blended with a sort of cinema snack presentation which felt like an unnecessary layering of themeage and I personally thought the weird piece of garden centre paraphernalia she’d presented them on was a bit naff

I don’t really believe calling this a hotdog is really adding anything to the dish or experience other than making it feel like it’s a children’s birthday party

but the judges loved it, as they did Kristen’s use of the tiffin tins that you can’t really go wrong with in terms of presentation

in a rarity for Kristen, she was having a bit of a Not Great™ episode with her platter being a little hit or miss, she was spared the biggest disaster with the masala Monkfish being only just cooked. It was a particularly beefy piece of monkfish that she’d had to skewer wolverine-style

but the bigger misplay for her was the Chilli and Cheese Croquettes which really weren’t necessary and ultimately hadn’t crisped up. But the rest of the accompaniments, especially the Lemon Rice, were very pleasant.

Lastly we have Sean who’d opted for a Chinese Take-away which you immediately knew wasn’t going to go well because Grace was stressing how it’s so painfully ordinary and basic that everyone knows that this is meant to taste like

and unfortunately his Black Bean Sauce was too overpowering and the only real saving grace was that his prawn toast and part-time doorstops were really good

but beyond that it did kind of feel very 4 minutes in the microwave and make sure food is piping hot throughout before eating.

An Unofficial Fake-away Ranking:
1. Daniel’s 23 to 50 Trojan Cockles
2. Frankie’s Film Snack Skill Tree
3. Kris-tiffin
4. Tony Just Battered Scallop
5. Sean’s 3 for £8 Meal Deal
6. Jim’s Underwhelming Pile-up

Once the judging was over, it was kind of really obvious who would be going out – there was no way that Jim was recovering from the “underwhelming” comment, so he was first to fall

and Sean hadn’t got a much better critique with the judges at least going out of their way to say some positive things about Tony and Kristen so Sean is the second eliminee

which is at least one way of solving my tendency to get Jim and Sean confused, I guess.