This is my Halloween costume next year.

Somehow MasterChef: The Professionals 2026 has returned.

I feel like I just said goodbye to MasterChef: The Professionals 2026 and then we started walking in the same direction and now we have to make uncomfortable small talk! The biggest problem for me (and I am the main character) is that I don’t know how to title MasterChef: The Professionals 2026 2: Electric Boogaloo because that’s too many colons! Did they not think of the niche interest blogs?

despite the fact the recap titling is going to cause me sleepless nights and test the limits of citalopram, we shall forge ahead!

Holy Ravioli, Batman!

There are a few changes to the format and I’d say all of them thus far are for the better. The BBC have finally decided that Monica and Marcus do not require the supervision of a third party and are now free to do their American Gothic couples’ Halloween costume

they are also in the newly refurbished studio and Monica wasted no time in running up the stairs to claim the balcony as the Monica Galetti Sniper Tower

spawn camper behaviour.

The biggest change is the Skills Test part of the show. No longer is it an individual test, now all six contestants cook the same dish at the same time

which is a bit of a recession indicator but comes with more pros than it does cons. The downside is that it doesn’t let us get to know the contestants as immediately as the individual sessions used to and I will miss someone sitting in the cupboard wearing the MasterChef branded headphones (that I’m still hoping someone will send me a pair of – you’re not using them anymore!)

but the biggest benefit is they get a lot more time, they had 75 minutes to create the Crab Ravioli with an accompanying Bisque and Samphire Garnish as opposed to what used to be like 20 minutes to befriend, butcher and pan-fry a chicken!

and making them all do the same dish prevents the old issue of how unbalanced the challenges could sometimes seem. I’d be so mad if I got the Signature Round and found out that I had struggled to de-wing a ray while on a pogo-stick and the guy next to me made an omelette!

And if you’re worried that everyone cooking together means that there’s going to be less deeply unfortunate things happening like the guy last year who just rammed a knife into a cod’s forehead and gouged out its eyes while looking for its cheeks

I wouldn’t worry too much because despite having 5 other chefs in her vicinity doing the same thing, Ruchi at no point twigged that her bisque probably shouldn’t be the colour of a mid-range hotel room’s curtains

she was very open about the fact she wasn’t familiar with how to make a Bisque given that she specialises in Indian cuisine and has done so her whole life. Which is fair and the dish she had made, while not fully what the judges wanted still tasted good and showed a great technical capability. But also, diva this is the 19th series of MasterChef: The Professionals and you know that at some point Marcus Wareing is going to jump out of a cupboard and demand you list the the French Mother Sauces in ascending alphabetical order. You can prepare for this inevitability.

Ruchi may have just made Crab Juice Gravy but she at least did so with a level head, whereas Kieran had seen Monica’s red dot focused on his forehead and immediately went to pieces

he was trying to set himself apart from the others by rolling leaves of herbs into his pasta but he was having a little trouble with doing basic maths under pressure

and if you have read the blog before, you will know that naturally I am in love with anxiety riddled LeFou over here

and for all the flop sweat and tiptoeing on the knife edge of mental collapse, it wasn’t a bad Raviolo!

he had rolled the pasta a little bit too thin but it was generously stuffed and he had a great sense of crab-flavour running throughout the dish.
Jemma had also slightly let her nerves get the better of her, try as she might to use the crab as a stress toy to bash all of her nervous energy out with a brutality only years of generational trauma at the hands of crustaceans could produce

the downside of just bashing a crab until you don’t feel feelings anymore is that the tiny shards of shell are very hard to pick out and you can guarantee that Monica is going to find them even if you didn’t

but the bigger issue was that with not getting her Dill Oil up to the pass and having to throw token clippings of illegal samphire while Monica shouted at her for disobeying The Clock™ her dish was unfinished

but Jemma will always be iconic for the moment in her VT when she asks them to not keep in her saying “I’m in it to win it!” because it’s a bit cringe

only to then have Marcus saying exactly that with complete sincerity to his new prodigal son, Dan but minutes later

you’ll be unsurprised that the cell scrapings of Marcus Waring is “one to watch”

and he certainly was very good, his crab raviolo was faultless, or at least the judges never said anything negative. They barely said anything at all, they just ate it! So Dan was pretty confident of his abilities

Dan… those exceptionally hubristic saxophones are getting *louder*.
But you know what? Good for him, we’re leaving faux humility behind. This is Cinematic MasterChef, you better believe in yourselves! You’ve been lit like Dutch Golden Age paintings – HAVE SOME SENSE OF STATUS!

And also, it’s not hard to know you were the best in the room when Ruchi didn’t make a bisque, Jemma is slinging samphire across the room and Kieran is in the corner failing a maths GCSE exam. Thus leaving your biggest competition as Jack who is trapped in an infinite ravioli feedback loop

or Matty, who did in the end have a fairly decent plate and knew how to correct the fact that his crab filling had been a little too runny

HOWEVER! The critique of how he went about this was weird because at the beginning of the challenge Monica says that they don’t want to see any waste

and then later says that Matty should have started again with his portion of unused crab

but wouldn’t that have been more of a waste? Because at least if he hasn’t used it, the on-set gaffer, Peter Banks, can take it and create his own MasterChef: The Professionals skills test at home? I just think Peter Banks deserves nice things

give Peter Banks his crab! Or at least a Tupperware box for some of Jack’s infinite ravioli

so as much as MasterChef will change its aesthetic or format, one thing will always be the life blood of this show and it’s a man who talks about barbecues like he’s trying to survive the wilderness of Gondwanaland some 600 million years ago

who amongst us doesn’t occasionally connect with our cave dwelling ancestors by grilling a pack of Tesco’s Maple BBQ Chicken Skewers? But for as much as I often find The Big Meat Men™ to be mostly quite annoying, I could not love Jack more just for the absurdity of him showing us his big fish like he’s Chad Kroeger making us look at old photographs

🎵 LOOK AT THIS GARR! 🎵

An Unofficial Crab Raviolo Skills Test Ranking:
1. Dan and he knows it
2. Matty’s Food Donation To Peter Banks, The Gaffer
3. Jack’s One Man Ravioli Sweatshop
4. Kieran’s Mental Unravioling
5. Jemma by virtue of at least making a Bisque
6. Ruchi’s Very Good Not-a-Bisque

The Signature of Things

The last half of the episode is as normal with all of the chefs creating what they consider to be their signature dishes with one chef being eliminated and one being dubbed Chef of the Day, it’s Vivian Pinay

what does that mean? I don’t know. It seems to just be an unquantifiable moniker, a fun thing to write in the margins of your culinary CV. You don’t even get handed a badge! I KNOW YOU HAVE THEM!

currently on my Christmas list:
– The official MasterChef branded headphones
– A gold MasterChef pin
– A signed copy of this truly absurd glamour shot of Matty holding a big gas lighter

DO YOU NOT FEEL THE PRIMAL GRILLED CHICKEN FLOWING THROUGH YOUR VEINS, MATTY!?

despite having the role of Fire Guy thrust upon him, he was not engaging with the grill and instead made a very nice Lamb Loin with Stuffed Morels, Potato Fondant and whole lot of wild garlic

truly we are back in an era of it finally being en vogue for food to actually touch one another instead of being separated into uncanny geometric island states.
Also trendy are stuffed morels, which were even having a bit of a Moment™ in MasterChef: The Professionals 2026: The Land of Waves Arc. Matty’s morel competitor came in the form of Dan, so it was unfortunately a losing battle before it even began because Dan can do no wrong in the eyes of Marcus. The main component of Dan’s dish was Guineafowl and to be fair to Perfect Dan, this plate of food does looks delicious

it is also incredibly funny to me that ingredient-wise, it is nearly identical to the plate of truly depressing prison food Seb served up in the last series

I am hard pressed to think of a more horribly conceived plate of food – I have truly not stopped thinking about it for 7 months. So maybe it was an amazing plate of food, actually.

Morels weren’t the only point of contention for Matty as Kieran was also doing lamb, focusing on the saddle and the…. Cweetbreads?

so culinary phonetics and pasta fractions aren’t Kieran’s forte but if there’s a market for Colonel’s Kieran’s Secret Sweetbread Recipe, he’s a rich man for the rest of his life

is the world yammering for an artisanal popcorn sweetbread food truck? Who knows!

Ruchi came into this challenge with a bit of a point to prove and with her being able to cook more within her own element, she really shone with her Chicken Goulati and a Makhani Sauce

it looks absolutely amazing and the judges were practically falling over themselves to get that recipe

and if you want it too, you’ve only got to trawl through the archived culinary columns of Lucknow newspapers published in… I’m going to say 1993?

the only newspaper clipping I’ve ever kept is Denise from Essex opining the ice cream economy to remind myself that no matter how bad it is now, it will probably always be worse in a few years time

for the sake of whoever at The Metro had to read all of the reader-submitted letters, I hope Denise never lived to see a time when an ice-cream truck would charge you £2.50 for a Magnum.

Jemma found herself going full redemption mode with her dish being another stuffed pasta. Agnolotti was her shape of choice and she was filling it with a stuffing made from what would ordinarily be leftovers from a roast chicken like livers, hearts and the sexy, sexy chicken fat

DOTH THOU FEEL THE EROTICISM?

she was very nervous through out the challenge, another thing about the group Skills Tests is that you are VERY aware of how everyone did. She pulled this off superbly though, the only slight issue they had, or tip they could give her, was that she could afford to roast off the bones a bit more to make her sauce that much richer.

While Jemma managed to redeem her shortcomings in the Skills Test, Jack had kind of succumbed to the same ones all over again. The judges asked for one Signature Dish and he sort of squashed together three distinctly separate dishes into one with his Alligator Pepper Duck, Carrot & Nori Terrine, Blackberries and all of it topped with an Orange & Lavender Sauce that sounds like a dish Denise van Outen served you in a dream

it’s a shame too because Jack clearly has a very interesting and enthusiastic eye for food and was showcasing ingredients like the Alligator Pepper that I’d personally never heard of before and was interested to see being used

and as Marcus said, that should have been the star note of the dish but once you add the lavender sauce, the nori and smoke the duck over the corpse of your last Christmas tree

you end up with a situation like the crayons in a dentist’s waiting room as they all turn a shade of dark green that you never see anywhere else in nature.

An Unofficial Signature Dish Ranking:
1. The MarcusBot 3000
2. Makhani All The Different
3. Jemma’s Lubed Up Agnolotti
4. Matty Listening To “Dancing On My Own” while Marcus Shakes Dan’s Hand
5. Kieran Fried Cweetbreads
6. Jack’s Kitchen Sink Duck

Given the near perfect run on the episode, it was a very well deserved Chef of the Day for Dan

you really can’t argue with his skill. I guess the worry for him now is that he’s kind of bolted too soon with not much room for growth but at least he and Matty have a baked in enemies to lovers arc that I’m very invested in because AO3 is down and I need my thrills from elsewhere now

KISS.

As for the elimination, Kieran at least had the redemptive Çweetbreads so it is sadly goodbye to Jack and his two fish who are NOT invited to the primal barbecue

see ya later, Alligator (pepper).