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Chef and restaurateur Luke Nguyen lifts the cloche on some of his favourite ingredients with mixed results. And Andy’s pink suit sends social media into a spin.
It’s time once again to reduce the grocery bill in the MasterChef house, as everyone not called Josh, Alex or Snezana faces elimination. The executioner is introduced: Luke Nguyen, who according to Andy is known for taking Vietnamese cuisine “to the next level”, in price if nothing else. Gillian is excited, as her passion for food was originally fired by her dad and Luke Nguyen, who raised her together.
Luke introduces a selection of his favourite ingredients, which he claims are both “aromatic” and “fragrant”. They are also redolent, perfumed, and smell nice. Each amateur is assigned a different ingredient. For each contestant, there is a visible ingredient and one hidden under a cloche. In round one they can cook with the one they can see, or gamble on the one they haven’t seen yet. But they’ll have to cook with the other one in round two if they fail.
A gambling spirit is immediately apparent as Harry and Sumeet lead off by choosing the hidden ingredient. Harry gets lotus root. Sumeet gets star anise. One by one the amateurs make their choices, and no matter what they choose everyone cheers like they’re at Eurovision. Many gamble on the cloche, but Darrsh sticks with durian despite the fact that durian is actually a weapon, not a food. “This durian is just like me: all spiky on the outside, and a lot to love on the inside,” says Darrsh. Nobody has any idea what he’s talking about. “I don’t mind the smell,” he adds, thought whether he means the durian or himself here is
unknown.
The amateurs have 75 minutes to avoid being in the bottom five, who will go into round two. The kitchen is a fever of activity as the cooks all try to think of something good to make with their uniformly horrible ingredients. Harry explains he’s making chips out of his lotus roots.
“So the lotus root is a side dish,” says Luke, in the same tone one might say, “So you are planning to drown ALL the puppies.” Meanwhile, Steve declares that he is OK with peanuts, which comes as a relief to everyone, because the Steve-peanut tension was driving us all mad. However, Steve’s filling looks dry, so he puts wet ingredients in, remembering from his high school science class that dry things can be made less dry by adding wet things to them. This is known as molecular gastronomy.
Gill is the luckiest of all, as her ingredient is rice wine, so she can get drunk while she cooks. “Your prawns look amazing,” says Luke to Gill, euphemistically. Meanwhile Juan has applied lime juice to his eyes in what could be a tactical
blunder. “I’m melting!” he wails, after a young girl throws a bucket of water on him.
When round one ends, the gap between best and worst is vast. Gill’s prawns amaze, and the judges are all agreed that Darrsh’s durian trifle could change the face of modern chemical warfare. On the other hand, when Juan serves his Vietnamese tacos, Sofia admits that there are parts of the dish that she likes, but they’re not the edible parts. Likewise, Lachie’s beef is dry, Nat’s curry is bland, Harry’s crab and lotus root is completely baffling, and Steve’s dumplings have suffered a complete system malfunction. Thus do we have our five failures to
stumble ineptly into round two. Harry is disappointed, but as he says, “When life gives you lemongrass you’ve got to stay in the comp.” Harry fans everywhere begin printing up t-shirts with this pithy catchphrase on them.
The kitchen is a fever of activity as the cooks all try to think of something good to make with their uniformly horrible ingredients.
The elimination cook begins. “Unfortunately, the cook who brings us the least impressive dish will be going home,” says Poh, though it’s not that unfortunate. It’d be more unfortunate if the cook with the least impressive dish never got to go home, but was forced to live out their life alone far beneath the earth’s surface. As was the case in previous seasons.
Steve tastes his bitter melon and finds it very bitter. The melon says the same about Steve. “I’ve got a very slim chance I’m going to pull this off,” says Steve, gesturing to the band-aid on his thumb. “Come on Stevo!” yells Alex unhelpfully from the balcony. Poh comes up and confuses everyone by calling it “bitter gourd”. Can’t we at least get a nomenclature consensus here? Melon or gourd: pick a lane, MasterChef. “I’m going with my gut on this one,” says Steve, though the chances of his gut tasting good seem low.
Juan tells Poh and Luke that he is making chicken empanadas. The judges suspect he might just have chosen a dish based on how good it sounds in his accent. “Make sure it works,” says Luke, causing Juan to abandon his plans of making it not work.
Poh informs the other judges that it’s very exciting because Lachie, Steve and Juan have never tasted their assigned ingredients, meaning that all the judges will be making a Maccas run on the way home tonight. On the other hand, Nat knows betel leaf like the back of her hand, but has never cooked the back of her hand before, so she’s flying blind.
Disaster strikes as Juan discovers that his filling is too sweet, which we’d all suspected for weeks – he just smiles a bit too much, doesn’t he? He adds more soy beans to ensure the empanadas don’t taste too good and make people jealous. Meanwhile, Steve has no idea how long bitter melon takes to cook, or indeed why anyone would want to cook it. Steve is suffering an all-encompassing existential crisis and has stared so long into the bitter melon that the bitter melon is staring also into him. Life was simpler with the crocodiles.
Time grinds terrifyingly on, and before you can say, “complete nervous breakdown”, the elimination cook is over. The five failures must now face judgment of both their dishes and their moral characters.
Nat serves her betel leaf bombs. “That’s as high voltage as a mouthful gets,” says Sofia, which may be the most erotic sentence ever spoken on this show.
Lachlan serves his fish and beans and is basically fine. Harry serves his seafood chowder and is also fine, the judges agreeing that since Harry and Lachlan are basically the same person, they should get the same score.
Steve serves his prawn-stuffed bitter melon curry with a powerful sense of gloom. “The guy knows how to cook,” says Sofia, the traditional MasterChef way of indicating that you’re about to savagely condemn someone’s cooking. Steve’s flavours are great but his bitter melon is raw, and apparently bitter melon isn’t supposed to be raw, though how anyone could possible be expected to know this is a mystery.
Finally, Juan’s empanadas. They are too sweet. “Where is the fire?” asks Andy, hating the dish so much that he yearns for cleansing arson. “This is a very one-dimensional dish,” says Luke, showing a woeful ignorance of geometry.
Juan and Steve are clearly the bottom two. But in the end, the judges have decided that raw melon is slightly better than sweet empanadas. As is so often the case, bitterness has won the battle over sweetness, and Juan must depart, leaving the kitchen a less Latin place. He goes home to work on his idea for a ceviche-based board game.
Tune in Wednesday night, when the contestants compete for the title of Mouth Feel Queen.
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