The judges got some pork on their fork. So who’s impressed the least and left everyone stone cold?
After last night’s team service challenge, which saw MasterChef make Australian history with the first ever use of the sentence “welcome to beautiful Frankston”, one team ascended to gantry heaven, while the other suffered the ultimate shame of entering the elimination cook.
And what an elimination cook it is. The episode begins with a huge shock to anyone who has never heard of MasterChef by introducing the muscular meat-wrangler Curtis Stone, best known as a judge on hit dessert detective show Crime Scene Kitchen, and also apparently a cook of some kind.
Curtis enters the kitchen, broad shoulders rippling and godlike face shining in the light. Immediately the amateurs bow down before him, wanting nothing more than to bask in the glow of his divine manliness. Today one cook will be forced out of Curtis’s light, to spend eternity in outer darkness. To avoid this fate Darrsh, Sue, Lachlan, Alex and Gill (Australian Josh mysteriously absent) will have to follow along with Curtis while he cooks, keeping up despite the fact they are just feeble mortals while he is an enormous demigod.
Curtis will be cooking pork with smoked beetroot and hasselback potatoes. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. The amateurs will have to finish their dishes within ten seconds of Curtis, a Herculean task, especially since Curtis, being ten feet tall with arms of banded steel, finds it a lot easier to each all the utensils.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d be cooking with Curtis Stone,” Alex bubbles, which is a bit strange. She deliberately applied to be on MasterChef, a show on which Curtis Stone appears at least once every year, and yet somehow this was beyond her wildest dreams? Her dreams are, bizarrely, less wild than her real-life actions.
Curtis does complicated things with beetroot and Gill struggles to follow. “I’m struggling because I’m an artist,” says Gill, which is a novel excuse. “I’m not going to repeat everything five times,” Curtis barks, which is his way of saying, “shut up and cut your beetroots Gill”.
Curtis comes round the amateurs’ benches to check out their pickled beetroot. The cooks cower in the shadow of his immensity. He fat-shames Sue’s beetroot before moving onto his cream cabbage, another vitally revolting part of the dish. “You don’t want big chunks of shallots in your cream cabbage,” he says, which is an assertion it is very difficult to argue with. Meanwhile, Lachlan slices through the top of his finger, which slows him down considerably but does add an intriguing new protein to the dish. Curtis refuses to stop while Lachlan gets medical attention. “Mercy does not exist in this dojo!” he screams, as Lachlan
slowly slumps to the floor in a pool of blood.
I’m not going to repeat everything five times,” Curtis barks, which is his way of saying, “shut up and cut your beetroots Gill”.
Lachlan has been having a band-aid applied to his finger for what seems about an hour, but he refuses to give in. With the skill of a seasoned professional, he immediately cracks out a speech about wanting to change his life for himself and his daughter, and the other amateurs reel at the force of his emotional subtext. The very potatoes themselves begin slicing themselves in sympathy.
Sue is struggling. “I’m trying to juggle the cabbage and the hasselback potatoes,” she says, and that’s where she went wrong. Curtis has not at any point juggled his vegetables, but panic makes a woman do crazy things. Focusing on her potatoes, Sue completely forgets about her cabbage, which is a very satisfying comedic pay-off from her earlier statement about how great at multi-tasking she is.
The cook takes a disturbing turn as Curtis begins to fill the room with smoke and urges his followers to do the same, risking the lives of all present. He pauses to perform a paid advertisement for Coles brand pork, which is not only delicious, healthy, and RSPCA- approved, but grants the power of flight to all who eat it. “I’m so happy right now,” says Alex, who has clearly not been paying attention. Her happiness fades as she realises she has undercooked her pork, something that Curtis has killed many apprentices for in the past.
Before you know it, or at least before you care about it, Curtis has finished cooking and the amateurs have stumbled to a similar close. It’s going to be curtains for whoever has failed most miserably to replicate his dish. Alex’s pork problem looms large, but she may still survive if another contestant has forgotten to make their beetroot inedible. Both Sue and Lachlan have during this cook talked movingly about their lives, so either one of them could be in trouble.
Darrsh serves first. He hasn’t been in this ep much, so he’s fine. Next is Alex, who is in tears. “What happened?” asks Andy. “Well, I was forced to do this stupid unrealistically difficult challenge that we already did with Jamie Oliver this year, so that was a bit unoriginal,” says Alex. Also, she didn’t get her mustard dressing on the plate, so she is officially un-personed. “Full pickle points,” says Sofia, patronising Alex just to really rub the failure in.
Lachlan comes in, faint from blood loss. The judges reckon his pork is just peachy. Jean- Christophe makes a pun on the name “Lachie” and the word “lucky” that only works in a French accent, and to which the other judges refuse to respond in any way.
Gill comes in and starts banging on again about being a visual person and how hard it is to cook without having any visual in front of her, even though the task was literally to copy what she was looking at – you know, visually. The judges have no idea what she’s talking about, but they think the dish is OK, and the soundtrack has inspirational horns on it, so she seems safe.
Finally, Sue, who’s been talking so much about how important MasterChef is to her that she seems utterly doomed. And indeed it turns out that Sue has fallen to pieces like a well-cooked lamb shank. Her potatoes are too crunchy, her cabbage is burnt, her cream is raw, her pickle isn’t vinegary enough and her pork is overcooked. Sue’s dish is a lot like the movie The Perfect Storm, if it was about George Clooney cooking pork. And so, despite Alex’s mustardless abomination, it is Sue who comes in last, and is hurled by Curtis into a pit of fire. Alex is stunned, scarcely believing anyone could be worse at cooking than her. Everyone hugs Sue and avoids saying they’re happy it’s her and not them.
Tomorrow night, Curtis is back, and probably doing the same thing again.
