MasterChef – Wed, May 17 – relay challenge

The contestants are split into teams of four in a relay challenge as each member has 15 minutes to cook and only 45 seconds to hand over to the next cook in the relay.
Will someone go rogue this year and derail the whole team? (Yes, John, I’m talking about you and your white chocolate veloute.) I love/hate it when that happens.

Promo for tonight:

Mini recap:
They have to create a dish celebrating maple syrup. The four people who volunteer to cook first are given differently coloured aprons. The are: Benita Token Older Contestant (green), Beardie Bushranger Benjamin (yellow), Tamara with the Chandelier Earrings (blue) and Diana who so ably captained the team in the pizza service challenge (red). So these people get to pick the dish.
And then the twist is announced: the remaining contestants won’t know what team they are on until just before handover time. Ooh – sneaky! Since they usually let them watch the action on a screen in another room they are going to have to keep tabs on all four cooks.
Everyone gets to cook for 15 minutes and has 45 secs to hand over.

So, how many maple syrup with bacon ice creams are we going to see?

Benita is making a Singapore crab/prawn dish. Tamara chooses Asian sticky pork belly with bao buns and slaw. She wisely gets out the ingredients needed for all the elements.
Ben is making maple ice cream and he wants every team member to add their own ideas. No, Ben, just tell them what to make so they don’t waste time thinking.
Diana is making maple syrup ice cream with bacon. Picked it! She has a list of elements she wants the others to create.
The judges aren’t too impressed by Benita’s idea to replace palm sugar with maple syrup for her chilli crab. She just gets an “hmmm, interesting”.
Round two
It’s time for round two and the contestants haven’t been able to see what’s been happening, so it’s a blind cook.
Bushranger hands over to Whiskey Eloise, now a holder of the golden immunity pin.
Diana hands over to Invisible Trent with the Tatts (remember, he did that one awesome dessert with quandong I think on top, then disappeared again).
Tamara hands over to Funky Hair Sarah while Benita gets Other Ben Who Works Out a Lot.
Other Ben is worried – and rightly so – about Benita’s choice of dish. But rolls with it.
The first round cooks are locked in another room to watch the action on TV.
Tamara is thrilled she got Sarah as her teammate and watches her whip up an Asian slaw and prep some pork skin to add to the dish.
Whiskey Eloise decides to add smoke to the ice cream and make a white chocolate foam. Great, but can someone please make something crunchy to go with it.
Invisible Trent makes a jelly but puts it in the fridge, not the freezer or blast chiller, while Diana watches in frustration.
Round three
Invisible Trent hands over to Headband Samuel (go Samuel!!).
Ben Who Works Out a Lot gets Blonde Ponytail (it may be Karlie).
Whiskey Eloise gets Dessert Guru Bryan so they’ve lucked out there.
Sarah gets Golden Ball Girl Michelle, who starts to freak out that it’s not a dessert. She looks very young and very panicked. She chucks the bao straight in the steamer without shaping them and without a layer of paper. Uh oh. Surely she’s made steamed buns before?
Bryan decides to add pickled apples and some candied bacon crisps for crunch – he knows his desserts.
Headband Samuel is adding an almond maple biscuit to add texture. He checks on the jelly in the fridge and notices it’s really runny, but leaves it.
Oh, Blonde Ponytail is Nicole. She also is not so keen on the Singapore crab idea.
Sarah and Tamara watch in horror as Little Mich chops the pork too small and then fries it too much. And we know Sarah wants to open a pork-themed restaurant, so she knows her pig.
Bryan hands over to Eliza. She’s wearing a topknot so we can tell her apart from Karlie and Nicole.
Samuel hands over to Whizzkid Callan. Nicole hands over to Arum from the UK.
Mich gets Karlie. Karlie has done quite a few Asian dishes in the past so fingers crossed. “What a mess,” Karlie announces. “Whoa, what is that?” she says as she lifts the lid on the stodgy buns. The pork is drying out and the slaw is going soggy – it was dressed way too early.
Karlie decides to ditch the dodgy bao and instead make a shallot pancake and in the room her teammates are thrilled.
Callan spots that the jelly is liquid and puts it in the freezer – phew.
Arum is worried their chilli sauce doesn’t taste maple-y enough so works to add more to the dish.
Karlie also makes a sticky maple sauce – smart.
Callan wisely cleans up and gets most of the elements out on the bench so the last person just has to plate up.
Last round
Karlie hands over to Nurse Jess.
Callan gets Doctor Ray.
Eliza gets Young Sam.
Arum gets Crane Driver Pete, who is also worried about the choice of dish and he can’t taste the maple.
Young Sam is too late checking the tuille in the oven and has to pop another one in. Their ice cream looks pretty soft.


In the other room the contestants are yelling at the screen. Doctor Ray is moving rather slowly and looks to have forgotten the jelly that is in front of his nose. He should be right, though – the crab team will lose due to lack of maple flavour.
Jess has made another salad to top their pork pancake with – it looks good.

The judges taste
Yellow’s ice cream with pickled apples and maplecomb: They get a “yeah, baby” from Gaz. It’s delicious.

Blue’s pork pancake: The pork is a bit dry but some other elements are tasty.

Green’s chilli crab and prawn: They used a whole bottle of maple syrup to make it but the judges can’t detect it. The dish has a lot of flavour otherwise.

Red’s ice cream with maple bacon and without jelly: Diana kindly just says the jelly just didn’t make it to the plate. “Great jobs,” says George. Presto says the biscuits (made by Headband Samuel) make the dish. George singles out Diana for praise for setting up the dish so well.

The top two teams are (no surprise) yellow and red. And the bottom team is, of course, green.
So up for elimination are Benita, Pete, Nicole, Arum and Gym Ben.

Tomorrow night: It’s the good old ingredients auction using chunks of time as cash.



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23 Comments

  1. Gary commences the episode slobbering over Eloise.

    It gets worse, Jess tells everyone how she has Maple Syrup in her fridge at home. Guess what? We have Maple Syrup in our fridge too.

    FFS. They cut to Jess again as she exhales deeply. Someone needs to tell her she is on MC not ER.

  2. My psychic powers suggest Benita’s team is in elimination tomorrow.

    For those who hate Ben the lawyer, don’t bother tuning in.

    • lol, yep – I’ll just do what I know and throw my team-mates under the bus. All without guilt because they can “add whatever they like”. Kinda like an architect building your new home and starting at the laundry first….

  3. I’m still watching last night’s. Shannon just asked chef Charlie: “What are the Oreos for?” Charlie: “My snacks.” Gold.

  4. It’s all the usual suspects dominating again. I’m so sick of the blondes, Eloise , Jess , Sarah etc

    Start focusing on some of the other contestants please. And last nights immunity pin for that plate of slop was a travesty. Looked most unappealing.

  5. Recap is up. No surprise – it was clear from 10 minutes in who would be in elimination, although the pork team is lucky Karlie was their middle cook.

  6. So, here are the MasterChef contestants currently still in the comp who are active on Twitter:
    Sarah, Eloise, Michelle, Pete, Bryan, Eliza, Tamara, Ray, Bushranger Ben, Benita, Young Sam, Diana, Nicole, Trent; Arum, Callan and Gym Ben a little bit.
    I can’t find anything for Headband Sam or Jess.
    Karlie has an account but there are no pix of tweets.
    Sooo, Sam, Jess and Karlie for final three? Or they just don’t like Twitter.

    • Oh i hope you’re right Juz. Can I dream that Eloise has been distilled and is happily entrenched in some peat bog inhaling smoky flavours?
      Not her fault that the judges have taken such a shine to her and I’m sure she’s probably perfectly okay. But she’s completely over exposed on the show.
      I enjoyed seeing some of the newbies tonight – the people previously hidden by the blondes and favourites.
      Eg I liked Diana for not throwing Ray under the jelly bus, and I thought boy genius guy was very clever cleaning up and laying out the ailiments. Even if Ray couldn’t see them.
      Speaking of which, I fear gel cubes are going to be the red spheres of this season. And the old staple of “will it or won’t it set” that we love so much can be handily reused.

    • I really like headband Sam too.
      Benita’s odd choice gives me pause – I know she’ll be thrown under the bus as the sacrificial older person, and I think she probably deserves it. Saying there was a whole bottle of sauce in the dish is pretty lame – hate those kind of excuses. I wish the token older person could be great, in the way that the token blue collar Pete is clearly very good.

      However, the other green team members had a chance to fix it in the way that Karlie did – she tasted the food and realised it was no good yet came up with something else – that was very clever and impressive. None of the people following Benita, who were all quite puzzled by the dish, could think of something better, other than some maple prawns.

      • They just kept adding more maple to the sauce. They couldn’t come up with anything different or interesting. Best amatas evah! So will MC eliminate another person over 40 or will they continue to give her false hope?

        Another episode with ice cream. Is that all they can come up with? At least Benita & Tamara thought of something different. Blue team was lucky that Karlie was intelligent enough to change the dish. Green team’s food was good but failed because they couldn’t think on their feet and “mapelize” the dish Why didn’t they create a glaze to put over everything at the end, put some maple coated crunchy nuts on top, etc???

  7. It seems as though Eloise is the Chloe of this season… Except a marginally better cook and a lot more mature. This episode didn’t really live up to the dramatic expectation of the commercial, which was almost and exact replica of the ad shown in 2015 when Georgia came in and saved the day during the relay.

    I thought Benitas dish worked well in theory, but maybe would have worked better as a marinade over a crab salad perhaps.

    • Yes, the promo was screaming “if you’re gunna watch one episode of Ma$terchef , this is it”.
      So I just watched the encore of Last Resort instead.

      • I did too BDD. Even the producers were leaving the couples alone to drown. Never realised the counsellor was Sandy Rea aka ‘other woman from Jacket-gate’.

      • Next week they will say the same thing
        “If you’re gunna watch one episode of Ma$terchef this week, this is it”.

        How silly to say that.

        • We already know what’s happening tonight…..the butchering of Benita.

          Blonde ponytail swishin’ Nicole will be safe.

  8. As if we have not been bombarded with desserts, next week has become the The Great Bake off. The whole week is dedicated to sweets

    • ……but it will all turn sour for the best evah amatas. I’ll bet my fennel balls on that.

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